Evil Genius

• Jubei is a really solid fighter, and can take out Super Agents on his own if you use his two special abilities in conjunction to get the drop on them. He is the default starting henchman if you play as Maxamilian, but you can eventually recruit him with the other two also.

• Other great henchmen are The Butcher (AMAZING fighter) and The Matron (Good special moves).

• Red Ivan is way more trouble than he is worth. Avoid him unless you want to have a psychotic russian with a german accept blowing up all your rooms.

• Eli Barracuda is hilarious.

• Try to keep the island free of body bags, and build the more incriminating rooms (Control Room, Freezer, Power Plant) far away from the base entrance. Valets and the associated minions are good for distracting agents from penetrating too far deep into your base. If you're getting swamped by agents from a certain continent, check your Heat on the world map screen and consider laying low for a while in that region.

• Be really careful with Super Agents. They are the only things that can permanently kill off your Henchmen. You'll recognize Super Agents when you see/hear them. Neutralizing and incarcerating them should be your number 1 priority.

• Mechanical stuff wears down over time. Make sure they are accessable to by scientists.

• Don't trap your main entrance. It only takes one inattentive minion to set off a chain reaction that sees half your work force dead or dazed. Instead, build a small secondary base, fill it with non-lethal traps and seal off the outer door. Agents go in, spend ages in there, and by the time they get out they are ready to leave the island.

• Build cells so they open onto a freezer. That way, you can issue capture orders for troublesome agents, chuck them into a Death Roller, order a termination, and the body bag will pop out onto a freezer, removing the nasty loyalty drain.

• Social attacks work great against tougher agents. Once it's locked in, they're stuck until it finishes, even if a nearby Freak is pounding them. Super Agents become simple to capture with social attacks (keeping them captured is another matter )

• Plonk loot in heavily used areas like the Training Room or the Control Room to ensure maximum loyalty boost. Plus a lot of loot gives boost to other stats. An endurance booster can keep minions training for longer before collapsing.

• Another note about it the totem pole is that the pieces drain stats until the pole is completed, so store them in the freezer.

• The game doesn't explain it, but once you've researched freaks, you can create them by tossing body-bags into the bio-vat. If you want to get rid of them, tag them for weakening. They kill every agent they see, tagged or untagged, but they're handy if you've got waves of soldiers coming to your base.

• Don't make a spot completely inaccessible with objects. If you have an odd-shaped room where there's a tile that's blocked by items, saboteurs and thieves can tunnel in underground and start destroying your shit.

• If a minion deserts due to low loyalty, you can capture them, then release them from their cell after a few seconds, and they'll go back to working for you. They run at max speed, but if you double click, they'll stop to salute you, even as twenty guys beat them up. This doesn't work for minions who desert because of a super-agent ability.

• There's an objective to steal two out of three research objects. If you get all three, you can research all the cool tech stuff, if you just get the two, you get cut off from a lot of the cool end game tech.

• Press 'P' to pause. Especially once you get to the second island, and hopefully have a couple of mil in the bank. The ability to just sit back and layout your entire lair from the get-go is pretty sweet.

• There's a config file that lets you adjust the maximum number of minions. Increase that to make the game a little easier.

• Agent skill level contributes to stats, but most importantly it decides how much the agent does his thing. Rookie Investigators don't get the urge to do their jobs until they run across arms stockpiles or the ark of the Covenant, while master Agents waste a lot of time taking notes on everything they run across, no matter how innocent. Green Soldiers are easy to distract and redirect, but commando Veterans shoot everyone and everything without provocation, starting from the noncombatants.

• Spin doctors are your most useful agent defusers. They drain Smarts, which lowers the agent's suspicion back to "carefree" level. If they leave the island with that blue ring around their feet, they actually lower your heat. Diplomats are also useful, as they drain loyalty, but they can't calm down tourists. Playboys are more useful in the field than in your base, as they're the only social minions capable of theft.

• The mess hall mixer, the researched archive devices and the biotanks eat up the agent's smarts. A trouncing by the supercomputer or the bio-dome plant life and being used as a live target in the rifle range hurt attention. The basic chair interrogation, impact tester, laser cannon and motorized bookcases just kill the prisoner for entertainment and loyalty boosts.