Concepts and strategies for beginners.

1: Heavy traps and an inaccessible base (Relatively speaking. Super agents always get in, unless you use minions to stop them or they don`t find the entrance.). A hallway in your base with several doors leading in; one to the base and the rest to various traps, is a good way of doing it. Operating with traps in separate entrances not connected to your base sounds good but gives your minions logistical problems when they have to remove dead agents from your traps. So it is best to have trap arrangements near your main entrance, but not actually in the main entrance. I rarely use turrets but they might be an option as long as you place loads and loads of them in the same place. I haven`t actually tried this, but it might be enough to get rid of even some of the super agents. This is an aggressive approach and not recommended for beginners:)

2: Being innocuous. Make every attempt to never be discovered by placing harmless things like camouflaged base entrances and hotels at the front of the base. Make sure the camo entrance isn`t locked though, or agents will keep destroying it, which is expensive and generates heat. And build hotels right outside the entrance. This is important for the same reasons as I mentioned with the traps, because a hotel far from your entrance will mean that your social minions spend most of their time walking to and from work, while being seriously exposed to agents. This is basically what the hotel is for, and if you are playing angry base defense you don`t really need hotels, since your social minions will be much safer inside the base than in the hotel. Inside the base you should place innocent looking rooms like barracks and mess halls closest to the entrance, and heat produucing things like armories and power plants at the back. You might also consider not displaying loot in the first couple of rooms, just in case any agents manage to get in. Use as few cameras as possible outside the base, especially before you can research the camouflaged camera, and never ever place turrets for any reason whatsoever.

3: Single entrance. The advantages are that it is easier to defend and that it is easy to place conspicuous, heat generating rooms and items far away from where agents might enter your base. The drawback is that parts of your island will be too far away to use properly for anything, since the long run from the entrance defeats the purpose of whatever you want to build on the opposite side. It will also give you a long run to either the dock or the helipad, depending on which side you put the entrance on, and especially on the second island where they are opposite each other.

4: Multiple entrances: Advantages and disadvantages are the reverse of the above. I almost always stick with a single entrance, although multiple entrances can be useful even if they lead nowhere, or alternatively into traps, although nowhere is better because nobody needs to run back and forth to repair it or gather bodybags. If you use multiple entrances to the actual base, as opposed to to nothing or to traps, then you need to be very careful about room placement, and be Johhny on the Spot if soldiers or super agents come in the back door. Always remember that your main goal is to slow the agents down by any means possible, and not to kill them since this generates heat. So a second entrance which is a time waster without generating heat is good if you can manage it. The less agents see the better. Ideally they should leave the island after having seen nothing incriminating at all. If this isn`t possible then they should leave the island in your freezer:)

5: Topside shack spam: Placing shacks with closed doors on them all around your island is a simple and cheap way of slowing down the agent barrage on your base. They don`t need to contain anything, but the locked doors will take up loads of time from more or less every agent who lands on the island. And even if someone decides to shoot down the door it is almost free to replace it after the troublemakers have been dealt with.

6: Hotels. If you do build a hotel make sure you don`t build too much staff-requiring furniture inside it. These are the reception desk and bar desk, the piano and particularly the tables in the bar. It is tempting to put many tables in the bar, but since each one must be staffed by a social minion 2 or 3 is all you should bother with. Fill the rest up with dance floors, and benches and rooms in the lobby, that don`t need staff. When you can afford it it is a good idea to place two hotels at a bit of a distance from each other, at either side of your base entrance. Tourists will then have to walk between the lobby and the bar, and will have less time to poke around your base.
PS: For some inexplicable reason the hotel doors are locked when you build them, so always set them to the lowest security at once. If you forget this agents will keep shooting at your hotel doors and starting fires in your hotels, which can lead to chain reactions of hostile agents killing off all your social minions.

7: Playing aggressively/cautiously. If you play aggressively, meaning with deliberately high heat, then you will need to play turtle, with traps, fake entrances and turrets while going heavy on military minions. You will also need henchmen who can put up a fight like Red Ivan, and henchmen who don`t need too much micromanagement like The Butcher. The advantage is that you can play through the game faster this way and the drawback is that you will almost certainly die horribly to swarms of agents.
Playing cautiously means looking at the heat levels on the world map, and giving them time to settle after a heist, so you can avoid soldiers and saboteurs as much as possible. This is the best way to actually finish the game, although it is time consuming, and slightly boring at times.

8: Super agents. These are a right pain in the gluteus maximus and one of the best reasons for playing cautiously. Each faction has one and they all activate at certain notoriety levels. If you rush through missions on the world map you can activate all five at the same time and almost certainly die. Each one has a scripted way to defeat them, which you must discover through research or quests on the world map. Ideally you should have dealt with the first one before you activate the third one and so on, so you never have to worry about more than two of them at any one time.

9: Plotting. This is essential and is best done early on, when you don`t have a million people sneaking around the base. Send out technicians or other science minions to the world map, one in each zone, and put them on plot for about 30-45 minutes and they will have plotted enough to reveal all the missions available. Most of them will not be visible yet, but are dormant until you reach a high enough notoriety level. But as soon as you do they will be there. This saves you from getting stuck because there is an invisible mission somewhere you don`t know about because you didn`t plot enough in a particular zone.

Other than this it`s mostly about base dynamics and building your work force. Always prioritize missions that give you loot, since you can display that in the base and boost your minions` stats, or even heal them. This will prevent a lot of desertions and is an all round great way to start things out. By carefully picking off loot missions from the start you will be able to eek your way into the notoriety territory of the second super agent before you need to do any non-loot missions, at which time you should consider moving to the second island anyway. Never do this before you have completed all four missions of the totem pole quest though, since it is the best loot in the game, and boosts all stats except health. And you can only finish this quest on the first island.

Make sure all floor tiles in your base are accessible. If you wall a part of the base in, or it gets cut off when you demolish a room, agents will tunnel into that area until it is accessible again. It is easy to lose an entire, very expensive power plant like this so make sure.
Always keep track of what your quests are in the quest tab. Some of them are subtle and easy to overlook, since you don`t really get much of an alert when you get new quests.

The frustrating, enormous and unavoidable crisis comes when you move to the second island. If you didn`t cheat at the start and therefore need money, as much of the base as humanly possible should be dismantled for cash, without locking anybody in. The move must be done when there is no heat at all, and preferably when there aren`t any super agents or soldiers on the island. If you`re lucky you can get away safely, but never leave the island with your avatar until all the minions have left or they will be stranded. Save the game before you do this though. Sometimes a super agent will appear on your island a nano second after you click the move button on the world map, and will run around killing off all your minions while they are moving your stuff. Because of the move you need to make, it is advisable to keep at least 40 workers around on the first island, since these are the only ones able to build the second base for you. And the more of them you have the faster that will go. Once the second base is up 10-20 workers is plenty and you can train more higher level minions instead.
The second part is by far the worst, which is building a functional second base as quickly as humanly possible, with all your loot and the avatar stuck outside in the jungle. The first thing to do is to send all the henchmen off to steal or plot on the world map so super agents don`t kill them while you`re building the base. They only have three lives and you`ll be too busy to micro manage them. Build an entrance, a tunnel and a barracks and then move all the loot in there while you work on the rest of the base. The first priority is the power plant. But you can`t build that at the entrance so dig a few other rooms without furniture first and then a full power plant to power the doors and stuff you need. Then furniture for the barracks, a control room, an armory, camera surveillance, speakers, freezer and then everything else after that. Remember to move the avatar into the base as it develops. If he/she is caught outside by a super agent you will be dead and have to load a save or restart.

There are four basic ways to make money in Evil Genius. One is cheating, one is an exploit, one is great and one is horrible.

1: Type "humanzee" while in game to set yourself up with unlimited money for the game, or several other things, using the instructions below.

Ctrl + S: Set off explosion / airstirke
Ctrl + C: Add $100,000
Ctrl + A: Army of Darkness (one of every henchman and minion)
Ctrl + O: Give all items
Ctrl + M/N: Turn on/off Global Chaos
CTRL + T: Gives all traps
DEMO: "Dev Mode"


PS: May ruin your enjoyment of the game.

2: When you start up you get an opportunity to set yourself up for the rest of the game, after you acquire the world map, but before you kidnap the maid. At this point you can send all your minions (except for 2 or 3 who will be needed to run back and forth to the treasury with gold) off to steal on the world map. Although they still generate heat, no agents will arrive on your island. So you can keep stealing forever if you like. Just build a large barracks so you can get as close to max minion level as possible, then a large treasury and off you go! You will earn about 1 million gold pr hour like this, with 80+ workers stealing, and about 4-5 million should be enough for the first base as well as the move to the second island and the larger base there. In other words there`ll be a bit of a wait....When you are satisfied with your gold reserves and have built up all the base facilities you have available, just kidnap the maid. This will activate the heat - agent dynamic on the world map and start the actual game as normal. It is a good idea to do as many loot/room rewarding missions as you can find as well as do your plotting for the game before kidnapping the maid. There is no going back once you do that.

3: If you`re not gonna cheat in either way then the best way to make money is to make trap combinations. Every time an agent gets hit by a trap, regardless of who triggers it, you gain some money. The more traps an agent is hit by in succession the bigger the cash bonus, up until the genius rank. You can see this in exclamation bubbles above the agent. Minions and henchmen do not earn you money when they are hit by traps, only agents.

In my view wind tunnels are by far the most reliable way of achieving trap combinations, so I will go with that for the purposes of this guide.
Make a two tile tunnel with as many twists and turns as you have room for, then place two wind traps in each bend and lots of sensors. It might take a few tries to make it work properly. Ideally all the wind traps in the tunnel should go off at the same time, so there`s no escape for agents trapped in the tunnel. To make sure of this, link all the sensors to the first trap in the tunnel and then link that trap to all the rest of the traps. If you put a gas trap at the bottom of the tunnel it will either finish off any agents blown in there or incapacitate them, depending on which color trap you use. For preference I would choose the attention gas trap (the purple one) as soon as it is available. Inattentive agents will keep triggering the trap without being incapacitated so your social minions need to go in for them, which is the case with the brains gas trap. And hopefully they wion't die either but just live inside your wind tunnel for the rest of the game. As long as your minions don't need to enter the tunnel for bodybags or confused people there should be no way for agents to leave it.
The basic problem with a wind tunnel is that if you blow agents into a long tunnel your social minions will have to go in to retrieve bodybags and confused people, which you usually have to to some extent. And if you do the opposite and blow them out of a long tunnel instead of in then you gain less gold because agents will give up and leave before they can get to the bottom of it, or just blow out the entire tunnel once and leave if they do get to the end of it. It also doesn`t work so well if you put a door at the end, next to the gas trap, for example leading into a convenient freezer room for the dead agents from the trap. For some reason agents can stand next to the door in safety, even when the trap is adjacent. One thing to keep in mind is that the chances of the agents actually dying depend on how well you measure the bends in the tunnel, and particularly the last bend. Ideally the gas trap at the end should be exactly where the effect of the wind trap ends. Too far and the agents will stop before reaching the gas trap; too short and they will crash into the wall at the end of the tunnel and take damage. A pathetic agent can only take three hits like this while the fourth will usually kill them. The less damage they take while in the wind tunnel the longer they will survive and the more money you will make.

Anyway, I recommend the first method and sacrificing some social minions in the interest of making money. A full squad of agents blowing through a tunnel with a pair of sensor pads pr pair of wind traps, and about 8-16 bends (less doesn`t trigger the trap multiplier regularly enough and more takes up too much space) will never get out again, because lingering agents will keep triggering the tunnel even if one agent figures out how to get out. A full wind tunnel if it is designed properly gives about 30k pr agent, so the more agents you can trap in it the richer you get.
Either way, urgent steps must be taken to keep super agents and ideally saboteurs and soldiers out of the wind tunnel. Unless they are quickly weakened or killed they can wreck it in no time, costing you part of the profit it made you. The only thing you can really do if you want them out is to open the door and deactivate the traps by cutting the power to the first trap in the cycle, if you built it like I said above, and hope they leave without destroying anything. Making money this way is pretty power intensive though so one wind tunnel is all you can realistically afford on the first island. On the second island, or really from the moment you research nuclear power plants, you can build as many as you need, although more than three is expensive and not effective. The idea is to make the tunnel more attractive and easy to find for agents than the entrance(s) to your base, so they will keep breaking into it, never to escape:)

For more advanced players they can simply make a carefully measured square of corridors with wind traps in each corner. If done correctly this will blow agents round and round for a steady supply of money. It is also much cheaper than a wind tunnel and requires much less power. The only problem with this as compared to a wind tunnel is that the agents willl have easy access to the door leading out of this smaller trap, whereas a good wind tunnel will have no escape, even for exceptional agents.

4: The final way of making money is obviously to steal on the world map. But since this requires your military minions and generates heat, your base will be poorly defended precisely when you need to defend it. So I never steal on the world map except while doing missions. I recommend that you don't either because it is silly.

Dealing with Super Agents:

To get rid of any of them you must be on the second island first. It is therefore a good idea to make this move as soon as it becomes an option, just so you can begin removing super agents. As much as possible it is wise to keep your henchmen as far away from the super agents as you possibly can, even if it means stashing them on the world map. The henchmen have only three lives before they are lost for good, and the super agents can kill one in no time at all if you're not careful.
All five super agents will become active at a specific notoriety level. It is therefore highly recommended that you do not exceed the required notoriety level before moving to the second island. it will not do to have more than two active super agents at any given time, especially when you can't get rid of them yet.
Similarly, the quests to permanently remove the super agents from your game are also triggered at specific notoriety levels. It should just be possible to deal with the first agent by the time the third activates and so on, meaning that you will never have more than two of them pestering you at the same time. And that is quite enough.

Mariana Mamba SMASH

Acts like a thief/investigator and will occasionally charm minions to desert you. Keep at bay with valets and particularly spin doctors, topside shacks or other doors leading to nowhere. She is also not too hard to imprison, although having super agents in the base is always a potential loose cannon if you get distracted or the power goes out.

Solution: Research Infirmary Chair (Pharmacy Booth + Laser and Bio-Tank) and interrogate Mamba in it. You will need the Mariana Mamba quest to do so.

Jet Chan ANVIL

Tougher to beat up on but very easy to deal with for valets. Will usually be more aggressive than Mamba and has the potential to wipe out all your social minions if you leave him in peace. Put a weaken tag on him until he is incapacitated and then remove it and pay attention to him. If he wants to leave the island you should leave him alone so he can get away. if he keeps investigating or attacking, repeat the process.

Solution: Interrogate him with the dojo. You will need the quest to deal with him and a martial artist. Oh and a training room with a dojo in it.

Katarina Frostanova HAMMER

This agent can be quite the pain in the butt. But, like with the other two, the weaken tag is usually enough as long as you remove it between each time, in order to give her a chance to leave. But she is very aggressive and particularly enjoys destroying traps and doors, which usually makes her even more angry once things start blowing up. Keep quiet with any social minions, although beware her ranged weapon. if she is angry you should try to beat her up instead of weakening her.

Solution: Kidnap her teddy bear, Mr Snuggles, and interrogate her with it. You will need to have completed the relevant quest in order to acquire said teddy bear first.

Dirk Masters PATRIOT

The game's resident Rambo and very dangerous. Essentially a super soldier, he fires a bazooka that can wreck your base or kill all your minions in no time at all. If you can get close to him with social minions, the weaken tag is the best way of dealing with him, just like with the first three. But he has a very short fuse and once he goes berserk he can wipe them all out very quickly and will never stop unless incapacitated. Just as soon as he gets angry therefore you must defeat him in combat or risk losing half your base. Red Ivan is my personal favorite for doing this, because he can return fire from miles away with his own bazooka. This will cause Dirk Masters to fall over, giving minions and other henchmen the time to approach him and hopefully finish him off. It is also highly recommended, if at all possible, to lure him into constricted quarters. The less space he has infront of him, the less dangerous his long range attacks will be.

Solution: Steal and research his towel and then interrogate him in the bio-tank. You will need the quest to deal with him first.

John Steele SABRE

This highly annoying agent can not be permanently defeated, but dies in the cut scene when you finish the game. Personally I don't find him quite as terrifying as Dirk Masters, but it's pretty darn close. Use whatever means available to keep him under control until he leaves, which he sometimes refuses to do. Patience required with this guy, who is basically a super saboteur who loves blowing up your power plant if he can find it.

Loot

Steal all the loot you can find and scatter it around your base, but particularly where minions gather. The control room, barracks, mess hall, training room and staff room are good places to put loot. On the hardest difficulty you actually need to do this in order to prevent desertions, although it is not quite as necessary on the two easier difficulties. Every piece of loot has a loyalty effect on minions within its circle of influence. Some loot items also boost other stats. Only one loot item boosts health though, and that is the sarcophagus from the Mega Loot quest early on. This and the totem are therefore probably the two best items in the game and I highly recommend that you get them ASAP. Remember that the totem can only be acquired from the totem quest on the first island, so get it before you move.

Doors

For some reason agents just love doors and they can sometimes spend half an hour staring longingly at a locked door. For this reason it becomes extra important how you design your base entrance and the first doors of the base. In other words: if you start with a door at the entrance to your base, which you typically do, then what is behind that door is extremely important. If it leads to a straight corridor heading directly into your base, agents will typically walk down it no matter how many other doors lead off the corridor to the sides. If on the other hand it leads immediately to a bend in the corridor and a door leading nowhere directly ahead, agents will tend to stop in front of this pointless door for ages. Never underestimate the stupidity of agents when it comes to doors. But the thing to remember is that getting this part of the base design wrong can mean agents completely ignoring any doors leading off a straight corridor, and therefore to agents waltzing willy nilly into your base on the heels of your minions. And you want them walking into your various trap arrangements. So make sure to place these attractive doors to traps and merriment where agents are likely to go, IE straight ahead when opening the first door of your base.

Critical Situations

There are a few of these, but for the sake of brevity I will focus on the worst one. And that is soldiers and veterans invading your island. If you are unprepared for them these wreckers of base harmony can wipe you out, so learning to deal with them is essential. One squad of exceptional soldiers can lose you the game all by themselves if you don't get rid of them at once.
First off, social minions are almost entirely useless against soldiers, unless they are pathetic, which they typically are not. So step one when soldiers and veterans arrive is to close your hotels. Do this by turning the time clock all the way down so your social minions leave and enter your base.
Secondly, recall any henchmen you have on the world map, and use them to defeat the soldiers. Try to do this inside your base entrance, and not in the open. Military minions will help out, but are generally no match for good soldiers.

Critical Situations (continued)

To avoid soldiers completely you must keep your heat lower than about 75%. If you go above this with any of the factions, that faction will begin sending soldiers instead of other agents until the heat levels are lowered again. The problem is that some quests force you over this heat level just by doing them. However, sending along the right combination of minions can severely reduce the heat generated from a quest.

Military minions: protect other minions during quests.
Social minions: reduce the heat while doing quests
Science minions: reduce the time a quest takes to complete

I am not going to actually recommend sending all your available minions on a particularly tough quest with a lot of heat associated with it, but it's almost just as well. The more social minions you send along, even if they are not needed to complete the quest, the less heat you will get, and the fewer soldiers and veterans you will have to deal with on the island. And sending along some science minions as well will save time, so that your minions can get back home quicker to deal with the likely aftermath of a particularly evil quest.

Minion Balance

Very much up to individual play style and preference. Broadly speaking you can go top heavy, meaning with as many high end minions as possible, or bottom heavy, with just a few higher level minions. In the first case it will take a lot of damage for you to run out of highly trained people who can train anyone below them in the hierarchy. Having few high level minions of a class means that there is always the risk that they will all die, forcing you to repeat the relevant kidnapping quest for some much unwanted heat and tedium.

Then again, not all the high end minions are much good. Diplomats and playboys in particular are notable by being worse than valets and spin doctors at basically everything. They can't use fire extinguishers or install furniture in your base like the valets can and both of them attack stats that are mostly useless when dealing with super agents. The playboy in particular is worthless at this because he attacks loyalty, which you can not reduce at all on super agents. The diplomat attacks loyalty and attention, but attacks attention less effectively than the valet does with his specialized attack. The valets and spin doctors therefore have the best weaken attacks, which are attention and brains. In essence, diplomats and playboys are almost exclusively useful for dealing with normal agents and tourists, which are not the main problem anyway. The high tier social minions are extremely good at reducing heat while doing evil deeds on the world map though, so a few of them can be kept around for that. But I would never have more than five of each of them.

Science minions on the other hand are highly situational. You'li need many of them early on, while there are tons of researchable things in your base. But fewer and fewer are needed as the game develops. You will always need some engineers though because they are the only minions capable of repairing broken equipment. And like with the high end social minions, keeping a few biochemists and quantum physicists around to shorten evil deeds is definitely recommended.
As for workers they are essential until you have built your second base but are much less useful after that, and should be replaced by trained minions until you have maybe ten workers left.
In general you want a modest force of military minions that you gradually expand as your workers and science minions become less relevant.

Potentially Game Killing Bug

There is only one that I am aware of, but I thought I'd mention it anyway because it is unbelievably annoying if it hits you. If you build a Big Screen in the control room and leave your avatar in the radius of it, your avatar will secretly die. It would be bad enough if it killed him outright but it doesn't even inform you that he's taking damage. Then, once you need to move him for some reason, he unceremoniously dies when he leaves the radius of the Big Screen. And because of this all your auto saves will most likely be useless, because your apparently living avatar will have been secretly dead for quite some time while standing next to the Big Screen. So keep Big Screens and avatars away from each other at all times to avoid this pesky bug!

Henchmen

These are sadly not quite as awesome as one would like and are very vulnerable to the super agents. What they are mostly for in my opinion is therefore to assist evil deeds on the world map, plotting or stealing on the world map or occasionally dealing with particularly tough groups of agents on your island, such as saboteurs, soldiers and veterans.
Since this is how I use them my recommendations regarding henchmen should be read accordingly.

1: Red Ivan. He has the range the other henchmen are lacking, and his bazooka attack will knock down any agents hit by it. He is therefore very useful in dealing with soldiers, even in the open. He is also useful for quickly incapacitating Dirk Masters from afar so other minions and henchmen can get close to him. For these reasons I consider Red ivan the only essential henchman in the game.
PS: Keep an eye on him. He doesn't really seem to care much where he is when he fires his bazooka and throws his grenades. if he happens to decide to do this in your power plant he will destroy it.

2: The Butcher. This guy is recommended for beginners because he requires almost no micro management at all. His rapid melee attacks are great, although they do mean that he needs to get close to the target first. So keep him away from ranged foes in the open.

The remaining henchmen I can take in any order. They are all useful in a limited way, although some require a bit of baby sitting to operate. Montezuma, Lord Kane and Jubei are probably the best of them, although in my opinion it doesn't really matter which ones you get.

Finishing the Game

You will really be led by the Doomsday Device quest chain to the end of the game. You do not need to kill all the super agents or anything like that. You just need to follow this chain. But like with all the Evil Deeds, you need the required notoriety level and the needed level of plotting in the relevant zones first. So back to step one in this guide, do all the plotting before you start!
Once this is done, and you have finished all the preparatory stages of the quest chain, you will be told to steal materials for the doomsday device on the world map. And this is the final quest you will do in the game. This stage requires a freezer for storage so you will need quite a large one on the second island to make sure you have room there for this. Alternatively you can remove some racks in the freezer room you do have in order to make room.
The quest is a bit different from the regular ones though and constantly generates heat while you acquire the materials. This quickly brings you to max heat and you will stay there while the stealing goes on. You must therefore expect to be invaded before you are done. You can always stop stealing, wait for the heat to die down and then steal some more. But I find that this quest is best done like ripping off a band aid: in one quick movement. You'll just have to make do as you deal with the fallout of it.



PS: For more details there is a good collaborative guide here: http://www.cheatbook.de/wfiles/evilgenius.htm My guide contains a few simple steps to beating the game from me personally, and it is not intended to be exhaustive. There are usually several ways of doing things in Evil Genius, particularly when it comes to base design and traps.