- goferchan
- Feb 8, 2004
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It's 2006. I am taking 276 yeti furs from the goodies hoard.
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New player: Just looking for some basic tips starting the game, stuff that I should know going in, etc
Games forum poster:
General Info
- The game is usually fairly intelligent about lure preferences; you will usually see the closest person investigate, but bear in mind the "closest person" could be above you.
- Anyone who can hear a lure will turn toward it for a few seconds, but only the primary target (with the ? over their head) will respond to it. Bear in mind however that people might not turn around too quickly and might not turn around at all if you're too close to them, so make sure the lure target has to go a ways if you're going to immediately subdue or kill them, or at least make sure they're out of the room or behind cover or something.
- Having two closed doors between yourself and NPCs generally means they will not hear any form of lures, most explosions, and some loud gunshots. The doors must be closed however! You can also exploit opening a door with some audio lures of course; more on that below.
- If an NPC has a ? over their head you can usually bump them to interrupt them from investigating whatever got their attention. After they've noticed something once they won't generally notice it again. This doesn't work with weapons though; more on weapons later. You can use this if someone heard the sound, but not the person you wanted, or to keep people from picking up ducks etc. There are other uses I'll mention with audio lures.
- If an NPC is lured somewhere and doesn't see the source of the sound they'll start looking around wildly in confusion. They have very dangerous viewcones when doing this and can even spot you approaching from behind sometimes. Avoid this wherever possible.
Coins
- When you throw a coin, whoever is nearest the sound usually goes to investigate. In most cases they will go where the coin landed, unless it ended up out of LOS from where the sound was made.
- When an NPC sees a coin on the ground, they will get a ? over their head and go pick it up. The radius they detect it is important to know because it's the same as the drop radius, so experiment with that. This is useful for Fall Accidents because you can generally put coins on railings and other areas that will lure a person to come over and walk into accident trigger range.
- When you drop a coin in front of an NPC they will usually also get a ? over their head. If you do nothing they go pick the coin up (or yell at you for standing on it). You can use this to make someone move a few feet to get them out of sight or something, and subdue/kill them while their back is predictably turned.
- If you pick up a coin that you dropped within a second or so after dropping it, you have a brief window of a few seconds to throw it again. You can move during this time but don't go too far. When you throw the coin again, assuming you were fast enough, the NPC will walk directly to where you threw the coin. This is the "coin fetch" trick and is very important to know.
- If you did the coin fetch and the NPC is within sound radius of a second throw location, you can pick up the coin before they reach it and throw it again to make them go to the second location. This is the "double coin fetch."
- You can also bump a person to make them forget they were being lured and then drop a coin again and start all over.
- Coins also have mind wiping properties when combined with weapons; more on that below.
Thrown Objects
- Thrown objects (anything that isn't a coin basically) are louder than coins, and can therefore be heard from farther away. If a coin isn't working try a crowbar or something but keep in mind that NPCs responding to thrown objects generally will go into search mode when they arrive at the source of the sound because they can't interact with melee weapons and other such things.
- Some objects are treated as if coins by NPCs in terms of becoming interested and picking them up, but are treated as thrown objects for the purpose of the noise they make when thrown. These are primarily the ICA Exploding Phone and the Remote Explosive Duck. You can fetch trick with any item that has this response, though in my experience it is much less consistent than with coins. This allows you louder lures and fetch capabilities in the same object (and potentially more).
- NPCs are vastly more likely to notice you and call you out for throwing an object than a coin (or using an audio lure) if they see you throw it. Sometimes you can get away with this by throwing the item and breaking LOS to any nearby NPCs before it lands and makes noise. Generally though you can't get away with throwing an object past a person looking right at you like you can a coin, with one exception: Soda Cans/Bricks/Apricots and other items that break if thrown far enough away seem to override this a lot of the time and NPCs are more likely to respond normally, probably because the source of the sound doesn't exist anymore so all they know is that they heard something. And yes, that squishy apricot is louder than a coin.
- Thrown illegal melee weapons are seen and reported as weapons by civilians. This seems to be a bug as melee weapons, even illegal ones, are not noticed by civilians when on the ground. Bear in mind this won't work with a screwdriver or wrench or something, the weapon must be illegal. So a knife, katana, etc. More on weapon reporting below.
- Weird trick that is almost never useful, but if you throw an object at a guard's head (without it being a lock-on KO/kill throw, that is) and it actually manages to bean them, they will go into alert mode. They'll even rush to wherever you threw it from; you can do this to some of the guards in the Marrakesh market from the lamp store rooftop.
Weapons
- A weapon is here defined as any gun and any illegal explosive (mines, demo blocks). Thrown melee weapons trigger weapon report responses but aren't actually weapons as far as guards are concerned.
- If a civilian wandering around sees a weapon, they will walk to the nearest guard to report it. If the guard is kinda close they sometimes just stand in place and yell it to the guard. If you can engineer which guard is nearest you can control who a civilian goes to get. If you're curious, I've actually killed every single guard on a map before and then let a civilian spot a weapon, and he just went "huh" and ignored it, so civilians magically know if any guard on the level is alive and will walk straight to them wherever they may be.
- If a guard has a weapon reported to them they'll walk right to where the weapon was, though they will get confused if it's gone.
- If a guard finds a weapon either from a report or on their own, they will pause, make a comment, and then walk straight to the weapon and pick it up. While doing this they do not turn their head at all, so it's a great way to KO or kill them without risk.
- Once a guard has picked up a weapon they go into "return weapon" AI state and walk to the nearest black weapon box to put the weapon away. While doing this they do not respond to or even notice noises and cannot be distracted or bumped. The only way to shake them out of this state is to set off a panic (gunfire, Combat, an explosion), whereupon they'll drop the weapon and go into alert mode instead.
- This only applies to throwable weapons (certain audio lures, mines, and Breaching Charges), but it is possible to double lure guards. If one guard sees the weapon in midair and goes into weapon detect mode, a second guard will hear the weapon land and be lured over to the spot. The guard who sees the weapon will 99% of the time be the one locked into picking it up; the other guard will not even notice it there.
- If you drop a weapon from inventory and immediately go back into your inventory and drop a coin, NPCs will not realize you were responsible for the dropped weapon but will see the weapon after a few seconds and report/confiscate it as usual. This is sort of why the FE bomb works, though it's a different NPC AI override (the "sir, you dropped that" response to the dropped FE).
- Civilians will only report a specific weapon once. If you leave a gun on the floor of a bathroom and they go get a guard and come back later and see the same gun lying on the floor, they won't report it. You can get around this by picking the weapon back up and dropping it again, at which point the game considers it a "fresh" distraction. This also applies if you bump an NPC to interrupt them; the game considers them to have already "seen" the weapon. You could maybe exploit this to create a weapon lure that everyone but the intended person ignores, though remember if a guard sees a weapon they'll go into retrieval mode and you can't get them out of it easily.
Audio Lures
- Audio lures are any item that makes a sound or plays music when placed/dropped or when placed/dropped and remotely triggered. Automatic lures are all Proximity explosives (mine/demo block/duck/Iconator) and Napoleon Blownaparte (which is a remote explosive). Triggered lures are the ICA Audio Distraction Device, Mixtape 47, and ICA Exploding Phone.
- Audio lures are louder than any other lure and tend to trigger NPCs to investigate them sooner. If no one initially hears a lure, the next NPC to enter the audio lure radius will hear it.
- There is no way to turn an audio lure off other than destroying it, picking it up, or allowing an NPC to pick it up.
- Once one NPC hears audio, no other NPCs will hear it even if they never manage to pick the item up (though they'll still turn toward the source of the sound). You can multi-lure with this using the audio lures or phone to lure someone with a ? even if other NPCs are closer to the new location of the audio, but the "broken item" glitch is highly likely to occur on the second and subsequent lures and render the item useless so I don't recommend it.
- The NPC will attempt to pick the lure item up in most cases, but there are exceptions. First, civilians will not attempt to pick up anything that's a weapon (so mines, demo blocks, and the Audio Distraction Device and Mixtape 47); as soon as they're close enough to see it (which is usually farther than the trigger radius of a proximity explosive), they'll go get a guard. Likewise, guards will start going into weapon retrieval mode when they spot something illegal. Napoleon is another exception; he's not considered a weapon but he's also not considered a duck/phone because NPCs don't seem terribly interested in picking him up. Napoleon deserves his entire section below so there'll be that.
- If an NPC picks up a Remote Duck they will keep it and walk around with it. You can detonate them at any time, including guards. If a guard retrieves a mine or other illegal explosive they will disarm it in the process and your detonator will vanish from inventory.
- The phone is similar to ducks but slightly different based on when and how you trigger it. If used as a regular audio lure an NPC will walk toward it, pick it up if you don't stop them, and answer the phone, which will blow them up. If you bump them any time before they answer they should generally drop the phone, avoiding a detonation. You can also KO/kill them before they answer. On the other hand, if the NPC just finds the phone lying around or picks it up after a throw, they will keep it in their inventory like a duck and walk around with it, and will answer the phone after a few seconds when you trigger it.
- You can lure with the phone by doing a fetch trick, picking it up before the NPC gets there, dropping it somewhere, and activating the audio. This can be more reliable than a double lure.
- RANDOM ASIDE: The Exploding Phone can be manually detonated by shooting it. It will also explode in a chain reaction with other explosives if it's in range. Be wary.
- The Audio Distraction Device and Mixtape 47 are considered weapons and will be treated as such. The Exploding Phone and Napoleon Blownaparte are not considered weapons. This makes the latter two better for luring civilians.
- The Audio Distraction Device and Mixtape 47 are identical in functionality; the only difference is one plays a beep and the other plays random music. They are considered separate items and you can bring both with you in a loadout if you wish. Same deal with the Remote Explosive Duck and The Pale Duck if you have the Requiem DLC.
- Some audio lures can be placed on walls and objects, others cannot. All mines and demo blocks and the Audio Distraction Device/Mixtape 47 can be placed, while ducks/phone/Napoleon/Iconator cannot. NPCs will report placed objects just fine but sometimes guards get confused by audio lures on walls and are unable to retrieve them for whatever reason.
- It is theoretically possible to triple lure with an Audio Distraction Device/Mixtape 47: One guard sees it as a weapon, one guard hears it land, one guard hears the audio that is triggered. It's extremely unlikely and there's probably never a situation where this is ever useful.
- All detonators and remote triggers are Suspicious on Professional difficulty, even if the item associated with them isn't. Keep this in mind with ducks and the phone and never bring anything with a detonator unless you plan to hang on to the item or use it right away. This does in fact mean that certain things will cause you to fail a frisk if they aren't in your inventory.
Napoleon Blownaparte
- Napoleon is kind of magical and broken in all sorts of ways so it's important to explain some of that separately from other audio lures, but generally speaking just realize he's an audio lure still.
- Napoleon starts luring almost immediately after being dropped or thrown, unlike triggered audio lures and without the grace period proximity explosives give you to get out of range. NPCs respond to his music almost instantly, so he is by far the fastest of all audio lures. However, he is very bad as a thrown item in most cases as his audio will interfere with the throw sound most of the time. It's possible if you crouch, throw at the ground or a wall, and grab Napoleon almost instantly.
- Napoleon is the only audio lure capable of luring multiple people. I have no idea why and it isn't reliable but it can sometimes happen. Drop him, let a person get a ?, pick him up, drop him again. You can usually get at least two people this way and I've gotten as many as five at once, but other times I can't get more than one. No clue what makes it work or not.
- Napoleon has some incredibly bizarre "phantom" lure properties. For example, you can drop him behind a door, wait for the music to start, pick him up, and then open the door and somehow lure a person on the other side. There is also a glitch where Napoleon can transcend spacetime and lure an NPC after a restart of the mission, but this is generally regarded as a blatant cheat/exploit and I won't explain the exact details of how it works.
- NPCs generally don't seem to know what to do with Napoleon and will often ignore him even if they locate him. He's not a weapon but he also doesn't seem to have civilian pickup logic a lot of the time. If someone does pick him up then he's just like a Remote Duck and can be detonated in their inventory.
Gunshots
- This is highly touchy and technical advanced player stuff so some of it may not make sense until you try it yourself.
- If you shoot the ground or wall near an NPC once, they will generally turn around and examine the sound. If you shoot multiple times, you will generally trigger them into alert/panic mode.
- Civilians alerted by gunfire (or explosions) will cease to enforce trespassing against the player as long as you aren't armed and they aren't already enforcers of your disguise. So you can panic them with a few shots from out of sight, put away your pistol, and run past them. Bear in mind that panicked civilians will only cower for a bit and one of them will usually always run to get a guard.
- Guards alerted by gunfire will go into alert mode. If they cannot identify the source of the shot they will start pacing around with guns out and tend to become enforcers and stuff. If they can identify, you will see them point their guns toward you with Guards Alerted appearing. They will then run to where they think you shot from, more or less, which can be used to lure them; for example, shooting the ground a few times near the Sapienza mansion guards from the town hall tower will cause them to rush up the tower stairs. For whatever reason, shooting your gun again somewhere else will sometimes lure them to that location even if they have no reason to know anybody fired a gun there. Stay out of the radius of wherever you last shot as even in public guards will become enforcers if you are within that radius. It's similar to the sniping alert, kind of, and it can be exploited, though it's rarely that useful.
- If you shoot an NPC from medium to close distance and don't follow up, they will spot you or put you into Combat. However, if you're sufficiently far away they won't do that and you'll get Guards Alerted instead. A civilian will report to a guard and guards will rush you similar to shooting near them.
- Guards alerted by you shooting the ground near them will sometimes pull guards near them or that they pass to rush the location with them, but the radius is fairly small and mostly only concerns guards they directly pass. If you shoot the guard, the radius seems to be much bigger and will pull more guards.
- Headshots stagger NPCs and seem to make it more difficult for them to notice or report things. If you're just outside the Silverballer's kill range you can headshot and then immediately bodyshot an NPC, killing them without causing a big stir (though anyone who witnesses the shot will still see the kill). If you wait three seconds or so between headshots at a long distance, a very strange thing happens: Civilians in the radius all turn toward your direction and stand completely still, and guards will go into alert and point their gun in your direction. However, if you manage to kill the NPC with three headshots (which kills at any range with any gun), the kill is considered Unnoticed and is very likely not to be reported or seen until NPCs calm down and turn to look at the person shot. If the person you're pistol sniping is hidden from sight it's even possible to "silently" kill them even though headshotting them at close range would've been heard! An example of this would be the two fishermen on the dock exit area of Sapienza: From the other dock, shoot the far one in the head and then the close one, after 3s shoot the far one again and the close one, and after 3s more shoot the far one and then the near one. They'll turn toward you after the first shot and thus the near guy won't see or hear the far guy die before you kill him as well. This is super advanced stuff and hard to wrap my head around so if you don't get it don't worry.
- Note that guns themselves make noise, even suppressed guns! If you are close enough to an NPC when you shoot they'll turn around immediately and spot you even with a suppressed gun. The loudest suppressed guns are the Sieger variants and all long guns, which have a hearing radius of around 8-10m. The Silverballer and other suppressed pistols, and the Jaeger 7/Jaeger 7 Tiger, are quieter but can still be heard within about 5m. The Krugermeier pistol and Jaeger Covert sniper rifle are vastly quieter and usually cannot be heard until you're within 1-2m. If you need to make a shot while an NPC is close by and has their back to you, don't use the Sieger.
Related to luring since it interferes with them:
Checkpoint Guards
- A checkpoint guard is a guard who stands in one place and restricts access to an area. Not every guard who does this is a checkpoint guard but most are, and just about any guard who will stop you for the wrong disguise or frisk you is a checkpoint guard. The important thing to know is that they have different AI than standard guards.
- Checkpoint guards almost always ignore sounds when the player is within a certain radius of the checkpoint. They will hear them, get a ? over their head, and after a few seconds it will go away and they will remain at their post. They also tend to completely ignore you dropping coins, so they cannot be coin-fetched. However, coins and thrown objects may lure them, if you threw them from outside the checkpoint radius (which is fairly large).
- Audio lures generally work on checkpoint guards, and if a civilian has no other choice they will report weapons to checkpoint guards who will go to examine them and more or less become regular guards.
- Sometimes if there are two guards at a checkpoint, removing one of the guards from the checkpoint radius "breaks" the checkpoint AI and the other guard begins responding normally to stuff like coin fetches.
- Dropping a weapon in front of a checkpoint guard will result in you being instantly detected in most cases. Sometimes you can get away with it as a guard but things like FE bombing will not work.
- Checkpoint guards don't actually detect you trespassing immediately, but they gain a very rapid detection rate and are looking right at you. Occasionally however it's possible to run right past a checkpoint guard, break LOS, and not be detected. They may get a ! over their head but if you weren't actually Found Trespassing it didn't count, as long as they don't find you. An example of this: 60-80% of the time you can run right into the barn on Colorado and jump into the crate in the room to the right and not be caught.
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Oct 7, 2017 17:06
