Stealth missions usually revolve around you not being noticed or identified as trespasser by the civilian NPCs around you, but what happens if they do?

A regular civilian NPC such as a researcher, office worker, or even a building night guard would pose absolutely no challenge to a Spy DNA agent, which would make missions boring. To help up the ante a bit, we’ve added the police.

The “police” NPCs will have a non-zero “combat tactics” skill, and depending on their experience level they’ll have other relevant skills, such as Pistols or Observation, to name a couple. This will make them more formidable opponents than your typical night guard. They will also arrive at the scene expecting trouble and will definitely carry weapons.

When civilian NPCs see something that we’ve defined as crime (picking a lock, using specific items, being in restricted areas, etc.) or if they see something that would hint at criminal activity (an unconscious body for example), they won’t go after the perpetrators or investigate the crime themselves, they’ll call the cops instead.

When the NPC “calls the cops” we start a countdown until the police units are spawned on the map. How soon they arrive depends on how remote an area is, among other things.

We’re playing super-spies, so when the Police Dispatcher activates the response units, your character will pick that up on their police scanner. The dispatcher will state how far out the response units are at regular intervals, to give you an idea of how urgently you need to get your character out of the area.

On stealth missions, getting arrested by the police will result in mission failure, as will shooting any civilians, so our heroes should ideally clear out before the law enforcement officers show up.

by Jason Sams, Lead Developer

In Spy DNA we have talked about how you can queue actions for your characters. When we were discussing the difference in behaviors of well trained troops or agents, vs thugs, vs civilians, one of the things that came up is how quickly a character can evaluate the situation and choose their action.

One of the concepts we have introduced to represent this in-game is the idea of a character being indecisive. To model this we introduced a skill called “Combat Tactics”. It’s a passive skill.

We used to key a character’s combat response off of their highest combat skill, but after thinking this through, we concluded this was not an accurate portrayal of how people respond in a tactical situation.

Let’s say we’ve got someone who’s a very skilled marksman while shooting at the range, but has no actual combat experience. Such a person would do worse in combat than a basic soldier who may have a significantly worse shooting skill, but has been trained specifically for a combat situation.

The new “Combat Tactics” skill will use mental quickness as its primary attribute, and mental memory as its secondary attribute. When an NPC decides to change their course of action in response to something it sees, this skill will be used to generate hesitation before starting the next action. This means some civilians and green troops may freeze for a bit once things go loud.

So how does this impact PCs?

When a PC is carrying out their queued actions this will not affect them at all. However, should you cancel your action queue, we will generate a hesitation for the character to represent this changing of their mind. Some PCs will be able to do this almost for free, either due to extreme mental quickness (Margo), or lots of training (Ivan). On the other end of the spectrum, avoid changing things up on Karsten, who’ll need some time to figure out the next steps. In effect it will be important for some characters to stick to the plan, whatever plan you made.

The “Combat Tactics” skill will improve with use, but the governing attributes will still have a large impact on how fast a character can respond to the change of orders.

Run! It's the cops!

Combat hesitations