Evil Genius 2 is a game where you will spend most of your time mining chunks out of the interior of a mountain on a tropical island, fitting it with a network of corridors and rooms.
The game does a good job of teaching you the ropes, as its story will get you to build rooms one at a time, but there are plenty of things the game doesn’t explain, and a handful of things we’ve learned during our time with the game that you might find useful.
Evil Genius 2 Base Building Tips Guide
Build Order Is Important
It might seem like a very obvious thing to start with, but the order in which you place things down really matters in Evil Genius. Minions will do their best to attempt to follow your orders in sequence.
What his means for you, is that you’ll need to consider the order you’ll put down your items. If something is going to take you above your power level cap, it will shut down your base until you place a new generator.
No power means no cameras and no traps, so if agents sneak in during your building process (which will take time) and you don’t have the required power, you’ll be in danger of losing a lot of response time.
As a side note, when you are setting out your rooms, you may find that you want to make changes to the room size, or fix the red errors that can occur when building rooms. To do this, it’s as easy as selecting Rock from the build menu, and filling in those gaps.
Don’t Forget to Check Your Decor
One neat trick tucked away in the building menu, is the Decor tab. It’s primarily full of trees, lights, plants, and other random decor, but there are also a handful of stat-boosting items in there that are cheap to build.
Air-con units, water fountains, coffee machines, and other miscellaneous items will slow the drain of Smarts and Morale in an area, and other items like the Weights in the Training Room can buff vitality of minions. These are all really good, because they keep your minions healthier than usual, which means less rests, which means more things get done.
Build Useful Rooms in Clusters
This is a tougher one to achieve, unless you’re willing to plan ahead or put in a lot of work remodeling, but certain things work best when they are clustered together. A simple example is keeping the Canteen close to the Labs, and your Genius’s Sanctum, for the purposes of speeding up research.
Scientists burn out faster than other minions, so they’ll need the Canteen regularly. Keeping your Genius using ‘Train Faster!’ like we advise in our tips and tricks means Scientists will prioritize researching.
Building your Training Room nearby to your Canteen and Dormitory is also a great idea, because Minions tend to congregate around these rest rooms, which means they’ll head straight to the Training Room when you bump up your guard numbers if you ask for more muscle. If you can get these near your entrance, even better, but it can be hard to achieve everything at once.
Finally, Armouries near Vaults and Generator Rooms is tried and tested combo, because you’ll want your stationed guards to respond to the threats which aim to take out the vital areas of your base.
Dig Up (or Down)
One of the new things that Evil Genius 2 has brought to the table is the ability to build over multiple floors. This is usually expensive, as the additional floors tend to be filled with higher density rock that you will need to complete research to remove and costs more to mine out.
The advantages are pretty simple clear cut however.
Firstly, it frees up space on your ground floor for Armouries, Traps Networks, Dormitories and Canteens.
Secondly, your additional floors are safer places to put your Generators, Communication Rooms, and Vaults, because it will take a long time for Agents to make their way there if they get past your guards. It will take a long time to move everything up there, but it’s definitely worthwhile.
If you do build across multiple floors, make sure you build multiple staircases, the last thing you want is a choke point for your main resource thoroughfare. A handful of agents or a few fires can then cause havoc.
Use All Your Real Estate
Every island that you can play, starts with a decent amount of floor designated as the Casino which operates as a front for you hideout.
As you progress through the game and hire deception minions, you’ll be able to fit it out with a selection of items such as gambling tables and bars that can sap enemy agent’s skill points (making them weaker in combat) or distract them so it takes longer for them to find their way to your base.
Evil Genius 2 is fairly generous with how much Casino space it gives you, and it also fills it with lots of clutter that you can sell for a quick cash injection early on. As the game progresses you’ll definitely find that the Casino isn’t super effective, and also presents an opportunity for remodeling.
A simple way to improve your response against Agent incursions is to remodel a chunk of your Casino as a labyrinth of traps, connected to an Armory or two full of muscle minions.
Our personal favorite setup was a T-junction, with an Armory at either side, as demonstrated above: a shark pit right behind the door is a way to sap eager agent’s health too.
General Good Practice
To finish up, there are a few more tips here that will help keep your base ticking over between schemes and Super Agent invasions.
- You can never build enough Fire Extinguishers: Saboteurs are able to blow up your bases with ease, and will attempt to focus your generators. You don’t want to let fire go out of control (it’ll spread to minions) so have at least three or four extinguishers by each room.
- Build long: Whilst it makes sense to build a lot of rooms in squares, like Training Rooms and Canteens, there are certain rooms you’ll want to build long. Vaults and Dorms are best built long, because you can easily fit lots of one width, three length security shelves and lockers in them respectively. Because space is a premium, this will help you squeeze the most out of each.
- Make corridors four squares wide: Your base starts out with corridors that are four squares wide. This is the best size to stick with in general, because traps and doors are configured to fit this width. You can change to different sizes on additional floors, but only if you know they’re secure.
- Use movement traps: Whilst damage traps are brilliant for whittling down enemy agents, it’s important not to sleep on the movement traps. Building Boxing Gloves, Freeze Rays, Bubble Blows, Magnets and Fans will all work to split agents apart, and waste their time – and as we know, lazy minions mean time is a premium.
With all of this advice you should be able to build a devious lair to hatch your nefarious schemes in. Take a look at our other Evil Genius 2 guides here on GameSkinny.
