The Summer 2023 strategy club title is Invisible, Inc. which we will be playing from July 2 to October 31, 2023.
Description:
Take control of Invisible's agents in the field and infiltrate the world's most dangerous corporations. Stealth, precision, and teamwork are essential in high-stakes, high-profit missions, where every move may cost an agent their life.
If you're new to the club, please check out the main thread.
Here's the Invisible Inc catch all. Only 4 pages but some good tips from back in 2016-18 when people were playing.
Not sure what the club goal is. The original game has a 3-day story. The DLC or complete game has a 5-day story. There's also an endless mode for achievements and challenge I guess. Never tried that part.
One quick tip when you start the story mode, you choose difficulty of Beginner, Experienced, or Expert. And then you can choose the number of rewinds per mission. You can turn this all the way up to 99 without affecting achievements or anything. Just in case things go really sideways on you it's a nice option to have to back up and redo things instead of losing an agent or losing the campaign.
Here's one of my most used pages on the wiki: mission types. It's worth checking to make sure you're not wasting time. For instance there is one mission type that awards you with a vault card. There's another mission type that is guaranteed to have a vault to use that card. And a different mission has a random chance to have a vault room spawn. So generally you don't want to do either of those mission types without taking a vault key with you. Likewise if you're not doing one of those 2 types, don't take a vault card, wasting a valuable inventory slot. Leave it at base.
There's other missions where you need a lot of credits to use the main mission item to buy items or programs. So you might want to save 1k credits instead of leveling up your team member to spend in the mission. Good to check the map before spending between missions.
The strategy club just operates on a ‘give it a go’ basis so there’s no need to complete it as such.
I’ll be in on this one I hope so long as I can squeeze it in before the big releases towards the end of the year.
Invisible, Inc is sitting in my backlog and I've been working my way towards playing. Hopefully, I'll get to it in a few weeks once I'm done with my current games.
Here's one of my most used pages on the wiki: mission types. It's worth checking to make sure you're not wasting time.
Looks like you repeated your link to the Invisible Inc catch-all page Stele
In! I finished a beginner-level campaign a few years back, pre-COVID, and I've been meaning to dive back in and try a harder campaign. After hearing Stele talk about the DLC, I just downloaded it: it's deeply discounted on Steam right now ($1.74). I think my personal goal will be a completed campaign on Experienced.
Invisible, Inc is sitting in my backlog and I've been working my way towards playing. Hopefully, I'll get to it in a few weeks once I'm done with my current games.
Stele wrote:Here's one of my most used pages on the wiki: mission types. It's worth checking to make sure you're not wasting time.
Looks like you repeated your link to the Invisible Inc catch-all page Stele
Thanks. Edited and fixed above.
In! I finished a beginner-level campaign a few years back, pre-COVID, and I've been meaning to dive back in and try a harder campaign. After hearing Stele talk about the DLC, I just downloaded it: it's deeply discounted on Steam right now ($1.74). I think my personal goal will be a completed campaign on Experienced.
Yeah I really think the 5 day campaign is better.
When I played last week it was day 4 before I got a Detention Center mission offered. So I was stuck with my 2 starting agents until then. Pretty crazy RNG luck.
Thanks Stele for all the great resources! I just picked the game up on sale and am looking forward to diving in, though it may be a couple weeks before I can get to it.
Also, it’s very easy to get credit for a club game. A good rule of thumb is to finish the tutorials and maybe a quarter of the campaign. No need to finish the 5-day campaign unless you want to.
Finished my Expert run that I started last week when this was getting some traction in voting.
3 more achievements today, since I finished it with DLC enabled, you get both the regular Expert and DLC ones. And I got enough points post game to unlock the last 4 Archive agents and 2 Incognita programs. So I have 100% unlocks!
Can play with any combo of agent or program now. Not sure what I will try next. Endless still seems daunting, but there's just an achievement for so many days would be the main goal. That seems more fun than Expert Plus I think.
I'll take a few days to think about it.
Good luck everyone. This one is still really fun.
Finally got to a place in my travels where I could download this onto my Surface. Downloading now.
Looks like there's a community modpack that adds quite a bit of additional content as well as some QoL changes:
Oh right I did get one of the workshop mods that fixes some UI things. Like it shows you half points on diagonal moves and a couple other things.
I didn't try the big big fix pack yet. Some of them have multiple solutions that you toggle on or off and I backed off.
I did a "subscribe all" to that modpack and the game failed to load. So I unsubscribed from them all and deleted all the files in the mods directory.
All good now. Played through the single mission tutorial. Other than not recognizing when I needed to chose an action over something ("observe" over last security guards head) to move the tutorial ahead, it was straight forward.
Going to play one "easy" campaign on default settings, then see about moving up in difficulty and adding mods selectively.
Once I reduced resolution to 1368 x 912 (half resolution of my surface) my old eyes could read everything nicely and it ran great. Looking forward to digging into it over the remainder of my vay-kay
Looks like I'm right on time to join in on this one. Ooof, last played in 2015 according to Steam for a total of 56 minutes?! Perfect time to actually give this one a fair shake. Thanks to everyone for picking this little gem!
OK, what's the trick?
I've tried the first mission a bunch of times and always die. Stealthing my way to the file is easy enough but by the time I get the file all the guards are hunting me down and get me before I can even find the exit.
Are you knocking any of those guards out?
Are you knocking any of those guards out?
The ones I have to. Part of the problem is that they wake up after 3 turns and are then actively looking for me. So I get pincered between the new guards arriving and the woken up guards chasing me down.
I've tried closing doors after myself, but they still seem to come through them. I've tried killing them using a gun I can buy at a store, but that only escalates the security level.
Maybe I should avoid knocking out those guards I can sneak past?
There aren’t many videos on YouTube for Invisible Inc. - probably because in relative terms it’s an older game now - but this one I found to be pretty good.
I think my main tip is - get in and and get out. This isn’t a game that promotes taking your time.
I would also make sure you have the right people doing the right things at the right time. They all have different roles, I would say it’s worth reading into that a little.
Yeah your order of preference is:
1: sneak past
2: knockout
3: kill only as last resort
Did you clock that you can pause the timer on knocked out enemies by being on top of them? I find that very useful if you need to wait for a guard to move away from where you want to go next without the sleeping dude in the same room as you waking up.
Similarly, you can bait the guards by opening doors in their sightlines, them close the door again and hide behind it so you can knock em out when they come investigate.
Yeah pinning knocked out guards helps a lot. But that's tough to do when you only have 2 agents for the early missions.
When guards are on patrol you want to try to avoid them without resorting to KO, especially in early missions when there's only 4 to 6 guards.
One cool thing is when a guard turns they don't really use peripheral vision. So as long as you're not on the square beside them you can hide in near plain sight.
Watch at 3:30 he explains the blind spots.
I've had this game for years. I've started it twice, and I continue to be unable to make progress. Maybe I should check out those videos as well, because I don't think I was ever able to get past the second or third mission... 
So I made a start on this this evening, aiming to play a mission an evening while I'm getting increasingly angsty that Baldur's Gate 3 hasn't been release yet.
I've navigated the first mission without injury or detection, although it did take me 2 turns to see that I had found the exit point - don't ask. It's not that unclear, I have no idea why I didn't recognise it for what it was.
Upgrading your agents is clearly very important - I have no idea if what I've done will be effective or an unmitigated disaster. I'll assume the first and expect the latter.
Good game though - another one I've never given enough time too.
For what it's worth, I've got 30 hours logged in the game and haven't reached the end of a run yet.
Either it's particularly challenging, and/or I'm particularly muppety at it.
Upgrading your agents is clearly very important - I have no idea if what I've done will be effective or an unmitigated disaster. I'll assume the first and expect the latter.
Yeah money is pretty important too, mostly to use on your agents. If you start with someone like Banks you can steal cash from guards in the first mission. Bump her or another up on anarchy ASAP so you can get more money. Even if you don't KO or kill you can sneak behind and steal.
Also be sure to check mission types on the wiki until you're familiar. It's obvious things like don't go to a vault mission without a vault key. But other things, like a nanofab mission can also have a normal machine in it, so maybe you want to take a spare 1k cash to the mission in case you want to buy something in mission. Nothing like finding the perfect cloaking rig or augment for your agent but not being able to afford it.
Also I try to get one agent hacking skills high, to gain more power. Usually different than the anarchy agent. Early on it's pretty easy to run close to each other so the anarchy agent can steal and the hacking agent can power up.
Speed is good for everyone obviously. Strength I mostly level up as my inventory gets full.
Ran headlong into the reason why I fell off this game last time I played it tonight - it's roguelike nature.
I did a mission to rescure a new agent and I breezed it quite easily. Then I did I mission to interogate an executive, and I messed up after not giving a rescued agent the stun weapon to use. I just couldn't keep all the guards in the level down long enough to keep them under control. I know I messed up but this game is just long enough and fiddly enough not to really want to have to go back and replay it all again just because of a silly mistake. There is also a lot going on that the game just doesn't explain to you as you progress. "Daemon Mask" sounds dramatic, but I have no idea what that means and the game isn't going to tell me.
I don't really have time now to properly learn all this before I play it which is a bit of a shame as I should definitely give it more time. But I'm not really a fan of "roguelikes" to be honest and I'd forgotten how much the game leans into that.
Again, no matter what skill level you set, you can turn rewinds up to 99, so you might as well.
Even if you're on a difficulty where you can't do "restart mission" you basically can back up 10 turns and restart yourself if you want. I had to do it a couple times on my Expert run. Things just go sideways sometimes, even with a good team.
Every time I come back to this game, I'm reminded how different it feels from all your XCOMs, Phoenix Points, Battletechs and 40k tactics games.
The shift away from beating the enemy over the head is always so refreshing.
Every time I come back to this game, I'm reminded how different it feels from all your XCOMs, Phoenix Points, Battletechs and 40k tactics games.
The shift away from beating the enemy over the head is always so refreshing.
I took another crack at it last night and enjoyed myself. I do wish it would stop giving me missions that need ‘other’ missions to complete fully (I’ve has plenty of Vault missions but no interrogate executive missions so far for example. Nor in this run have i had an option to rescue an extra agent) but it’s not that big a deal.
Once you get into the flow of it it’s really quite enjoyable. I kinda wish I’d given myself a little more time to play those now!
Well, got through to the final level of a beginner campaign (well, penultimate level) and lost an agent KIA because I didn't backtrack to a single door I missed to be able to open something else. By that time I was out of power and everything was walking around at Power level 5, and I just couldn't hack things fast enough - let alone take out armoured guards - to recover.
This is one of the best little tactical games I've ever played but my god it needs a "return to a previous save" - NOT TURN - feature. Even with giving yourself 99 rewinds, I'm not going through 20 of those just to get back to the start of a mission. Hell, even a "restart mission" button would do. It very much operates on a "one mistake and you're probably buggered" style. Yes, I know it tells you that before you start but it's just too long to get through each mission for it to crash and burn like that.
I really don't like rougelike mechanics in these games. What can I tell you? If it's a couple of minutes per level I get it, when it's 30 minutes plus I don't. I did managed to get some new agents unlocked though when I cashed in my experience.
I hope that'll do as a "playthrough" - I'm all in on BG3 come Thursday afternoon.
Yeah, that's basically how every run I've ever concluded in this game has ended, Sorb. I end up feeling like I've fallen behind the power curve of the enemies. Towards the end game, I'd try and split my team into two pairs to try and find the bit of the level I'm needing more quickly, before it gets swarmed with guards and overly difficult hacks. But then that ended up being counterproductive as it meant I had less capability for each pair when things inevitably went to sh*t.
To be fair, I've never done the "set 999 rewinds" thing, so it mostly felt like playing with mandatory Ironman mode on. That's my bad.
This is one of the best little tactical games I've ever played but my god it needs a "return to a previous save" - NOT TURN - feature. Even with giving yourself 99 rewinds, I'm not going through 20 of those just to get back to the start of a mission. Hell, even a "restart mission" button would do. It very much operates on a "one mistake and you're probably buggered" style. Yes, I know it tells you that before you start but it's just too long to get through each mission for it to crash and burn like that.
Umm....
Yeah but it randomly regenerates the level. There's the distinct possibility you're going to be back to square one.
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