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[Thexor]

Agreed, the original game was a brilliant idea with a passable execution. Most obvious flaws:

* Tourists are pointless. I've never noticed them generating much heat if you just ignore them. Building a resort is expensive as heck, distracts your social minions from the more important task of weakening agents, and forces those social minions to walk between the resort and the base, rendering them highly vulnerable to high-tier agents with itchy trigger fingers.

* Traps are mostly worthless. Set them up in your base, and they'll kill more minions than agents, guaranteed. The only effective way to use them is with 'decoy bases', full of nothing but traps, in the hopes that agents will wander into the decoy base and be killed (which usually requires complex set-ups for little benefit).

* Recalling minions from the world map reduces heat and increases your strength back at base. In other words, it's viable (but boring) to recall every minion after every Act of Infamy and wait for your heat to decay. You can beat the game without a soldier ever arriving on your island. It's the 'best' tactic, but boring as heck. Unless you intentionally antagonize the AI, the game is very easy.

Here's hoping the sequel manages to improve a few of these issues!

[Chaoswizkid]

Struggling to think of any game sequel that was built by a different company than the original, that didn't turn out to be a pile of horse shit. Examples are welcome, because I would so love to discover some reasons to look forward to this!

Dota 2

Wat? DotA 2 was handled by IceFrog under Valve. IceFrog made DotA: Allstars. Before then, yeah, DotA changed hands a bunch, but going from DotA: Allstars (the absolutely most popular version that got everyone's attention) to DotA 2 was not handled by anyone different.

As for sequels made by different companies...

Wasn't NWN and NWN 2 handled by different people, and isn't there a divide in which is considered the better?

There's also Matrix's acquisition of the rights to the Close Combat series, which it re-released and then produced full releases of.

Tropico 4 is considered a pretty good game, although Tropico 3 was a bit jarring, Tropico 2 was made by the original team and not considered that good and Tropico 1 was a classic. That said, Kalypso doesn't have a perfect track record (Looking at you, Patrician IV and Port Royale 3...).

On the topic of Tropico, PopTop Games, the developer for Tropico, first came out with Railroad Tycoon 2, which is also considered to be a classic, though they were not responsible for Railroad Tycoon 1.

Hmmmmm...

Hi-Rez and Tribes: Ascend from the Tribes franchise...

I got nothing after that.

[Satarus]

If they can focus on the bits that were fun, like the base building and the atmosphere.  Then fix the bad parts, like teh Acts of Infamy and the tourists, I can can see this being a great game.  If they make the tourism front a way to make/launder money and distract the Forces of Justice they could fix 60% of what was wrong with the first game.  Then just fix the pacing and replace the AoI with something fun they'd fix the other 40% right there.

[Puzzlemaker]

Yeah, the first one def. had some problems.

The main one for me is how they used time as a resource.  Like thexor mentioned, you could just outwait any heat.  You also had to wait to replenish your minion stock (Or you could pay money to replenish them).  I mean, it was really cool how you basically had an infinite source of minions, but I found myself just waiting until I got a full amount again.  Plus training took forever, so often it's best to leave the computer running for half an hour (Or more) while everything replenishes.  Time is used in RTS's to force the player to plan ahead.  In starcraft, if you could build anything instantly you would simply be able to react to whatever your opponent threw at you.  Time should be used to force the player to plan, not as a punishment or form of resource.  Instead of training minions up, maybe you build a special room that supports X number of special minions, or something, that cost infamy to build.  There are a ton of possibilities.

Another thing is heat.  Heat shouldn't go down passively, it should be managed by the player.  This makes it from "Wait for it to go away" to "Okay this mission would cause a lot of heat I better make sure I am ready to counter that", or something.  Maybe.  It does need fixing.

And yeah, tourists.

Personally I liked the traps, IF you could set minions patrol zones or no-go zones.  The security camera system was pretty cool, I think that should be expanded.  This area is off limits to any outsiders, anyone that enters this area gets X'ed (killed, captured, confused).  This area is off limits to minions, so hopefully agents will fall for it.  Minions should also be able to dodge certain traps, or something.

[timferius]

My biggest issue was that, having people in your base wasn't an EVENT. I mean, maybe I was doing it wrong, but the front part of my base always had people snooping around. It needs to be harder to sneak in, instead of just waiting at the door until you need to buy something, then sneaking in with the minion...

[snelg]

My biggest issue with the original game was how irritating it was to keep track of your minions on the world map.

[Fikes]

My biggest issue was that, having people in your base wasn't an EVENT. I mean, maybe I was doing it wrong, but the front part of my base always had people snooping around. It needs to be harder to sneak in, instead of just waiting at the door until you need to buy something, then sneaking in with the minion...

Air locks baby. It didn't totally fix the issues, but it helped. Two doors not, right next to each other, at the front and then another around the corner. After that give them a zero heat room like the break room.

My biggest issue with the original game was how irritating it was to keep track of your minions on the world map.

QFT

[Thexor]

My biggest issue with the original game was how irritating it was to keep track of your minions on the world map.

Indeed. The whole point of the 'Hide' action was to keep your minions safe from agents on the map. Problem is, unless you're staring at the map, you'll first be informed of an agent's presence by the World Domination button flashing briefly with a number. The number indicates how many minions just died, so it's already a little late. And unless you're paying very close attention, you'll miss even this indicator.

Also, 'hiding' automatically reset to 'stealing' after... 2 minutes, I believe. Superagents could easily spend more than 2 minutes in a region, and would swiftly murder your minions once the hide command wore off. Ultimately, recalling your troops was way easier than sending them into hiding.

[Neonivek]

Traps are mostly worthless. Set them up in your base, and they'll kill more minions than agents, guaranteed

Ohh how I found ways around that. For example not all rooms are manned and empty hallways can be an advantage. As well keeping your minion attention high also aids this.

Finally, not all traps are "bad" to hurt your minions

[Thexor]

Traps are mostly worthless. Set them up in your base, and they'll kill more minions than agents, guaranteed

Ohh how I found ways around that. For example not all rooms are manned and empty hallways can be an advantage. As well keeping your minion attention high also aids this.

Finally, not all traps are "bad" to hurt your minions

Making a completely separate section of your base, consisting of nothing but hallways and traps, is a great way to contain pesky agents. I've seen a few base designs consisting of one or more completely separate bases, consisting of a rectangular whirlwind trap (and a few lethal traps to actually kill trapped agents). Leave out the lethal traps, and you can end up hitting the limit for agents spawned into the map and completely trivialize the rest of the game!

Some traps are decently safe. Anything that does Smarts or Attention damage, for instance, will only incapacitate your minions and will still devastate agents. On the other hand, never ever use Loyalty-based traps, since depleting Agent loyalty is mostly useless while disloyal Minions tend to run straight for the exit if you don't cheese them.

[Siquo]

Damnit, now all this talking made me want to play it again.

*reinstalling*

[monkey]

Evil Genius 2 trailer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KTvZtCOEEI

Spoiler: "base pic" (click to show/hide)

[Radsoc]

O m g. Finally!

Dang it: 2020

[Mech#4]

I'm suprised at how faithful it looks to the original. The colour, style and humour are all really good and it looks like you can have multiple levels for your base.I hope they have the bizarre torture options the first one had. It was fun dropping enemies on random objects to see whether you could blend them.

I can't remember much of the first game, since I think I only ever played the demo, but it would be nice if there was more to your base having a front that you have to keep believable while in the background the sneaky stuff goes on. In the image it looks like the front is a casino so having something like a bookshelf with a hidden door behind it or a tunnel underneath a fountain would be neat ways to divide the two. I don't think the first one had much more than security doors.

[Majestic7]

Huh, 2020 is going to be a pretty big gaming year. Cyberpunk 2077, Bloodlines 2, Evil Genius 2... the year of reboots and sequals. Not complaining, though my wallet might.