Shalmendo: If they don't have multiple levels i'm gonna be MAD as HECK. That would be a huge boon in the limitations on base size! I had to go through a lot of contortionism in order to fit my whole base into strange room shaped because of those DANG ROCKS. Those felt like a VERY bad limiting mechanic. Now, I could get if you can't do anything about the rock areas until later when you research a special drilling technology or something, but keeping them permanently was really, REALLY annoying.

I do see the point of having to choose particular minions of others, but wouldn't it be simpler and more inclusive to have it be similiar to the way the original EG works? You can choose how many of each minion type to train and you can't have more minions then your max population. We were able to push up the max pop by filling our barracks with lockers to boost it, and we got more naturally as our notoriety rose. Both were good ways to manage to the population limits, although again, the low pop cap in the original game made things quite difficult even though our systems could handle more minions. Honestly, they actually had double minions rendered so they could fake the shiny floors with duplicate minions mirrored underneath. This is evident if you look at a guard minion training as a mercenary. If you have your base in yellow alert status, they will have a rifle on their back while lying on the floor doing the training, periodically, due to the animation, the gun will dip down and the barrel willl go into the floor, and a mirror barrel will POKE UP from the floor. Surely they could do this more effectively using actual reflections now? Or some kind of imposters. The double minion rendering may have been part of why they had a pop cap like they did, since they were inefficiently using extra resources for a 'shiny floor' type effect.

However, I could get behind a kind of 'end game minion' pick and choose type thing where you have to make a choice of which kind of top tier minions you want to use. In EG 1 there were two of each top tier. maybe they could come up with a few more and you have to choose which two to use from a pool of four or something. Each pair could have some kind of interesting synergy as a result, possibly, but you're still locking in. I do enjoy replayability but artifically forcing it through arbitrary choices tends to really kill my interest. The end-game of EG1 of choosing a single superweapon from the possible three was neat, and very natural. I enjoyed going through the game to see what each cinematic looked like. Also, your choice of superweapon didn't really affect your research much. It was kind of the other way around, which of the uberloot you stole would have a effect on which kinds of superweapons you could build. (I think it was the uberloot?) I usually just took all the loot and had all three options at my disposal since the loot itself was pretty useful to put in certain places of your base. I kept the Totem in the control room most often.

Shalmendo: I personally thought the 'red alert' level was supposed to be like an all-out everyone attack everything or we're going to die kind of 'extreme emergency' type deal, but now that you put it in that light, it does sound pretty overkill.

I do recall how I would find scientists and valets punching tourists. It's kind of funny but was very ineffective.

Maybe they should have more alert levels and tweak them a bit? Also, maybe we should have a policies control that allows us to more clearly define what we want to happen for certain alert levels, or just in general. Keeping armed minions out of public areas like the hotel would be a nice policy to avoid exposing them to suspicious agents. Tweaking trap sensors to only go off on certain kinds of agents or under certain conditions might be nice too, or introducing delays in timing to make your traps that much more deadly.

I always viewed orange alert as a kind of raised security state that you want to plan for. It had the downside of arming your construction workers (if you purchased the appropriate cabinets) and meant that they would become targets more easily and probably pull out their own weapons to fight back, which could cause a bit of a mess out on the exterior of the island, but it did mean that they could cannon-fodder mob the enemy with pistols. Orange alert was definitely something you would use pre-emptively to get your minions armed when you were anticipating trouble, I viewed it as a kind of strategic option to take advantage of when I knew my heat was high, or going to be high (About to start missions or something).

The population cap does need some heavy testing I think. The original limit was, as you say, almost unplayable. Thankfully, editing the population cap was actually fairly simple once you knew which files to look in. I personally didn't like the restriciton of having so few minions and having to carefully choose which types to have more of because it usually resulted in a heavy lack of minion types in other areas that made the game more tedious. If you really are a massive Evil Genius with a huge lair and recruiting network, (assuming you have enough notoriety) the population cap should be pretty huge anyway! I don't think population limits should be a major part of the game management... It worked well in DK but now that minions have a lot of jobs to do, and only certain ones can do certain jobs, it makes it kind of a crash waiting to happen. By 'crash' I mean waiting forever for a single construction worker to deliver generators or blast out a room, type stuff, essentially blocking your ability to get something done because the minion type to do it isn't available.

Shalmendo: I liked how your cap was tied to your notoriety. That definitely makes sense, that you can't recuit more people unless you either pay for it in the form of lockers in the barracks, or earn it via evil deeds and getting more known in the criminal underworld.

A max cap you can increase through notoriety would make sense, instead of just filling a barracks full of lockers to get to the absoloute max. Or perhaps doing research for betting minion support increasing the cap. Maybe you could get a bonus to your cap based on the lair you choose to purchase, or some other factor. Either way, being able to have enough minions should be balanced as your ability to recruit more increases vs needing more to operate more equipment and do various other tasks due to your lair sprawling further and needing more minions to send out to the world map.

A dynamic cap sounds good, but i'm not sure it should be solely based on paying extra like you said. It kind of seemed like they were donating their time to your cause rather then taking wages, except when their low loyalty has them stealing gold bricks from your strongroom. But maybe they should take wages now and you could boost their wages for various benefits including slower loyalty decay or something.

hedwards: I wish the hotels would be a little more useful. In all the games I've played, they've never really done much as they take so many minions to staff and I'm usually needing them for other things.

Shalmendo: The hotels were SUPPOSED to be a cover operation to keep the tourists busy and keeping you from having to deal with tourists getting into your base, along with delaying agents of justice. That didn't work very well, and I really found their effectiveness quite small for the amount of minions it soaked up.

Hopefully the whole 'cover operation' will be expanded and you'll be able to make money on the hotel or whatever else you can use. I often saw tourists giving tips to minions and I was wondering if the minions were just keeping those tips! I would have understood not making money if you had made money off the casino, but you didn't make any money on it at all and you had to steal from the world map. It would be nice if you could capitalize on your cover operation and use it as a funding source that would allow you keep more of your minions on base instead of occupying the world map and pissing off the agencies. I've often had soldiers come through and shoot up all my social minions and destroy the hotels before moving on to the actual base itself. Pandemonium.

hedwards: That was my impression. They were expensive, too large to be easily placed and the minion requirements made them something I never bothered with in most games. On top of that, agents didn't seem very interested.