Programs, P0w3R, 4haHAh4h-Wait your turn Incognita. No one disagreed with RAM's suggestion, so I sold the med gel and charge pack for one more speed on Decker. Then, its off to the detention center, in the former USA.
Everything is nearly ready! With all my programs, I can finally do what needs to be done. I won't F41L in my mission.
The team still isn't V10lenT enough. How will we deal with all the 4rm0R3d 0m-*spoiler redaction system activate*Ah, anyway, you'll find out whats in the final mission soon enough. Those of you who don't already know.
In the future of Invisible Inc, North America is ruled by... what is essentially Cosco. Factory to Market Retailers, commonly known as FTM, mainly employ knock-offs of K&O's militarized guards. Over they years since they took power FTM has gotten very good at protecting their vast warehouses of bulk goods from thieves; their facilities are equipped with scanning devices that will activate every time the alarm level rises.
The mission starts off pretty well, we've got two ways out, one of which is locked. Good thing we brought Banks. It turns out that behind the locked door is the exit. First turn exit is a
very good sign.
Then I hit the end turn button, and, well:
That's four guards in one room. And, the "last seen" ghost of a guard with three armor. That's a lot, you might say. Well, yeah it is, but this isn't normal armor its an electronic barrier. Barriers are FTM's pride and joy; they convert firewalls into armor. The more you hack the barrier system, the more the armor goes away. Since our hacking is strong the four guard room is the main problem.
Finally, a challenge.
Banks uncovers a new room and I send Decker over that way to hack the consoles; Banks unlocks the security door and then waits to engage in further thievery. Prism runs through the door, unavoidably distracting a guard in the process, and then hides behind a power generator and peaks the door to the next room. She sees a facility database. I really like facility database systems, but this one has three firewalls. So far, all the cameras and such I've been hacking this time have had two firewalls, which is perfect for our new Lockpick 2.0 program. But the one firewall increase to three adds another whole turn or three power cost to the hack. So I decide to ignore it for now. (Dagger is on cooldown, I don't remember what I used it on)
Banks robs the barrier guard, finding a charge pack. She also uses her buster chip to hack his barrier; her more advanced model destroys it completely in one go. The animation for using the buster chip is the same one as hacking a console, which makes it look like she's plugging a cord into his butt, its pretty entertaining.
So, I didn't take a picture of what happened next because it happened so fast. What happened is, guard walks through laser wall, turns and sees Prism. Unseen guard runs up to the door she was peeking, and kicks it down. The door explodes outward and KOs her for one turn, and then he steps through the now empty doorway, pinning her. Then everyone else comes running.
So yeah, that happened. Thankfully, the guards are bunched up, making them ready for our ultimate AoE attack: sound ping.
Since Prism is on the ground unconscious, they don't shoot her. But they all left to investigate the sound ping, so Prism just... gets up and leaves. Turns out there's an open door allowing the bunched up guards to see her, so Incognita turns down the lights:
Looking back she may have been able to run through all that cover to escape anyway, but... oh well. Banks could run up and try to pickpocket the back two, but not safely, so she observes them all and moves closer. See that arc? That means the guard is going to throw a grenade, but not a scanning one. An
ordinary grenade. The kind that blows people up. K&O and FTM are apparently fond of simple solutions.
While this is going on, Decker found a dead end with a bunch of consoles, both guard elevators, and a secondary server terminal. We've got a full load of programs, but I decide to check it out anyway.
Y3s, ult1M4te Pow3r- not your turn Incognita.
I have never seen these programs before. Rogue reveals unseen safes and costs 300, whatever. Lightning... KOs a guard with a T.A.G. in them regardless of armor! But it costs 800 credits and eight power to use. Still... that's intriguing.
The "support guard" who threw the grenade stands in the laser wall while he does it. Unless you hack them, laser walls deactivate when guards walk through them. This means that Banks can run past through the grid without tripping it, until this idiot moves. She can also pickpocket said idiot, finding that he has a flashbang in his inventory. This KOs guards in a radius regardless of their armor. That makes it an ACTUAL ultimate AoE attack, unfortunately it can be used only once. Banks has a full load with the charge pack she "acquired" earlier. Its worth dropping in order to keep that flashbang, but I think Banks can get to safety even over-encumbered so she keeps both. She moves up to hide behind a safe.
Did I mention that there are a lot of safes past the laser wall?
I hacked a daemon database to see what all those daemons are. Blowfish raises the alarm, authority attracts guards to opened safes for a few turns, labyrinth lowers agent AP by two for a few turns. All of those values are random, so I don't know the exact effect. Prism also found the detention center, as you can see in the upper right corner of that screenshot. There is a camera drone alongside the warden, both looking in the general direction of the occupied cell. The good news is, there is an Invisible agent in there. The bad news is, the console is also trapped with a daemon, specifically paradox. This will block Incognita hacking for a short period of time.
This can be a pretty brutal daemon, but Decker got to a lot of consoles that were close to the secondary server terminal so we have a LOT of power. I decide that Incognita will just hack everything important in a single turn, triggering all the timed daemons at once, and THEN trigger paradox so we can get this agent out. That way the loss of hacking for a couple of turns won't be too painful.
The order I decide on is camera drone, labyrinth safe, authority safe, blowfish safe, then prison console infected with paradox. I do blowfish last because it might trigger alarm level two, causing the firewalls to increase, causing us to have to spend extra power to break through the prison firewalls. It adds three pips, raising the alarm level to two. Unfortunately, I forgot the other consequence of raising alarm levels here: the scanning device! It gives away Prism's position, causing the warden to investigate. Prism has no AP left to move out of the way. I have a camera drone near the warden. Any enemy seen by a camera can be observed by any agent, not just one that can see the enemy personally.
Decker, who is farthest away from the action, observes the warden and reveals that Prism is NOT safe. She can't move out of sight, she could shoot the warden but that would be one more alarm level and one more alerted guard. But, what she can do is this:
The illusionary boxes will hide Prism for the next turn, and then she can step diagonally to get behind the deprogramming device. We don't know what deprogramming is but given that fricken
Central is scared of it its probably not good. At least in this case its providing Prism with ready made cover.
Decker finds that alerted guards are randomly trying to walk through his door. Two of them line up perfectly, and Decker decides to EMP them since he won't need his EMP for the next few turns.
This will create noise that attracts them, but on the other hand it will disable their heart monitors. Could come in handy later. Also pictured in that, the ridiculous number of daemons we triggered, at one less than their original cooldowns.
In the prison, a few things happen. The warden discovers that, hey wait a second, why are there boxes stacked up in my prison? He checks it out and picks up the hologram projector. Apparently he would do pretty well if Solid Snake broke into his prison. We'll have to steal the projector back from him. Fortunately Prism has both thieving skills and a small armory, so it shouldn't be that hard. A T.A.G.ed guard is going to enter the prison next turn. The camera drone moves next to the prison console and then de-activates for a turn to reboot. Prism moves on top of the drone, pinning it, and then hacks the console.
And who do we find but Dr. Xu! He's was the team's lockpicker before our involuntary breakup. His cybernetic tools allow him to break open safes and EMP most electronic defenses (except cameras, which are positioned too high for him to reach, but including heart monitors). This isn't on a cooldown, all it does is use up his attack for the turn. This is undoubtedly the most powerful effect of any cybernetic enhancement, but its the only augment that comes with a price: he has one fewer AP per turn. This means not only is his speed not upgraded, he moves slower than even a rookie agent. He'll be both a serious liability and a great asset.
So, mission completed! Well not really, I mean the team still has to get past a small army of alerted guards. But still, seemed like a good breaking point. Decker can easily go back to get lightning if you guys think that's something we want.
Author
Topic: Invisible Inc LP: Introducing FTM (Read 23053 times)