XCOM Aliens Analysis: Part 1
A format of #/#/#/# means the number varies based on difficulty, difficulty going left to right as Easy/Normal/Classic/Impossible. If the number is unaffected by difficulty, I simply give the one number.
Hardened always means the Alien makes no use of Cover. The reverse is not necessarily true -Zombies do not use cover, but do not have the Hardened trait, and so too is this combination true of Seekers.
Worth commentary is that every enemy has no innate crit chance beyond whatever their weapon provides on the lower two difficulties and has an innate crit chance on the higher two. It's always +10 on those higher difficulties, with the exception of the Mechtoid for some reason, which is +15, and EXALT, which instead cancels a penalty (-10) to crit chance they have on lower difficulties.
I'm actually not 100% sure whether Aliens benefit from their weapon's crit chance. I'm assuming they do on the basis that various integrated weapons have an innate crit chance, which would make no sense if Aliens simply ignored weapon crit chance, but I'm not actually sure on the point.
The Light Plasma Rifle does not confer an Aim bonus in Alien hands. Most notably, this means Mutons transitioning from Light Plasma Rifles to Plasma Rifles is a pure upgrade for them.
A point of note: "Mobility" has a rather odd formula that, according to the simplified explanation on UFOpaedia, works out roughly as "orthogonal movement uses 1.625 Mobility per tile, and diagonal movement uses 2.33 Mobility per tile." (Put another way, one tile of diagonal movement is equivalent to a tile and a half of orthogonal movement) The 'default' Mobility of 12 therefore works out to 7 and a half tiles of movement, rounded down to just 7 if you go in a straight line. A 'dash' (Using both actions on a single movement action) doubles this before the rounding down occurs, so a dash with a Mobility of 12 is 15 tiles of movement.
For convenience's sake I've provided the tiles of movement provided by a given Mobility in parentheses. The format is (#/#), where the first number is a single-action move and the second is a 'dash'. Alternatively, you can just consult the prior link for a table of what a given value works out to in practice.
Sectoids
Aim: 65/65/65/75
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10
Defense: 0
HP: 3/3/3/4
Mobility: 12 (7.5/15)
Will: 10
Damage: 3 (Plasma Pistol)
Can Suppress and Mind Merge. Mind Merge is +25 Aim, +25 crit chance, and +1 HP to the target, but kills the target if the originator dies before the Mind Merge is over.
Your basic cannon fodder aliens, of course. I do appreciate that the remaquel gives the basic Sectoids a psychic ability. It was always an odd aspect of Sectoids in the original that they had no psychic powers outside of the Leaders and Commanders. Mind Merge itself is actually a decently designed ability, in that it can up the threat level of Sectoids fairly noticeably -in particular, on non-highest-difficulties that +1 HP is huge, taking into account Frag Grenades- but it can be turned against them and make them even easier. Risk/reward. I do wish there was a mechanic to actually connect Mind Merge to the other psychic abilities of the game, though. You have to 'take it on faith' that Mind Merge is a psychic ability as far as actual mechanics goes, and I'm not fond of that.
Not a lot else to say about them, as they're meant to be basic trash enemies you move past in the later game.
It's worth commentary that Sectoids are one-shotted by Frag Grenades, making them really easy to deal with on all but the highest difficulty if you've brought any, as you can kill clumps of them and entirely ignore the RNG. I approve of this from a design standpoint, as it's a very clear benchmark for separating Sectoids from higher aliens in threat level -and also is a clear benchmark for the highest difficulty version of Sectoids being a noticeable step up from the lower difficulty Sectoids, since you can't just wipe out a pod with a single Frag Grenade anymore.
I mean, it's a waste of Weapon Fragments to do so, but it's still a useful option to have as a panic button, and the lack of said option on Impossible really does make Sectoids harder to trivialize in the early game.
Aesthetically, I don't think I like their redesign.
The original design was basically cute, and I can understand wanting to move away from that, but the remaquel's Sectoids are monster-y and not very interesting. I might like it more if there was any evidence their design was tied into behavior or abilities -they crawl around on all fours a lot, but they don't get any ability to duck under cars or climb especially skillfully with their clawed hands or anything. They're vaguely animalistic because... reasons, probably mostly because the developers are starting from the idea that they need to look like Bad Guys.
Their weird "sort-of-a-mouth" thing, strangely, actually makes them less of an intimidating cipher -they can't bare fangs, but you can tell they're trying to bare fangs and intimidate XCOM. It 'humanizes' them, makes them seem less alien and bizarre.
I do like their sound effects, at least.
Thin Men
Aim: 65/65/65/75
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10 (+10 from Light Plasma Rifle)
Defense: 0
HP: 3/3/4/6
Mobility: 15 (9.23/18.46)
Will: 15
Damage: 3/3/5/5 (Light Plasma Rifle: lower difficulties impose a damage penalty)
Can Suppress, Leap, and Spit Poison. Poison Spit creates a cloud that lasts 3 turns (3-5 in Enemy Within) inflicting Poisoning, which does 1 damage a turn and lowers Aim by -25 and Mobility by -3. When killed, releases a Poison cloud, and is itself immune to Poison.
Another basic enemy of the game. On the lower two difficulties they're barely better than Sectoids, having identical HP, damage, and Defense, and their other parameters aren't much better. In fact, Sectoids' unlimited ammunition makes them more threatening with Suppression and in general gives them an edge in cases where an individual goes ignored by the player for several turns. Since Thin Men tend to dominate Council missions, Council missions become cakewalks in the late game, good for training rookies, which is just weird for your spec ops missions. Shouldn't Council Request missions be harder than usual? In all honesty the only reason I'd argue Thin Men are a clear improvement over Sectoids is because Poison Spit skips Accuracy checks, is area of effect, and imposes noticeable stat penalties, all while doing at least the damage of a Plasma Pistol shot if allowed to play out the full turn count. It's very important to kill Thin Men ASAP early in a run.
On the highest two difficulties Thin Men are more clearly a step up from Sectoids, gaining a noticeable damage and HP advantage. On the highest difficulty, in particular, Thin Men have the distinction of being able to survive a single Alien Grenade, where even a Mind Merged Sectoid is one-shotted by the same. As such, Thin Men are never quite as trashy as Sectoids, on the highest difficulty, in the sense of being equally useless/unthreatening, as if nothing else Thin Men can't be instagibbed en mass by single Alien Grenades. In Enemy Within, their Impossible difficulty HP also provides a fairly clear benefit to the Heavy's Grenade specialty skill providing an extra point of damage -Heavies with that Skill can one-shot Thin Men with Alien Grenades, where your other troops can't. Nice.
The AI isn't good at maximizing the potential of Leap, but it's still worth commentary that they have it. Just taking the high ground -which the AI prefers to do if it can- gives them an instant +20 Aim, making their mediocre stats better than they first seem.
Aesthetically, I'm of mixed feelings about Thin Men. They're a callback to a dropped design from the original XCOM, and also a callback to Snakemen, but their design is blatantly an infiltrator design, and indeed the fluff characterizes them as infiltrator units, yet in gameplay terms they're just a weak early-game enemy with a couple of fairly random gimmicks. It's not like Terror Mission civilians can turn out to be surprise Thin Men or anything of the sort. What's the point of having a Totally An Infiltrator unit if it doesn't... you know... infiltrate?
This gets even weirder once Enemy Within comes along and has you fight actual human units. They could've easily had EXALT units have a random chance of getting Thin Men traits. It would've been a nice little touch and made EXALT missions a little less same-y.
Missed opportunity.
Floaters
Aim: 50/50/60/60
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10 (+10 from Light Plasma Rifle)
Defense: 0
HP: 4/4/4/6
Mobility: 12 (7.5/15)
Will: 10
Damage: 5 (Light Plasma Rifle)
Flies and has the "Launch" special, allowing it to teleport to arbitrary locations. (The location must be visible to allies, at least in Multiplayer) Launch is blocked by ceilings, both at the destination and if the user is under one. Is always considered to be in Partial Cover unless in natural Cover and also being flanked, or in Full Cover.
Another early game trash enemy. On lower difficulties they at least have a consistent damage increase and an HP advantage, and their flight ability helps compensate for their bad Aim (+20 for height advantage puts them ahead of Sectoids and less consistently Thin Men when flying) while making them impossible to flank to take away their Cover, but on the higher two difficulties they're noticeably less threatening than Thin Men, with no particular advantage to set them apart. The mobility advantage provided by Flight is largely matched by Leap, and Aliens that use Cover are good about consistently using Cover, so the auto-Cover provided by flight isn't super-meaningful. It's not as if Floaters will aggressively attempt to get a flank, either. It's basically just an annoying denial of the ability to flank them, yourself.
In theory I appreciate how they hit Frag Grenade/Alien Grenade benchmarks on their health (Including that Impossible Difficulty's 6 HP is what Heavies specialized in Grenades land with Alien Grenades), but in practice that's sketchy because you can't hit them with Grenades if they're flying, and the only time it makes sense for them to land is when they have access to Full Cover. Admittedly, the AI isn't nearly as consistent about putting them into the air as I'd like, but still.
Aesthetically, I loathe Floaters. We've gone from some demonic/cultist-looking humanoid that is really creepy when you get a good look at them to a (remaquel) Muton whose legs have gone missing to clear out weight for the integrated jetpack. It reads like an attempt to push the cybernetic body horror angle, and if that is the intent I think it falls flat by comparison.
In the original, Floaters have this aspect of "Oh man, they fly! Sign me up for whatever they've got!" *read UFOpaedia entry* "Wait, that's the cost? Oh god no, never mind."
Contrast with the remaquel, where it's obvious up-front that there's a huge cost involved. You're not going to have that experience of longing for what they have and then being repulsed by the fact that you ever wanted it. Missed opportunity.
I also dislike the redesign because Floaters are A: completely inappropriately named now (They're not floating, they're flying via rocket jetpack) and B: remaquel Floaters are obviously a product of military "enhancement", which is honestly less grotesque/disturbing than the original Floaters, whom appear to have scooped out their own guts for the everyday civilian utility of ignoring gravity.
It's also just really hard to accept that remaquel Floaters aren't dead. The original Floaters replaced much of their body mass, with this being very obvious visually. It's intuitive that they could fit a life support system of some kind in with their anti-grav device. Remaquel Floaters are just missing like half their body and somehow not dead. Huh?
Outsider
Aim: 70/70/80/90
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10 (+10 from Light Plasma Rifle)
Defense: 0/0/10/10
HP: 3/3/5/5
Mobility: 12/12/12/17 (7.5/15, except on Impossible, where it's instead 10.46/20.92)
Will: 20
Damage: 5 (Light Plasma Rifle)
Can Suppress. They have no other special properties from a tactical perspective. Strategically speaking, they leave no corpse when killed.
On lower difficulties, Outsiders aren't very interesting, being basically bad Thin Men the plot mandates you capture, rather than kill, if you want to progress through the game. Whoo.
On the highest difficulty they're insanely mobile and have nearly perfect Aim against any target out of Cover and/or lacking Defense, making them incredibly prone to picking off rookies or weakened soldiers you thought were safe from Alien fire. I like that dynamic, and it grates on me that they're completely phased out so early in the game, as no other enemy really pulls off an equivalent role, not even in Enemy Within.
Their HP values are kind of obnoxious, being exactly on the Grenade thresholds. This is less obnoxious on the higher two difficulties, amusingly, where it's feasible to lob a Frag Grenade and then try to capture one, but on the lower difficulties it's irritating that trying to weaken them with a Grenade isn't an option, given that you need to capture them to advance through the game. It's a dubious bit of design that advancing the plot/game in this way is easier because of difficulty modifiers on the higher difficulties.
I actually quite like the Outsider's aesthetic! It's a major disappointment that the game phases them out after you've fought just one or two, in practice. They're yet another humanoid enemy, but they're some kind of crystal energy being whose rest state is a floating crystal so they still manage to seem alien. It helps that they're a new alien design and so I don't have any reason to say "THIS LACKS THE THING THAT MADE THE ORIGINAL DESIGN COOL", but honestly if all the remaquel's designs were this interesting I'd probably complain less.
I do kind of wish their "face" was less face-like. It's kind of distracting and weird. That, and it seems bizarre that the crystal is so poorly protected in their humanoid form, but that's part of a general trend I'll be getting to later.
Chryssalid
Aim: 0 (Melee skips accuracy rolls)
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10 (+20% from Claws)
Defense: 10
HP: 8
Mobility: 20 (12.31/24.62)
Will: 120
Damage: 8/8/10/10 (Claws)
Melee attack poisons and can perform the "implant" action when landing a lethal hit, and Chryssalids can Leap, are immune to Poison, cannot be stunned/captured alive, and are Hardened.
Chryssalids suffer enormously from the remaquel's combat engine, relative to the original game's version of them.
Even after accounting for engine differences crippling them, they've also just been nerfed in general, most notably being surprisingly fragile. Tough for how early they can show up, but fragile compared to late-game standards, where classic Cryssalids were tough in general. Classic Chryssalids had 96 HP, where peak HP was 143, while in the remaquel you're talking 8 HP vs a peak of 30 -that puts old Chryssalids at more than 50% of peak HP, where new Chryssalids are less than a third of peak HP. Then Enemy Within gives Sectopods a trait that effectively doubles their HP! So they're also just a lot easier to gun down than they were in the original game, relative to the other threats.
Even though remaquel Chryssalids have several unusual features, they are in practice very boring enemies, and arguably are less threatening than Sectoids even before you do things like use Archangel Armor to render them 100% irrelevant. I'm particularly disappointed that they were given the nonsensical Leap feature but not any kind of leap attack to strike at flying units -one of the more flawed aspects of the original Chryssalid design was that they were utterly terrifying unless you could fly, in which case they were completely helpless, and alleviating that would've been nice. Nope, remaquel Chryssalids are pathetic, and even their tendency to zombify civilians doesn't make them that threatening. (Arguably it's to the player's advantage -Zombies are worth experience, and the potential for Panic increases in countries that lose too many civilians isn't really a big problem for the player)
They're just too easily killed, and have too much difficulty getting in damage, particularly since their Mobility is misleading -they're the fastest unit in the game by a fair margin, but since a given action is either a move or an attack, they can only use half their theoretical movement speed in any turn they want to attack. If they charge anything greater than 50% of their total movement, they end up stopping right up next to a soldier, staring blankly at their intended victim. It's farcical, and it even makes it easier to kill them, because outside of Sniper Rifles all your weapons have higher Aim the closer the target is, maximizing your odds of hitting them with your shots.
I get that the original Chryssalids were arguably too dangerous, but I really feel like the remaquel took things way too far in the other direction. I'm also baffled as to why they inflict Poison in melee. How is that supposed to work, in-universe?
Aesthetically, I get why Chryssalids were radically redesigned, as the original design has enough shades of the Xenomorph design it was probably a good idea to move away from that and avoid any risk of being sued or whatever, particularly given Chryssalids and Xenomorphs both implant their babies into humans to then be lethally born from their still-living flesh, but this bizarre centaur-bug-thing is terrible. Pretty much every feature on it is inexplicable and nonsensical, and frankly the idea of a Leaping centaurian thing is nuts all by itself. I'm also not a fan of the fact that they now Poison things, somehow using their claws to do so, never mind all the effort put into animating them drooling -yet their claws show no evidence of being envenomed.
sigh.
I guess the poison was meant to be an allusion to the instant-zombie-bite in the original game, only less heinous to fight, but it's just a very random feature. In general their visual design just doesn't really have anything to do with their gameplay mechanics.
A point of note: the original Chryssalid's humanoid design provided the foundation for an extremely well-done animation of a zombie converting into a Chryssalid. The new design raises questions of how the Chryssalid is hidden inside the zombie at all. This does not raise my opinion of the redesign.
Zombie
Aim: 0
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10
Defense: 0
HP: 10/10/10/14
Mobility: 8 (4.92/11.84)
Will: 120
Damage: 8/8/10/12 (Punch)
If left alive for 3 turns, will hatch into a Chryssalid. Cannot be stunned/captured alive. Not Hardened.
Nothing to really comment on about zombies. It's a zombie. I find it pretty weird that they're vastly tougher and harder hitting than Chryssalids, though admittedly they're less than half the Speed of Chryssalids so they're not liable to get that close anyway. Still, why is a civilian who is unarmed, unarmored, and already seriously injured more capable of punching holes in people than the alien bioweapon with visible claws and more capable of shrugging off damage than the genetically engineered monster?
Aesthetically speaking, they're zombies. Whatever. Their design(s) doesn't particularly leap out at me, beyond that it's irritating to me that they have glowing red eyes and puzzling that at least one design is abruptly shoeless. Huh?
Muton
Aim: 70/70/80/80
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10
Defense: 10
HP: 8/8/10/10
Mobility: 12 (7.5/15. Blood Call raises this to 9.85/19.70)
Will: 10
Damage: 5 (Light Plasma Rifle), 7 (Plasma Rifle)
Can Suppress, has twice as much ammo as usual, can throw a single Alien Grenade, Blood Call (Friendly nearby Mutons/Berserkers/Muton Elites gain +10 Aim, +10 Will, and +4 Mobility for 2 turns. Cooldown 4), and has Intimidate. (When injured, provokes a Will test in its attacker: failing results in them panicking, randomly choosing to hunker down, shoot a random target nearby [including potentially the Intimidating Muton] without regard for friendliness, or move to a different position)
Your bread and butter Alien in the mid-game. They're tough, once they shift to Plasma Rifles they're harder hitting than any of the early game aliens, and they can chuck Alien Grenades, which has all kinds of implications. Blood Call is sort of pointless in practice -Mutons rarely use it of their own volition and the game design tends to mean they only have a couple of allies to benefit from it while its benefits aren't significant enough to be worth spending a turn on to boost just two allies- but I like it in theory, in terms of keeping Mutons relevant even into the endgame by shifting them to a supporting role for Berserkers and Muton Elites. Intimidate is just weird, and doesn't serve a clear purpose beyond punishing using low-Will soldiers, which seems redundant with Psi Aliens punishing the player for using low-WIll soldiers. Especially since if the shot killed the Muton, Intimidate doesn't trigger, and Grenades and Reaction Fire don't trigger it either. Since, as I covered in the Psi post, even Intimidate-induced Panic almost never happens, it seems a pretty pointless addition. Usually by the time Mutons start showing up your troops will largely have too much Will to have any chance of Panicking. The Slingshot DLC makes it a little more relevant, but the odds of Panicking are always quite low.
Still. The only complaint I have particularly about Mutons is how unfaithful to the original game design they are -Mutons in the original are obnoxiously durable and carry heavy weaponry without particular effort, in exchange for being dumb as bricks. Mutons in the remaquel are susceptible to Psi effects from their poor Will, but so is basically everything that isn't immune by virtue of being a robot (Robots still have garbage Will, incidentally) or a Psionic unit with a good Will score of its own (Chryssalids and Zombies are the only exceptions on Alien troops, having actually passable Will scores), so Mutons aren't actually unusually susceptible to Psi, and their durability, though it's more than twice a Sectoid's, is low compared to all the actual big nasties of the game and, more importantly, is low compared to decently leveled xcommies with non-crap armor.
It's utterly baffling that genetically engineered alien supersoldiers kitted out in powered armor are about as tough as a decently experienced human in one of the fairly basic armors, and is a huge reduction, relatively speaking, compared to the original game's Mutons, which were pretty much impossible to kill with conventional munitions and were prone to surviving individual Heavy Plasma shots in a game where most things died in one hit from most weapons.
In fact, they had more than twice the maximum possible human soldier HP in classic XCOM. Why are the remaquel's Mutons so pathetic? It's especially jarring since the remaquel wants us to fear the Aliens. What's so scary about such a pathetic unit?
I don't really have strong feelings on the Muton redesign. I don't particularly like it, but the old design was very silly. I liked it, but it was silly. I would've been unhappy with a direct translation, I think, unless the remaquel had stayed true to the comic book aesthetic of the original in a general sense. Ultimately the only thing I particularly dislike is the gas mask. It has no gameplay impact (it's not like Mutons are immune to Poison, even though all Poison effects in the game are a gas that sealed suits protect against), and it's kind of baffling that the Alien supersoldier grunt is the only Alien that can't cope with breathing Earth's atmosphere unassisted. On the other hand, I can pretend to myself that it's actually a delivery system for alien supersoldier drugs, as the game itself doesn't bother to address the topic at all and it's equally plausible. So... whatever. It's okay, basically. Not great, but not terrible.
... well, except for the general trend in the remaquel of almost nobody bothering to protect their head.
Sectoid Commander
Aim: 85/85/95/95
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10
Defense: 20
HP: 10/10/14/14
Mobility: 12 (7.5/15)
Will: 90/90/115/125
Damage: 3 (Plasma Pistol)
Carries one Alien Grenade, can use Mind Fray, Mind Control, use Greater Mind Merge (as per Mind Merge, but works on multiple Sectoids/Mechtoids at once), and Psi Panic. (Attempts to panic the target) One of the aliens immune to Enemy Within's Flashbang Grenade.
I'm really not a fan of the fact that the remaquel does away with Alien ranks and instead creates entirely different unit types when it bothers to have rank representation at all. The Sectoid Commander is particularly irksome -in the original game the leadership units were important to interrogate if you wanted to get any useful information about the enemy's larger plan. They knew more, as appropriate to being placed higher in the chain of command.
In the remaquel we instead need to kill an Outsider and analyze it's magical crystal to somehow find the Alien Base, and convert said magical crystal into a "skeleton key" so we can assault the Alien Base. (Because we can't just blow our way into the Alien Base. That would be rude, after all)
Outsiders? Can't be interrogated, what they know doesn't matter, and once you've hit the Alien Base they're replaced by Sectoid Commanders... who can be interrogated, but still don't know anything of importance.
Since the game has no in-battle representation for leadership ability, the closest Sectoid Commanders get to seeming leader-like is their use of Mass Mind Merge, which has the problem that it's tied into their larger facility with psionic powers. In practice Sectoid Commanders are just... Psi Aliens.
... Psi Aliens that are carrying an Alien Grenade somewhere on their body, don't think too hard about where given that they're naked and have no orifices to store it in. No, we don't get to see an Alien Grenade on their model until they chuck it. That would make entirely too much sense to be allowed.
In raw gameplay terms, they're primarily threatening through their superior psychic powers... and their access to an Alien Grenade... given that they're still using a Plasma Pistol like regular Sectoids and so should basically never actually shoot at XCOM. They're also tougher than Mutons, because everyone knows a skeletally thin, naked humanoid is 25% harder to blow to smithereens than a supersoldier gorilla in powered armor.
sigh
Aesthetically speaking, I hate Sectoid Commanders with a burning passion. They're Sectoids with large, red and vein-y heads, and are overall larger than regular Sectoids. That's it. Why are they more than three times the durability of a Sectoid? Because shut up. Why are they 25% (40% on the higher two difficulties!) more durable than a Muton? Because shut up. Where's their marks of leadership? Their nice hat, or epaulets, or medals, or holographic banner? Why are they not in armor of any kind? Why on earth does a Sectoid developing competency in psychic powers cause obvious distortions and discoloration of their braincase, while humans with psychic powers just get a neat purple glow? I'm willing to overlook the evil glowing red eyes and assume that it's their psychic powers in action, same as the purple glow XCOM guys will do, but otherwise... what?
The original game had the excuse that the Aliens didn't use different graphics for different ranks in the first place. The player was left to fill in the gaps with their imagination, and anyway you were actually supposed to use the Mind Probe to check a given Alien's rank, you couldn't identify it at a glance, not even by hovering over them with the mouse. They were supposed to be undifferentiated, impossible to tell a leader from an engineer from a soldier. The remaquel makes an entire separate model for the Sectoid Commander, and it's a minor adjustment to the regular Sectoid model (Honestly, the biggest difference is in size: Commanders are something like twice as large), no thought put into explaining the stat advantages or considering the implications of... anything to do with their design.
Why would you do this?
--------------------
Next time, we cover still more Aliens.
Hardened always means the Alien makes no use of Cover. The reverse is not necessarily true -Zombies do not use cover, but do not have the Hardened trait, and so too is this combination true of Seekers.
Worth commentary is that every enemy has no innate crit chance beyond whatever their weapon provides on the lower two difficulties and has an innate crit chance on the higher two. It's always +10 on those higher difficulties, with the exception of the Mechtoid for some reason, which is +15, and EXALT, which instead cancels a penalty (-10) to crit chance they have on lower difficulties.
I'm actually not 100% sure whether Aliens benefit from their weapon's crit chance. I'm assuming they do on the basis that various integrated weapons have an innate crit chance, which would make no sense if Aliens simply ignored weapon crit chance, but I'm not actually sure on the point.
The Light Plasma Rifle does not confer an Aim bonus in Alien hands. Most notably, this means Mutons transitioning from Light Plasma Rifles to Plasma Rifles is a pure upgrade for them.
A point of note: "Mobility" has a rather odd formula that, according to the simplified explanation on UFOpaedia, works out roughly as "orthogonal movement uses 1.625 Mobility per tile, and diagonal movement uses 2.33 Mobility per tile." (Put another way, one tile of diagonal movement is equivalent to a tile and a half of orthogonal movement) The 'default' Mobility of 12 therefore works out to 7 and a half tiles of movement, rounded down to just 7 if you go in a straight line. A 'dash' (Using both actions on a single movement action) doubles this before the rounding down occurs, so a dash with a Mobility of 12 is 15 tiles of movement.
For convenience's sake I've provided the tiles of movement provided by a given Mobility in parentheses. The format is (#/#), where the first number is a single-action move and the second is a 'dash'. Alternatively, you can just consult the prior link for a table of what a given value works out to in practice.
Sectoids
Aim: 65/65/65/75
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10
Defense: 0
HP: 3/3/3/4
Mobility: 12 (7.5/15)
Will: 10
Damage: 3 (Plasma Pistol)
Can Suppress and Mind Merge. Mind Merge is +25 Aim, +25 crit chance, and +1 HP to the target, but kills the target if the originator dies before the Mind Merge is over.
Your basic cannon fodder aliens, of course. I do appreciate that the remaquel gives the basic Sectoids a psychic ability. It was always an odd aspect of Sectoids in the original that they had no psychic powers outside of the Leaders and Commanders. Mind Merge itself is actually a decently designed ability, in that it can up the threat level of Sectoids fairly noticeably -in particular, on non-highest-difficulties that +1 HP is huge, taking into account Frag Grenades- but it can be turned against them and make them even easier. Risk/reward. I do wish there was a mechanic to actually connect Mind Merge to the other psychic abilities of the game, though. You have to 'take it on faith' that Mind Merge is a psychic ability as far as actual mechanics goes, and I'm not fond of that.
Not a lot else to say about them, as they're meant to be basic trash enemies you move past in the later game.
It's worth commentary that Sectoids are one-shotted by Frag Grenades, making them really easy to deal with on all but the highest difficulty if you've brought any, as you can kill clumps of them and entirely ignore the RNG. I approve of this from a design standpoint, as it's a very clear benchmark for separating Sectoids from higher aliens in threat level -and also is a clear benchmark for the highest difficulty version of Sectoids being a noticeable step up from the lower difficulty Sectoids, since you can't just wipe out a pod with a single Frag Grenade anymore.
I mean, it's a waste of Weapon Fragments to do so, but it's still a useful option to have as a panic button, and the lack of said option on Impossible really does make Sectoids harder to trivialize in the early game.
Aesthetically, I don't think I like their redesign.
The original design was basically cute, and I can understand wanting to move away from that, but the remaquel's Sectoids are monster-y and not very interesting. I might like it more if there was any evidence their design was tied into behavior or abilities -they crawl around on all fours a lot, but they don't get any ability to duck under cars or climb especially skillfully with their clawed hands or anything. They're vaguely animalistic because... reasons, probably mostly because the developers are starting from the idea that they need to look like Bad Guys.
Their weird "sort-of-a-mouth" thing, strangely, actually makes them less of an intimidating cipher -they can't bare fangs, but you can tell they're trying to bare fangs and intimidate XCOM. It 'humanizes' them, makes them seem less alien and bizarre.
I do like their sound effects, at least.
Thin Men
Aim: 65/65/65/75
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10 (+10 from Light Plasma Rifle)
Defense: 0
HP: 3/3/4/6
Mobility: 15 (9.23/18.46)
Will: 15
Damage: 3/3/5/5 (Light Plasma Rifle: lower difficulties impose a damage penalty)
Can Suppress, Leap, and Spit Poison. Poison Spit creates a cloud that lasts 3 turns (3-5 in Enemy Within) inflicting Poisoning, which does 1 damage a turn and lowers Aim by -25 and Mobility by -3. When killed, releases a Poison cloud, and is itself immune to Poison.
Another basic enemy of the game. On the lower two difficulties they're barely better than Sectoids, having identical HP, damage, and Defense, and their other parameters aren't much better. In fact, Sectoids' unlimited ammunition makes them more threatening with Suppression and in general gives them an edge in cases where an individual goes ignored by the player for several turns. Since Thin Men tend to dominate Council missions, Council missions become cakewalks in the late game, good for training rookies, which is just weird for your spec ops missions. Shouldn't Council Request missions be harder than usual? In all honesty the only reason I'd argue Thin Men are a clear improvement over Sectoids is because Poison Spit skips Accuracy checks, is area of effect, and imposes noticeable stat penalties, all while doing at least the damage of a Plasma Pistol shot if allowed to play out the full turn count. It's very important to kill Thin Men ASAP early in a run.
On the highest two difficulties Thin Men are more clearly a step up from Sectoids, gaining a noticeable damage and HP advantage. On the highest difficulty, in particular, Thin Men have the distinction of being able to survive a single Alien Grenade, where even a Mind Merged Sectoid is one-shotted by the same. As such, Thin Men are never quite as trashy as Sectoids, on the highest difficulty, in the sense of being equally useless/unthreatening, as if nothing else Thin Men can't be instagibbed en mass by single Alien Grenades. In Enemy Within, their Impossible difficulty HP also provides a fairly clear benefit to the Heavy's Grenade specialty skill providing an extra point of damage -Heavies with that Skill can one-shot Thin Men with Alien Grenades, where your other troops can't. Nice.
The AI isn't good at maximizing the potential of Leap, but it's still worth commentary that they have it. Just taking the high ground -which the AI prefers to do if it can- gives them an instant +20 Aim, making their mediocre stats better than they first seem.
Aesthetically, I'm of mixed feelings about Thin Men. They're a callback to a dropped design from the original XCOM, and also a callback to Snakemen, but their design is blatantly an infiltrator design, and indeed the fluff characterizes them as infiltrator units, yet in gameplay terms they're just a weak early-game enemy with a couple of fairly random gimmicks. It's not like Terror Mission civilians can turn out to be surprise Thin Men or anything of the sort. What's the point of having a Totally An Infiltrator unit if it doesn't... you know... infiltrate?
This gets even weirder once Enemy Within comes along and has you fight actual human units. They could've easily had EXALT units have a random chance of getting Thin Men traits. It would've been a nice little touch and made EXALT missions a little less same-y.
Missed opportunity.
Floaters
Aim: 50/50/60/60
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10 (+10 from Light Plasma Rifle)
Defense: 0
HP: 4/4/4/6
Mobility: 12 (7.5/15)
Will: 10
Damage: 5 (Light Plasma Rifle)
Flies and has the "Launch" special, allowing it to teleport to arbitrary locations. (The location must be visible to allies, at least in Multiplayer) Launch is blocked by ceilings, both at the destination and if the user is under one. Is always considered to be in Partial Cover unless in natural Cover and also being flanked, or in Full Cover.
Another early game trash enemy. On lower difficulties they at least have a consistent damage increase and an HP advantage, and their flight ability helps compensate for their bad Aim (+20 for height advantage puts them ahead of Sectoids and less consistently Thin Men when flying) while making them impossible to flank to take away their Cover, but on the higher two difficulties they're noticeably less threatening than Thin Men, with no particular advantage to set them apart. The mobility advantage provided by Flight is largely matched by Leap, and Aliens that use Cover are good about consistently using Cover, so the auto-Cover provided by flight isn't super-meaningful. It's not as if Floaters will aggressively attempt to get a flank, either. It's basically just an annoying denial of the ability to flank them, yourself.
In theory I appreciate how they hit Frag Grenade/Alien Grenade benchmarks on their health (Including that Impossible Difficulty's 6 HP is what Heavies specialized in Grenades land with Alien Grenades), but in practice that's sketchy because you can't hit them with Grenades if they're flying, and the only time it makes sense for them to land is when they have access to Full Cover. Admittedly, the AI isn't nearly as consistent about putting them into the air as I'd like, but still.
Aesthetically, I loathe Floaters. We've gone from some demonic/cultist-looking humanoid that is really creepy when you get a good look at them to a (remaquel) Muton whose legs have gone missing to clear out weight for the integrated jetpack. It reads like an attempt to push the cybernetic body horror angle, and if that is the intent I think it falls flat by comparison.
In the original, Floaters have this aspect of "Oh man, they fly! Sign me up for whatever they've got!" *read UFOpaedia entry* "Wait, that's the cost? Oh god no, never mind."
Contrast with the remaquel, where it's obvious up-front that there's a huge cost involved. You're not going to have that experience of longing for what they have and then being repulsed by the fact that you ever wanted it. Missed opportunity.
I also dislike the redesign because Floaters are A: completely inappropriately named now (They're not floating, they're flying via rocket jetpack) and B: remaquel Floaters are obviously a product of military "enhancement", which is honestly less grotesque/disturbing than the original Floaters, whom appear to have scooped out their own guts for the everyday civilian utility of ignoring gravity.
It's also just really hard to accept that remaquel Floaters aren't dead. The original Floaters replaced much of their body mass, with this being very obvious visually. It's intuitive that they could fit a life support system of some kind in with their anti-grav device. Remaquel Floaters are just missing like half their body and somehow not dead. Huh?
Outsider
Aim: 70/70/80/90
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10 (+10 from Light Plasma Rifle)
Defense: 0/0/10/10
HP: 3/3/5/5
Mobility: 12/12/12/17 (7.5/15, except on Impossible, where it's instead 10.46/20.92)
Will: 20
Damage: 5 (Light Plasma Rifle)
Can Suppress. They have no other special properties from a tactical perspective. Strategically speaking, they leave no corpse when killed.
On lower difficulties, Outsiders aren't very interesting, being basically bad Thin Men the plot mandates you capture, rather than kill, if you want to progress through the game. Whoo.
On the highest difficulty they're insanely mobile and have nearly perfect Aim against any target out of Cover and/or lacking Defense, making them incredibly prone to picking off rookies or weakened soldiers you thought were safe from Alien fire. I like that dynamic, and it grates on me that they're completely phased out so early in the game, as no other enemy really pulls off an equivalent role, not even in Enemy Within.
Their HP values are kind of obnoxious, being exactly on the Grenade thresholds. This is less obnoxious on the higher two difficulties, amusingly, where it's feasible to lob a Frag Grenade and then try to capture one, but on the lower difficulties it's irritating that trying to weaken them with a Grenade isn't an option, given that you need to capture them to advance through the game. It's a dubious bit of design that advancing the plot/game in this way is easier because of difficulty modifiers on the higher difficulties.
I actually quite like the Outsider's aesthetic! It's a major disappointment that the game phases them out after you've fought just one or two, in practice. They're yet another humanoid enemy, but they're some kind of crystal energy being whose rest state is a floating crystal so they still manage to seem alien. It helps that they're a new alien design and so I don't have any reason to say "THIS LACKS THE THING THAT MADE THE ORIGINAL DESIGN COOL", but honestly if all the remaquel's designs were this interesting I'd probably complain less.
I do kind of wish their "face" was less face-like. It's kind of distracting and weird. That, and it seems bizarre that the crystal is so poorly protected in their humanoid form, but that's part of a general trend I'll be getting to later.
Chryssalid
Aim: 0 (Melee skips accuracy rolls)
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10 (+20% from Claws)
Defense: 10
HP: 8
Mobility: 20 (12.31/24.62)
Will: 120
Damage: 8/8/10/10 (Claws)
Melee attack poisons and can perform the "implant" action when landing a lethal hit, and Chryssalids can Leap, are immune to Poison, cannot be stunned/captured alive, and are Hardened.
Chryssalids suffer enormously from the remaquel's combat engine, relative to the original game's version of them.
Even after accounting for engine differences crippling them, they've also just been nerfed in general, most notably being surprisingly fragile. Tough for how early they can show up, but fragile compared to late-game standards, where classic Cryssalids were tough in general. Classic Chryssalids had 96 HP, where peak HP was 143, while in the remaquel you're talking 8 HP vs a peak of 30 -that puts old Chryssalids at more than 50% of peak HP, where new Chryssalids are less than a third of peak HP. Then Enemy Within gives Sectopods a trait that effectively doubles their HP! So they're also just a lot easier to gun down than they were in the original game, relative to the other threats.
Even though remaquel Chryssalids have several unusual features, they are in practice very boring enemies, and arguably are less threatening than Sectoids even before you do things like use Archangel Armor to render them 100% irrelevant. I'm particularly disappointed that they were given the nonsensical Leap feature but not any kind of leap attack to strike at flying units -one of the more flawed aspects of the original Chryssalid design was that they were utterly terrifying unless you could fly, in which case they were completely helpless, and alleviating that would've been nice. Nope, remaquel Chryssalids are pathetic, and even their tendency to zombify civilians doesn't make them that threatening. (Arguably it's to the player's advantage -Zombies are worth experience, and the potential for Panic increases in countries that lose too many civilians isn't really a big problem for the player)
They're just too easily killed, and have too much difficulty getting in damage, particularly since their Mobility is misleading -they're the fastest unit in the game by a fair margin, but since a given action is either a move or an attack, they can only use half their theoretical movement speed in any turn they want to attack. If they charge anything greater than 50% of their total movement, they end up stopping right up next to a soldier, staring blankly at their intended victim. It's farcical, and it even makes it easier to kill them, because outside of Sniper Rifles all your weapons have higher Aim the closer the target is, maximizing your odds of hitting them with your shots.
I get that the original Chryssalids were arguably too dangerous, but I really feel like the remaquel took things way too far in the other direction. I'm also baffled as to why they inflict Poison in melee. How is that supposed to work, in-universe?
Aesthetically, I get why Chryssalids were radically redesigned, as the original design has enough shades of the Xenomorph design it was probably a good idea to move away from that and avoid any risk of being sued or whatever, particularly given Chryssalids and Xenomorphs both implant their babies into humans to then be lethally born from their still-living flesh, but this bizarre centaur-bug-thing is terrible. Pretty much every feature on it is inexplicable and nonsensical, and frankly the idea of a Leaping centaurian thing is nuts all by itself. I'm also not a fan of the fact that they now Poison things, somehow using their claws to do so, never mind all the effort put into animating them drooling -yet their claws show no evidence of being envenomed.
sigh.
I guess the poison was meant to be an allusion to the instant-zombie-bite in the original game, only less heinous to fight, but it's just a very random feature. In general their visual design just doesn't really have anything to do with their gameplay mechanics.
A point of note: the original Chryssalid's humanoid design provided the foundation for an extremely well-done animation of a zombie converting into a Chryssalid. The new design raises questions of how the Chryssalid is hidden inside the zombie at all. This does not raise my opinion of the redesign.
Zombie
Aim: 0
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10
Defense: 0
HP: 10/10/10/14
Mobility: 8 (4.92/11.84)
Will: 120
Damage: 8/8/10/12 (Punch)
If left alive for 3 turns, will hatch into a Chryssalid. Cannot be stunned/captured alive. Not Hardened.
Nothing to really comment on about zombies. It's a zombie. I find it pretty weird that they're vastly tougher and harder hitting than Chryssalids, though admittedly they're less than half the Speed of Chryssalids so they're not liable to get that close anyway. Still, why is a civilian who is unarmed, unarmored, and already seriously injured more capable of punching holes in people than the alien bioweapon with visible claws and more capable of shrugging off damage than the genetically engineered monster?
Aesthetically speaking, they're zombies. Whatever. Their design(s) doesn't particularly leap out at me, beyond that it's irritating to me that they have glowing red eyes and puzzling that at least one design is abruptly shoeless. Huh?
Muton
Aim: 70/70/80/80
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10
Defense: 10
HP: 8/8/10/10
Mobility: 12 (7.5/15. Blood Call raises this to 9.85/19.70)
Will: 10
Damage: 5 (Light Plasma Rifle), 7 (Plasma Rifle)
Can Suppress, has twice as much ammo as usual, can throw a single Alien Grenade, Blood Call (Friendly nearby Mutons/Berserkers/Muton Elites gain +10 Aim, +10 Will, and +4 Mobility for 2 turns. Cooldown 4), and has Intimidate. (When injured, provokes a Will test in its attacker: failing results in them panicking, randomly choosing to hunker down, shoot a random target nearby [including potentially the Intimidating Muton] without regard for friendliness, or move to a different position)
Your bread and butter Alien in the mid-game. They're tough, once they shift to Plasma Rifles they're harder hitting than any of the early game aliens, and they can chuck Alien Grenades, which has all kinds of implications. Blood Call is sort of pointless in practice -Mutons rarely use it of their own volition and the game design tends to mean they only have a couple of allies to benefit from it while its benefits aren't significant enough to be worth spending a turn on to boost just two allies- but I like it in theory, in terms of keeping Mutons relevant even into the endgame by shifting them to a supporting role for Berserkers and Muton Elites. Intimidate is just weird, and doesn't serve a clear purpose beyond punishing using low-Will soldiers, which seems redundant with Psi Aliens punishing the player for using low-WIll soldiers. Especially since if the shot killed the Muton, Intimidate doesn't trigger, and Grenades and Reaction Fire don't trigger it either. Since, as I covered in the Psi post, even Intimidate-induced Panic almost never happens, it seems a pretty pointless addition. Usually by the time Mutons start showing up your troops will largely have too much Will to have any chance of Panicking. The Slingshot DLC makes it a little more relevant, but the odds of Panicking are always quite low.
Still. The only complaint I have particularly about Mutons is how unfaithful to the original game design they are -Mutons in the original are obnoxiously durable and carry heavy weaponry without particular effort, in exchange for being dumb as bricks. Mutons in the remaquel are susceptible to Psi effects from their poor Will, but so is basically everything that isn't immune by virtue of being a robot (Robots still have garbage Will, incidentally) or a Psionic unit with a good Will score of its own (Chryssalids and Zombies are the only exceptions on Alien troops, having actually passable Will scores), so Mutons aren't actually unusually susceptible to Psi, and their durability, though it's more than twice a Sectoid's, is low compared to all the actual big nasties of the game and, more importantly, is low compared to decently leveled xcommies with non-crap armor.
It's utterly baffling that genetically engineered alien supersoldiers kitted out in powered armor are about as tough as a decently experienced human in one of the fairly basic armors, and is a huge reduction, relatively speaking, compared to the original game's Mutons, which were pretty much impossible to kill with conventional munitions and were prone to surviving individual Heavy Plasma shots in a game where most things died in one hit from most weapons.
In fact, they had more than twice the maximum possible human soldier HP in classic XCOM. Why are the remaquel's Mutons so pathetic? It's especially jarring since the remaquel wants us to fear the Aliens. What's so scary about such a pathetic unit?
I don't really have strong feelings on the Muton redesign. I don't particularly like it, but the old design was very silly. I liked it, but it was silly. I would've been unhappy with a direct translation, I think, unless the remaquel had stayed true to the comic book aesthetic of the original in a general sense. Ultimately the only thing I particularly dislike is the gas mask. It has no gameplay impact (it's not like Mutons are immune to Poison, even though all Poison effects in the game are a gas that sealed suits protect against), and it's kind of baffling that the Alien supersoldier grunt is the only Alien that can't cope with breathing Earth's atmosphere unassisted. On the other hand, I can pretend to myself that it's actually a delivery system for alien supersoldier drugs, as the game itself doesn't bother to address the topic at all and it's equally plausible. So... whatever. It's okay, basically. Not great, but not terrible.
... well, except for the general trend in the remaquel of almost nobody bothering to protect their head.
Sectoid Commander
Aim: 85/85/95/95
Crit chance: 0/0/10/10
Defense: 20
HP: 10/10/14/14
Mobility: 12 (7.5/15)
Will: 90/90/115/125
Damage: 3 (Plasma Pistol)
Carries one Alien Grenade, can use Mind Fray, Mind Control, use Greater Mind Merge (as per Mind Merge, but works on multiple Sectoids/Mechtoids at once), and Psi Panic. (Attempts to panic the target) One of the aliens immune to Enemy Within's Flashbang Grenade.
I'm really not a fan of the fact that the remaquel does away with Alien ranks and instead creates entirely different unit types when it bothers to have rank representation at all. The Sectoid Commander is particularly irksome -in the original game the leadership units were important to interrogate if you wanted to get any useful information about the enemy's larger plan. They knew more, as appropriate to being placed higher in the chain of command.
In the remaquel we instead need to kill an Outsider and analyze it's magical crystal to somehow find the Alien Base, and convert said magical crystal into a "skeleton key" so we can assault the Alien Base. (Because we can't just blow our way into the Alien Base. That would be rude, after all)
Outsiders? Can't be interrogated, what they know doesn't matter, and once you've hit the Alien Base they're replaced by Sectoid Commanders... who can be interrogated, but still don't know anything of importance.
Since the game has no in-battle representation for leadership ability, the closest Sectoid Commanders get to seeming leader-like is their use of Mass Mind Merge, which has the problem that it's tied into their larger facility with psionic powers. In practice Sectoid Commanders are just... Psi Aliens.
... Psi Aliens that are carrying an Alien Grenade somewhere on their body, don't think too hard about where given that they're naked and have no orifices to store it in. No, we don't get to see an Alien Grenade on their model until they chuck it. That would make entirely too much sense to be allowed.
In raw gameplay terms, they're primarily threatening through their superior psychic powers... and their access to an Alien Grenade... given that they're still using a Plasma Pistol like regular Sectoids and so should basically never actually shoot at XCOM. They're also tougher than Mutons, because everyone knows a skeletally thin, naked humanoid is 25% harder to blow to smithereens than a supersoldier gorilla in powered armor.
sigh
Aesthetically speaking, I hate Sectoid Commanders with a burning passion. They're Sectoids with large, red and vein-y heads, and are overall larger than regular Sectoids. That's it. Why are they more than three times the durability of a Sectoid? Because shut up. Why are they 25% (40% on the higher two difficulties!) more durable than a Muton? Because shut up. Where's their marks of leadership? Their nice hat, or epaulets, or medals, or holographic banner? Why are they not in armor of any kind? Why on earth does a Sectoid developing competency in psychic powers cause obvious distortions and discoloration of their braincase, while humans with psychic powers just get a neat purple glow? I'm willing to overlook the evil glowing red eyes and assume that it's their psychic powers in action, same as the purple glow XCOM guys will do, but otherwise... what?
The original game had the excuse that the Aliens didn't use different graphics for different ranks in the first place. The player was left to fill in the gaps with their imagination, and anyway you were actually supposed to use the Mind Probe to check a given Alien's rank, you couldn't identify it at a glance, not even by hovering over them with the mouse. They were supposed to be undifferentiated, impossible to tell a leader from an engineer from a soldier. The remaquel makes an entire separate model for the Sectoid Commander, and it's a minor adjustment to the regular Sectoid model (Honestly, the biggest difference is in size: Commanders are something like twice as large), no thought put into explaining the stat advantages or considering the implications of... anything to do with their design.
Why would you do this?
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Next time, we cover still more Aliens.
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