Deceive Inc. – Beginners Guide (Character Select, Insertion, Infiltration, Extraction)

Character Select, Insertion, Infiltration, Extraction, Extra tips I couldn’t fit in anywhere else.

Character Select

All credit goes to CATGIRL !

Out the gate, I feel the top 3 agents are Ace w3 > Yumi w3 > Cav w2 > Everyone else. Here’s my reasoning.

Cav has some of the highest sustained damage short-mid range in the entire game. If you shoot an agent and they’re a cav, you have to be able to beat them in a fight.

Cav w2 can kill you in 3 headshots, or 5 bodyshots. Compare this to Larcin that kills you in around 9+the gun throw. This means that in a straight up fight, I expect Cav to win 90% of the time unless the Larcin either 1- gets a massive advantage jump on her (sentry gun, 0 idea where larcin is, hurt cav), or the larcin massively outskills Cav.

Ace w3 can kill you in two bodyshots. If you have heatlh, 2 body shots + 1 melee.

Yumi w3 can kill you in one headshot if you’re uncovered, two bodyshots if you are.

I think these two are the only two in the game that stand a chance, but I may be missing something with one of the men (like shotgun Hans or something- I don’t know, I don’t use male characters)

Gadget Select

I think the only viable ones are:

Bounce pad – If you have a plan for it. IE: You know the maps and you know where you can jump up on different floors for a getaway//the roof, to block doorways, etc. Don’t just pick it randomly.

Shield is okay in teams but thats about it.

Sentry gun is strong but it does a surprisingly low amount of damage. It’s usually not worth throwing in the middle of a fight, but is great to throw before a fight starts.

Mimic is good vs AI and as of the current patch, dodges intel scans. I’ve heard they’re going to fix it though.

I love goo pod, it’s great to throw behind you while you’re storming an area, it’s great to throw at sus targets inside of guard rooms because people freak out.

Tripwire is great if you want to lock down an area because you can’t win fights. If you can win fights I don’t advise it because it takes forever to set up.

Spyglass is incredible utility and lets you rush through things faster and makes you much safer while you do it.

My current loadout I use is goopod + spyglass. That said, I don’t see that many people pick goo pod besides me, so your mileage may vary. I think if you don’t want to think about it, just pick sentry + spyglass.

Field Upgrades

If you don’t want to think, copy my loadout:

• Green – Hacking speed, Purple – Intel drain, Gold – Health.

The other two don’t matter. I have it on Ammo – grey and social battery – blue.

Going through it one by one:

• Cover accelerator – Not that good. If you choose it, I recommend grey only.
• Increased Intel capacity – Doesn’t do anything
• Increased hack speed – Important because it also affects med stations and opening doors. It’s great, but you need to get it early. I recommend green.
• Health up – The most important one because it’s the only one that actually directly helps you in a gunfight
• Reduced Expertise – Good for some agents, I’d put this on blue for Yu-Mi if I played her. Otherwise doesn’t really do anything for Ace/Cav. Compare it to your char- if you have larcin you probably want it.
• Social Battery – Niche, basically the only use is if you’re too scared to go into a health room, or you can’t because you have the intel and you’re holed up in the briefcase room // surrounding areas.
• Food health recovery – Worthless don’t bother
• Intel package drain – Very important as well if you follow the guide.

Insertion

A little bit controversial, Deceive Inc is a battle royale with a spy game flavoring. You have 3 goals in the insertion phase:

1. Get your important upgrades. For my loadout, this is Green, Purple, Gold.
2. Get keycards so you can be the first to get the briefcase
3. Deny enemies from getting keycards/upgrades

I run around everywhere. Walking around roleplaying does not achieve these goals. The longer you take roleplaying, the rattier your enemies will become- enemies can rat out the last terminal if you take 6 minutes to get to it, but if you’re sprinting to every terminal, they don’t have any time to setup (probably because they’re also roleplaying)

But Catgirl- what happens if someone starts shooting me?

Simple. You run away. This game’s time to kill is typically high- most of the time you can run away if the fight is disadvantageous.

If you are low and you have a feeling they are camping the med station, I give you permission to roleplay. Otherwise, just run around. The faster you do things the less resources your enemies have. Nothing sucks more than going into phase 2 with a blue keycard and only your purple buff.

Fighting is okay as long as you have an overwhelming advantage and you can guarantee you won’t be third partied- or if you do you have an escape route.

And the escape route is another reason why I like to rush. If I have a blue and purple keycard, I have a place that nobody can really go to easily except me.

So don’t play this as a roleplaying game. Run around, get all the resources, force enemies into phase two in an uncomfortable position.

Infiltration

Infiltration is about getting to the briefcase as fast as possible.

Preferably, you’re at the vault doors as soon as they open. This isn’t always possible because you probably are the one that unlocked the last terminal and it might be across the map, but it’s preferrable.

Then, it’s basically a game of “Who has more keycards”. If you have more keycards, you get the briefcase first.

A lot of the time the AI will open purple for you, but it’s not reliable.

But Catgirl, why do I want to get the briefcase first? This is putting a giant target on my back!…

Extraction

When you have the briefcase, you have wallhacks.

This is quite literally the most powerful thing in the game. You have the ability to choose your fights and to get the opening shot in every single engagement.

You also have plenty of time. If enemies are camping, you shoot them and run away and guards will start to shoot them (not to mention other players)

The way the briefcase works is you’re on a timer- every X seconds you’ll put a ping at your feet. However, if you run, it pings faster. So you can bait out a ping, then start walking the complete opposite direction and it won’t ping for a very long time.

You can call for extraction at multiple locations. Call C (another reason why spyglass is good, you don’t have to be hugging the terminal), then start walking to B. Enemies will rush C and start killing each other since they’re sprinting // they don’t know you’re not hugging the car. Then you got B and a nice 1v1 with the survivor where you have the first shot advantage.

Since you dictate every fight, I hope you picked a good enough agent to be able to kill people with the first shot advantage.

Just make sure you take off your technician/vip outfit when you’re trying to get the first shot advantage.

Notes & Tips

Just a few tips and notes:

A lot of maps have a free green room that you can jump into. Diamond spires has the generator room with 6 spawn locations (I’ve gotten both the blue and the purple in the same one multiple times!), Silver Reef has the counters you can jump over (but also like 5 green rooms right next to each other), and Fragrant Shore has the window you can jump in at the hotel.

Green rooms are incredibly powerful. I recommend going into one first.

You can hear keycards through walls and inside of drawers. It makes a little shine noise

If you’re hacking, make sure you’re wiggling so I can’t land a free shot on you. Especially vault terminals and the briefcase because they take literally forever to hack.

You can test all the weapons out in training mode. Just use the tripwire to blow the bot’s cover.

And if you can’t win 1v1s, because maybe you’re still unlocking Yu-Mi’s w3 or Ace’s w3 or you’re not Cav, you might be forced to rat. My favorite strat to get Ace up to w3 so I could stop using her bad guns was to sit inside of a vault with a sentry gun deployed and tripwires watching the entrance. You usually get a few free kills before you’re forced into phase 2.

It’s not a good strategy but you don’t really have a choice since their first two guns are bad.

Second, Yu-Mi is actually really good in teams. It’s sad to see a Yu-Mi with w1 or w2 in teams (Did I mention her w3 is a one shot headshot out of cover?), but the deployable shield + medifield is a very strong combo.