As you might be aware, we can nowadays hide as civilians or enemy troops using the covert trait. So far, this was only used by the player, raising fears that this might ease the game for the player, with the AI not having anything in response…These fears are now unfounded. The queen can now send out assassins. These are elite soldiers that are covert ops experts. They will disguise as members of your militia, and, when the time is right, they will suddenly attack your mercs.
They are pretty good at pretending to be militia (they even appear like militia on the radar screen and tactical map, and are called “Militia”), the only ways to identify them are:
- Whenever they break any of the rules for the covert ops trait, they are uncovered. It is rare (but possible) that the gear they have is better than any gear militia can have – in this case any militia or merc can uncover them. Be on the lookout for such messages.
- Note that assassins are not uncovered when near fresh corpses. This was necessary, otherwise the player could use dead bodies to ‘ward’ against spies. While I am happy if players find new creative ways of using corpses, I think it a bit odd, especially as the AI cannot evade corpses, like savvy players can.
- Naturally, you do not share vision with them. If you play with shared vision and see a militia only through direct eye contact, he might be a spy…
- They do not take orders from you, like normal militia would. Instead they talk to you like normal militia would, they even use different dialogues dpeending on the kind militia they pretend to be. Of course, talking directly puts you near them…
- They do not help you in combat. This does not help much, as you might not want to start fights and see who joins you every time you suspect a traitor is among your forces.
- A few more things I will not tell you
Most of the time, it will be one assassin… though it can happen on rare occasions that multiple ones get sent. Killing one does not necessarily mean that the other one will show himself.
The goal of this is not necessarily to take back sectors by this, but to cause fear and anger in the player, and to lay the seeds of mistrust against local militia. Having your repair dudes unarmed in the middle of your untrusty allies can be bad šĀ This might also be fun for those who like Mafia šĀ At the moment, there are no assassins disguised as civilians. That might change in the future…