Hey folks. Been bouncing around ideas on talking about Invisible Inc for a while, just because of how much I love this game and how much depth it has. It's a pity there's been no new content since Contingency Plan, but whatcha gonna do? Maybe someday.

Anyways, for those of you looking to figure out the characters, how they work, what they're good for, and who to use for your 20 day endless achievement... look no further!

I'm going to be using terminology here that should be intimately familiar to any of you MOBA players around here, but for those who haven't seen these terms before, I'll define them right here.

Carry: A powerhouse character that generally forms the core of the team. Starts out weak in the early missions, but with the right items and/or augments becomes far more powerful than other agents, usually but not always in terms of combat capabilities.

Hard Carry [HC]: The most extreme form of carry. Generally weak and vulnerable in early missions, but becomes devastating after enough credits are invested.

Soft Carry [SC]: A carry that is, compared to the hard carry, more effective early and less effective late. Can still be the backbone of a team, but pays for an easier early game with a more challenging late game.

In carries, we're looking primarily for powerful innate augments or exclusive items. These unique strengths are usually balanced out by low/awkward stats or crappy item loadouts. Soft carries either have half-decent starting loadouts (Draco, Shalem 11) or augments that are immediately useful (Nika). Hard carries have the weakest loadouts but the most potential (Sharp, Archive Prism). We also include in this category characters that for whatever reason require a credit investment to be most useful, even if they pay that investment back in unusual ways (Archive Xu, Olivia).

Support [SU]: A character with augments and starting items geared towards providing utility for a team, often in the form of easy power generation. Usually don't need major stat upgrades to be effective, nor do they need many items or augments.

In supports, we want early-mission utility that remains relevant into the late game without major credit investment. That's not to say these characters don't benefit at all from increased stats or items; Xu benefits greatly from Speed, for instance, while Internationale makes fantastic use of Hacking. They're useful without that investment, however, so it can be safely delayed until the later missions. Support characters usually have non-combat innate augments that put them at a disadvantage as fighters, and make them better suited for carrying utility augments like Distributed Processing. While the carries are up front taking out guards and exploring, the supports often take up safe positions, hack consoles, and pin guards in cleared rooms.

Ganker [GA]: Early mission combat powerhouses, usually because of their strong starting items. Most fall off in the late game due to weak or non-existent starting augments. Can be the backbone of a team with enough augmentation and investment, but never reach the heights of the carries.

In gankers, we want extremely strong initial item loadouts. Disrupters are basically mandatory, and ranged weapons, particularly lethal ones, are highly favored. Guns act as an insurance policy due to their "priority"; even on expert plus, the highest difficulty, an overwatched agent can fire on a guard safely. Ranged weapons are also supremely flexible; a ganker with a ranged weapon can take out a guard to save a support or carry without jeopardizing themselves. Lethal weapons are favored because they magnify this flexibility. Ranged K.O. weapons often have very short K.O. times which are further reduced on higher difficulties. If no agent is in position to pin or deliver a paralyzer, K.O.ed guards often get right back up and continue causing problems. Alarm ticks are a small price to pay for the time bought by permanently downing a dangerously positioned guard.

Remember that any agent can ultimately play any role. You can augment Sharp with 5 copies of Distributed Processing and leave him in the back-lines to generate power, or give Internationale a flurry gun and have her mow down hordes of guards; just know that working against the innate properties of agents means struggling in high difficulties and endless mode.

Decker [GA,SU]:
Ah, your very first agent. So nostalgic! Unfortunately he's an all-rounder, which makes him a pretty mediocre choice once you've unlocked other agents. Having a disrupter is standard. His cloaking rig is one of the better starting items, roughly equivalent to a Cloaking Rig II, and it allows him to position quite aggressively. His innate augment that uncovers daemons, however, is awful. It edges him barely into the support category, but the melee requirement makes it not very useful, and the fact that it occupies an augment slot hampers his late game potential greatly.

ArchDecker [GA]:
For those that love Decker on principle, this guy is your man. His 6-shot revolver is great for kill happy teams, and his innate augment synergizes well with the same fast-moving, high alarm level compositions. He's very early-game weighted though, making him probably the purest ganker type; once those 6 shots are fired his gun cannot be reloaded and his usefulness drops significantly. As such he pairs well with the hardest carries. That said, his augment is decent enough to take him into the late game, unlike his OF counterpart.

Internationale [SU]:
Oooh, boy. Another starter, but this one's amazing. Central calls her "the bedrock on which you can build a winning team", and she's not kidding. She has a disrupter, so that's good, but her augment is what makes her god tier. It allows you to hack consoles from rooms away, making her an incredibly quick and safe power vacuum cleaner. It also gives you crucial information on hackable objects: drones, cameras, turrets, shielded guards, and sound bugs will all be revealed for free. They can then be hacked without even having to peek through the door. Max out her hacking skill and she'll generate all the power you'll ever need.

ArchInternationale [SU]:
Less amazing than her OF counterpart, but strong in trigger-happy teams that like to amp up the alarm level quickly. For slower, more methodical compositions that want to hack everything early though, that 11th hour power rush will leave you wanting for the other Internationale.

Shalem 11 [GA,SC]:
Has access to an unparalleled 2 armor piercing from the start, which sets him up to be godsend against those early armored enemies in your kill-comps. Unfortunately, those 2+ armor enemies will take a couple missions to show up, and during that time his glut of armor pierce won't be able to shine at all. Still, the combination of disrupter and lethal weapon makes him quite powerful early. His carry potential isn't massive, as his innate augment is identical to the generic range armor pierce augment, but it does put him slightly ahead of the curve for dedicated ranged killer.

ArchShalem 11 [GA]:
A much purer ganker than OF Shalem. Starts with the 3-shot hand cannon which will save you a fair amount of credits early compared to the 2-shot desert wind. He also comes with the relatively rare ventricular lance item, which unlike OF Shalem's enhanced optics augment, can be passed to other characters. His lack of innate augments makes him a flexible blank slate after the early game, potentially a desirable trait for comps that want to retool him into a support or soft carry.

Banks [SU,GA]:
Her ability to open locked doors is easy to underestimate but surprisingly powerful; it can open up new paths early in a mission to save several turns for a team, or create secure escape routes where none were available before. Having a paralyzer from the start is no joke either, and together with her disrupter it makes her a ganker, albeit not a strong one.

ArchBanks [SU,GA]:
Somewhere between support and ganker without being fantastic at either, she's a difficult one to classify. A ranged weapon greatly increases her safety, but the standard length knockout can prove problematic on expert when the body can't be pinned immediately. Her econ chip has some potential for helping to fund a carry-type teammate, but for a support she brings relatively little to the table. Her aptitude as a ganker is also severely hampered by her lack of a disrupter.

Dr. Xu [SU, GA]:
Another god tier support. His melee range single target EMP opens safes for free with his attack action, making him a pseudo power generator by saving you power you'd otherwise spend. He also makes short work of drones, which lends to his ganker status. A shock trap makes for much safer escapes and eliminates heavily armored guards in tight situations. Finally, he is worth noting for his broken synergy with Stim IV: in the late game, when most electronics have 10+ firewalls and magnetic reinforcements, the unlimited attacks of Stim IV coupled with his attack-EMP allows him to chew through an infinite amount of firewalls spread over a huge area in a single turn. For all this, innate -1 AP is a miniscule price to pay.

ArchDr. Xu [SU, SC]:
A curious mix of support and soft carry, in that maximizing the use of his augment requires a decent strength capacity to carry items, and a respectable hacking/anarchy/speed score to use them. With these requirements fulfilled he becomes a formidable energy generator, but the investment required makes him incompatible with most hard carries.

Nika [SC, HC]:
The first and softest of the hard carries. Her early game is bolstered by her volt disrupter, which trades a cooldown for a power cost. This along with the AP boost from her augment allows her to take down multiple guards simultaneously from the first mission. In the late game, the fact that her augment triggers on ALL attacks allows her to transition into a brutal ranged killer.

ArchNika [HC]:
Much more demanding than her OF counterpart yet with far greater potential, as well as formidably utility and versatility as an item user. Requires high strength and speed to use Stim III and multiple other items. Also requires the torque injectors augment, benefits greatly from aditional augment slots, and possibly subdermal cloak. Assemble all this and you'll have an incredibly fast moving, nearly untouchable fighting machine that will get you through the entire game no problem.

Sharp [HC]:
An incredibly pure hard carry and the magikarp of Invisible, Inc, he starts the game with nothing more than a disrupter and an augment that does nothing. Judiciously fill his 5 free augment slots, however, and his initially useless innate augment will give you a staggering +2 KO damage and make him a monster melee fighter. Torque injectors and predictive brawling highly recommended.

ArchSharp [HC]:
A somehow EVEN HARDER carry than OF sharp, who plays and builds identically but trades KO damage for +2 armor pierce and -1 AP, which makes him even less useful early on and even more useful once enemy armor starts to really pile up. You'd better pick a solid support/ganker with him, or you're going to be hard pressed surviving the early game...

Prism [SU]:
A respectable power-generating support, whose innate augment synergizes well with Incognita's Seed program. Her disrupter-only loadout is pretty lousy though, which makes for a tough early game.

ArchPrism [HC]:
A hard carry quite different from her brethren for a couple reasons; first, her disguise kit allows her to play a pure stealth game rather than smash guards like her fellow carries. Second, she requires slightly less investment in herself and more in a strong power-generating support who can keep up with her power-hungry disguise. Her early game is absolutely miserable though: uniquely, she starts with no weapon and 0 open augment slots, which means that early trips to augment labs are practically a must. Satisfy her power demands, buff up her speed and anarchy, and give her a set of stims though, and she breezes through any level practically solo, totally ignoring guards, cameras, and basically anything except pulse drones.

Central [SU]:
Possibly the strongest power-generating support, who synergizes fantastically with the Faust + Brimstone Incognita combo to form a comp that generates more energy than it often even knows what to do with. Starts with level 3 anarchy as gravy. Has an unusual but minor disadvantage, however, in that her presence within your main team denies you the extra body she offers in the final mission, making it slightly more difficult.

Monst3r [SU]:
A unique but rather weak support who gets a small discount on nano fabricator purchases. I suppose he saves you credits in the long run, but really he's underwhelming anyways. His saving grace is his innate level 3 hacking, and his daemon-installing weapon synergizes well with Brimstone and Central, but by and large he's a lousy pick. He also possesses Central's weakness as a plot character who appears in 1 (2 for Contingency Plan) mission(s).

Olivia [SU,SC]:
A hybrid support/soft carry that converts KO damage into power, her strength lies in converting combat specialization into power generation. Enough bonuses to her KO damage and she can simultaneously satisfy a support and carry role, possibly making her a decent pair for a second soft carry. Still, she suffers from a lack of specialization and her crybaby item is mediocre, as it tends to get picked up by guards after activation.

Derek [HC]:
Another uconventional hard carry in that he specializes in mobility rather than combat prowess. His teleporter allows him either to go incredibly deep into a level, then escape pursuit, or bypass heavily guarded areas by teleporting long distances. The fact that he has a permanently occupied augment slot that does effectively nothing means his combat capabilities will always be sub-par, but his safety and mobility make up for this shortcoming.

Draco [SC]:
A personal favorite of mine, his ability to steal stat upgrades from corpses can get him to max stats within 3 to 4 missions when paired with a lethal ganker like Shalem 11. He is incredibly versatile, and generally dynamite for the first 10 or so days of an endless run, then begins to fall off as other characters approach maximum stats as well. His augment continues to yield rewards for corpses and KO'd guards in the form of AP, credits, cooldown reduction, and power bonuses, but as his maxed out stats become less unusual his star fades somewhat. Past 10 days he becomes less of a carry and more of a frontline support.

Rush [SC]:
A soft carry whose starting Stim makes decent in the early game. Her sprinting augment gives her powerful bonuses but is anathema to stealth. Despite her bonus to KO time, she works best with kill-comps that don't leave guards alive to wander the map. She also takes a severe hit to her usefulness in maps featuring multiple soundbugs. Her level of situationality makes her a weak pick in most cases.

Finally gonna make that tier list! The ranks will be A, B, and C; nothing will be rated below 'C' because none of the characters are unusably terrible (though some of them toe the line) and frankly, if you like a character, then by all means play them. Like all tier lists, this is totally subjective, and moreover, reflects what I perceive as optimal play patterns for Expert Plus and Endless Plus. My advice is aimed at people looking to tackle these harder modes efficiently rather than more casual players.

Once again, my lists will be sorted into the three classes: Ganker, Carry, and Support. Some characters occupy multiple roles; their positions on each chart ignore their strengths in other areas. In situations where you want a character to fulfill multiple roles, you may value them more highly.

Gankers

• A: Archive Shalem 11, Archive Decker
  
• B: Shalem 11, Decker, Banks, Dr. Xu
  
• C: Archive Banks

Explanations: Shalem 11 has a ranged lethal weapon, which is worth a bunch of ganker points, but the 5 turn cooldown on his disrupter pushes him down a tier, and his glut of armor pierce is wasted in early missions. His archive counterpart, on the other hand, has a 3 ammo gun rather than 2 and a normal disrupter, which makes him the king of gankers. Archive banks is just... lame in general. Meh. The neural dart puts her in ganker turf, but barely.

Carries

• A: Nika, Archive Prism, Draco, Sharp
  
• B: Archive Nika, Derek, Shalem 11, Rush
  
• C: Archive Sharp, Archive Dr. Xu, Olivia

Explanations: Nika's innate augment is just SO GOOD. Permanent 2nd attack plus mini predictive brawling... that also activates on ranged attacks. That insane augment efficiency makes her strong late, and the 0 cooldown volt disrupter makes her a powerhouse from mission 1. If there was a god tier, she'd be in it. Draco is great, but needs a specific synergy; if he doesn't have an early killer re: Shalem 11, either one, or Archive Decker, he's a C tier carry. On file Sharp is good, bottom of A tier on account of his weak early game. Archive Sharp, though, takes a big hit for the -1 AP that makes his early game a real challenge, and the fact that armor piercing is easy to get from augments, vent lance, and high level disrupters... and it doesn't even begin to shine until day 10+ when armor really picks up. Archive Xu and Olivia are really borderline as carries, but strong energy generation can be powerful.

Supports

• A: Internationale, Dr. Xu, Banks, Prism
  
• B: Archive Internationale, Archive Dr. Xu, Central, Olivia
  
• C: Decker, Archive Banks, Monst3r

Explanations: Internationale and Dr. Xu are a cut above the rest of the pack, even in the A tier. They're both so far beyond 'good' that I consider them near broken. Their augments are amazing, and the fact that they both have disrupters is just gravy. Decker and Archive Banks barely make it into the support category, Decker for his lousy short range daemon detector and Archive Banks for her econ chip. Monst3r's weapon is a liability and his augment is narrow and mediocre. He and Archive Banks are in stiff competition for worst agent in the game; Monst3r probably takes the cake EXCEPT when paired with central. Together, they're OK. Just OK.

Widowmaker [SU, GA]:

Her mines combine the functionality of a ventricular lance and a smoke grenade, while her gun combines a cooker and a neural D.A.R.T. Both recharge between missions, and that makes her spectacularly versatile from mission 1 without demanding much credit investment. Her augment is alright and makes her good at observing multiple targets simultaneously, but frankly it holds her back; it's not strong enough to earn her a dedicated support spot, and it fills a spot that could hold a piercing scanner to make her a ranged attacking soft carry. A tier ganker, B tier support.

Sombra [SU, HC]:

Another odd hybrid. Her EMP augment acts more like an extension of the hacking system than a traditional EMP. It's quite cost effective for opening safes and the like, which earns her the support classification. Later on, when credits become more available, chugging charge packs makes her an evasion carry like Prism. Unlike other hard carries, she doesn't require an early investment of credits nor does she need to be supported by a low-cost support or ganker; she begins to shine once charge packs start to become super common guard drops and credits start to flow in abundance. Until then, you can pretty much just put a point or two into her hacking skill and leave her be. She pairs well with gankers and soft carries like Shalem 11 and OF Nika who can do the fighting for her and profit from her early credit-independence.

N-Umi [SU]:

Has the rather interesting ability to effectively put another agent into play with her spider drones. They're totally expendable, which means they can lead guards on wild goose chases and do suicide runs into risky zones. They're also more than capable of getting overwatched, ramping up the alarm levels, and making guards hunt you, so be careful when using them aggressively. Their wreckage also acts like a guard corpse, even if you self-destruct them. Buying power is alright in a pinch; you should really only be doing it when you're desperate; it's pretty expensive. It's an interesting option, if not a desirable one.

Mist [GA]:

Hoooly ♥♥♥♥. A powerhouse ganker with the lategame of a carry; she dodges the carry label simply because she needs absolutely nothing to attain near maximum power. Her augment alone makes her relevant from day 1 to day 100. For a pittance of power on no cooldown, you straight up deactivate a guard at any alertness level from long range, while ignoring armor. To boot, it neither alerts the target nor raises the alarm tracker. The hologram projector adds yet another layer of undetectability and lets her move EVEN MORE aggressively without fear of being spotted. The disrupter is barely necessary, you might as well give it to another character. This one needs a nerf.

Dr. Pedler [SC, SU]:

An extremely flexible character, also a little bit over-tuned, though to a lesser extent than Mist. His +2 KO and ability to break down doors (to dish out armor ignoring KOs) make him quite relevant in the later days, while his power generation disrupter, ability to carry extra items, and spammable sight grenades give him major support cred. The AP cost on his melee does hamper him slightly, so stims and points in speed are essential. As a swiss army knife character, he fits well into just about any team.

Ghuff [N/A]:

Evalutation pending experimentation.