XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Julian the Protype Sectopod

HP: 60/80/90/100
Armor: 4/6/6/7
Defense: 10/10/12/14
Dodge: 0
Aim: 50/55/60/65
Mobility: 14/16/16/16 (9/18 on Rookie, 10/21 on all other difficulties)
Damage: 3-4 (+1)
Shred: 1
Crit Chance: 0
Will: 50
Tech: 125

Mechanical Chassis
This unit is a robot, rendering it immune to Poison, Fire, and Chryssalid Poison as well as most psionic or mental effects (Including that it will never Panic or be rendered Unconscious), but susceptible to anti-robot effects and impossible to heal with Medikits.

Unlike other hackable units, Julian's Sectopod hack options are Stunning him or taking control of all the currently-present Derelict Mecs, instead of being able to Stun or take control of Julian's Sectopod itself. Makes sense, given he's the boss of Lost Towers, and you win by killing him.

If you're going to go for the control one, you should probably wait until turn 4, to maximize the Derelict Mecs you manage to steal. Do note that while Shen's Hack score is bonkers, she's not remotely guaranteed to succeed at it: Julian's Tech score is tuned so that if you have Shen try to hack him, Stunning him is virtually guaranteed to work, while stealing his Derelict Mecs is basically a coin flip. Stunning Julian is the safer route.

Anyway, it's of course also a good idea to use Shen's Combat Protocol and Capacitor Discharge on Julian, as they'll each tear off 10~ HP without worrying about Julian's Armor. That'll help quite a bit with taking him out quickly, not to mention be more reliable than having Shen take a shot.

Hardened
Does not use Cover, but is never considered to be in the open.

Like with Lost Towers' prior enemies, this serves to give a strong first impression of SPARK-001, since you don't have to deal with Cover interfering with its Aim.

Slightly less so given Julian's innate Defense, but still.

Overclocked
Has three action points.

Julian's in a Sectopod, this isn't surprising.

Bullet Swarm
Attacking does not end the turn, and costs only one action point.

Julian's attack's +1 chance is only 25%, so he's less lethal on average than his base numbers suggest. Still very lethal for how early you're meant to be fighting him, so don't be careless.

Like regular Sectopods, Julian's AI is shackled so he's not supposed to attack twice in a row. He's actually a lot more consistent in his behavior than a regular Sectopod, being extremely insistent on shoot->move->shoot -in part because he lacks Lightning Field and Wrath Cannon, and so can't do anything except moving and shooting. But my main point is I've never seen him do the move->shoot->move chain regular Sectopods sometimes do.

The config files also indicate he's supposed to be strictly forbidden from firing on a target twice in  given turn, but I've had him do exactly that so don't count on eg Parry to be invincibility.

Massive
Is a 2x2 tile unit.

This is less important than you might expect, as the third map is designed to be fairly open.

As with regular Sectopods, if you hit Julian with a Frost Bomb, it'll be completely useless. The game will claim that you cost Julian one of his action points, but he's perfectly able to shoot-move-shoot. Don't bother bringing the Frost Bomb; it's a waste of a precious equipment slot. (It's not like it's amazing on one of the prior Lost Towers maps) It may also be risking losing the Frost Bomb: I've never tested what happens if a soldier dies on one of the first two maps. I wouldn't be at all surprised if their equipment is lost.

Wall Smash
Can freely walk through destructible terrain, destroying it.

The design of the battlefield makes it so Julian having this isn't strongly relevant. A lot of the Cover on the map isn't destructible at all, or can't be walked into by Julian himself due to it being on high ground he can't reach.

He actually starts out by smashing his way out of a building, but gameplay-wise its relevance is surprisingly low.

High Stance
Can switch freely (At no action point cost and with no cooldown) between Low Stance and High Stance: Low Stance is normal behavior. High Stance raises the Sectopod's firing position 3 Z-levels for purposes of calculating whether it gets height advantage or not and also causes its 'pass through and destroy terrain' effect to extend upward appropriately. (Your own troops still use the location of its feet to calculate height advantage, even though their firing animations target its 'head')

Like regular Sectopods, Julian always opens his first proper turn by going into High Stance, and as far as I'm aware he'll never leave it afterward: it's not like he has Wrath Cannon to give a reason to leave it.

Naturally, this means Julian's poor Aim is also misleading, and you should largely treat his Aim as 85 at base, making him the most accurate threat in Lost Towers by a fair margin. There is high ground on the map, and you should certainly have SPARK-001 take to it to boost its own accuracy and discourage Julian from shooting at SPARK-001, but it tends to be impractical to have other soldiers take to the high ground, given the time pressure and all.


Julian is the boss of Lost Towers, showing up only on the third and final map. He starts the map inactive, and too far away for your team to reach, but automatically activates on the first enemy turn and advances on your squad as his activation movement: your initial position has it possible to walk the squad up the ramp and Overwatch, with SPARK-001 even able to hop up to a tower to have high ground, thus letting you get some 'free' damage to start.

Note that this means that you don't get the start-of-second-map situation of being able to fix people up before starting the fighting. Even if you want Shen healing, she should move and heal, not heal twice.

Anyway, Julian of course has bonkers HP, and Armor comparable to a Gatekeeper. He's arguably the single most durable enemy in the game, even with Chosen and Alien Rulers about as competition. The Armor point means you really shouldn't be wasting your precious explosives on prior floors if you can avoid it: SPARK-001's Rocket Launcher in particular is very much best saved for tossing out with an initial Overdrive against Julian for its reliable 2 Shred.

SPARK-001's Autocannon does Shred on its own, of course, but it's only 1 Shred per shot: even if you catch Julian with Overwatch, then Overdrive and shoot him twice plus fire a Rocket, he'll still have 1 Armor on Regular or Commander difficulty, and 2 Armor on Legendary! And that's assuming all your shots hit, which is unlikely. So you really want some grenades on hand to finish the Shred -or a Shred-capable other soldier- instead of relying exclusively on SPARK-001, as the sooner the Armor is gone, the better for tearing through Julian's ludicrous HP in a timely manner.

Seriously, 6 Armor is enough that the only reason Conventional weapons do damage to Julian to start is the pity damage mechanic. You need his Armor wiped fast.

There's actually a pair of generators on the map you can potentially blow up when Julian is nearby to get in some Shred, but they're tough enough you'll need to shoot them twice, making it a bit of a poor investment of soldier effort if you don't trigger them more incidentally. (eg catching Julian and a generator with grenades) You also can't get started on it until at least turn 3, since Julian's initial move doesn't put him in reach of either generator. This is especially undesirable as...

... starting from the second enemy turn, Derelict Mecs will start spawning into the map (As with prior Derelict Mec spawns, as far as I'm aware this goes on forever), 2 or 3 at a time from all around the map's edges. (Hilariously, this is just them jumping really high, visually: they don't seem to be using rocket boots) The possible locations to spawn from is technically fixed, but the variety is sufficiently widely-placed that there's really no one safe place to hide to avoid being flanked. Its only thanks to their tendency to prioritize self-destructing that you're not basically guaranteed to be dealing with flanking shots, and it's still a concern, especially since there's plenty of high ground for them to potentially take advantage of -including that some of their spawn points automatically place them on high ground, potentially letting them prime their self-destruct and immediately take a shot from high ground.

You should avoid wasting effort on the Derelict Mecs if you can. They can absorb a distressing amount of firepower if you've done the expected thing and shown up with Conventional gear, and while Julian is very durable it's actually entirely possible to kill him before any Derelict Mecs get a chance to detonate on your squad, if the RNG isn't too hostile to you. Killing Julian instantly ends the mission, no need to escape the Derelict Mecs or mop them up or anything, so it's just plain better to heavily prioritize Julian. Go ahead and catch the Derelict Mecs with area-of-effect if they happen to get near Julian, but generally a soldier turn not spent pushing Julian closer to death is a mistake.

Also note that there's actually an inactive Derelict Mec toward the back of the map to start, which will only activate if you get close enough to see it. It's thus best to avoid advancing too aggressively if you can avoid it, so you have fewer Derelict Mecs complicating things.

On the plus side, though Julian's death animation still looks violently explosive, he doesn't actually do damage on death. As such, it's perfectly fine to have a Templar or Ranger finish Julian with their melee attack, and to a lesser extent makes it more okay to approach for close for the Aim bonus on ranged weaponry. Knowing that can make things a little easier.

Overall, while Julian can be very intimidating and can absolutely get people killed if you're not on the ball, he's actually a fairly easy boss fight overall. Surprisingly, if you're playing War of the Chosen Julian nonetheless gives more Ability Points for your general pool than any other single source, with a whopping +15 Ability Points. I don't really consider that a reason to switch away from Integrated DLC... though I suppose it's a surprise benefit to using this mod that allows Lost Towers to spawn while still having Alien Rulers start out tied to Avatar Project Facilities.

Anyway, if you're really concerned, you can actually wait until you have some magnetic weapons online before hitting Lost Towers, as it never actually times out or upgrades enemies or anything. That does a lot to make Lost Towers easier, as the numbers on enemies are tightly-tuned: for example, a Conventional Shotgun fired on a Commander Derelict Mec can kill the Derelict Mec in one shot, but needs to get the 1-in-3 chance of max damage, whereas a Shard Gun will always one-hit-kill the Derelict Mec. (And even on Legendary, it'll still kill 2/3rds of the time instead of never) Even Julian himself can be made much easier this way.

It partially negates the part where one of the benefits of doing Lost Towers is getting a SPARK online early, but still, it's an option, especially if you're intimidated by Legendary difficulty's numbers but still want to do the mission on Legendary.

Speaking of, Legendary difficulty doesn't make any tweaks to this third map. Just stat tweaks to the enemies on it. Admittedly, those do plenty to make the map harder...

Also, note that losing SPARK-001 is still a game over at this step. Among other points, you should keep in mind that keeping SPARK-001 on high ground can lead to a Derelict Mec exploding on it and getting fall damage thrown in. Fortunately you shouldn't have to worry about that scenario until turn 3, but you shouldn't forget about it.

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Aesthetically, the Prototype Sectopod is literally a Sectopod with a white paintjob and grime accumulated from years of lack of care, consistent with the Prototype Sectopod in the code you were at some point intended to encounter at the Forge. I'm not entirely sure how to take this, in part due to the previously-covered lack of clarity of how Sectopods are supposed to fit into the setting.

I don't like the final result, definitely, as it makes it seem like ADVENT started out with a PR-friendly white color scheme and then switched to an Evil Color Scheme later, which is pretty eyebrow-raising a scenario, but I'm uncertain what the devs were thinking.

For one thing, I'm not actually 100% sure the devs knew -know?- that the Forge's Sectopod encounter is with a regular Sectopod. I wouldn't be surprised if Shen's Last Gift was developed with the team under the impression the released game had players encountering the white-painted Prototype Sectopod: in that scenario, Julian's Prototype Sectopod being painted white would be a natural bit of consistency, dictated by decisions made earlier.

For another, I strongly suspect Shen's Last Gift and Alien Hunters were both rushed. It wouldn't at all surprise me if Julian ended up with this graphic because they already had a white color scheme drawn up, and making it grimy was much easier than having to draw up a new color scheme. Or maybe they struggled to rust up the regular Sectopod color scheme in a way that was readily distinguishable from the regular graphic. Or the DLC being rushed caused the team to forget that they'd disabled the white-painted Forge encounter. Or any number of scenarios in which the devs would've made a different decision if they weren't rushing the production.

In any event, I honestly think this Sectopod should've had a darker color scheme... or more accurately, that its color scheme should've contrasted with the map's better. Julian visually blends in disturbingly well, to the point that I've actually made errors from misunderstanding Julian's position, in spite of the game being turn-based.

Narratively, the Prototype Sectopod is an even more dramatic example of what I laid out with the Derelict Mec: that if XCOM 2 is quietly retconning out Ethereals having robotics when they found Earth, it actually makes a lot of sense that Lost Towers -a facility dedicated to developing and constructing robotics technology- would include at least one Sectopod prototype, whereas if that's not the setup the whole thing is pretty difficult to believe. In the retcon scenario, Lost Towers is very likely one of the first facilities dedicated to robot R&D, and so it wouldn't be at all surprising for the biggest, meanest ADVENT robot to have been under development here.

The fact that it's specifically on the roof is more consistently problematic, as Lost Towers' roof has no cargo elevators (Or whatever) and XCOM 2 never depicts anything that could believably land on Lost Towers' roof and carry a Sectopod, nor does it depict anything that could pick up a Sectopod without landing. This is one of the smaller reasons why I suspect Shen's Last Gift got rushed: this is the kind of oversight base XCOM 2 rarely makes. (The biggest reason I suspect the DLC was rushed is honestly how janky the SPARK level-up lineup is: it's much less interesting and balanced than literally any other class, including the Resistance classes from War of the Chosen -which was blatantly rushed)

Anyway, moving on from the shell you're blowing up, let's talk about the mind inside AKA...

...Julian.

Julian's backstory is weird and one of XCOM 2's stranger decisions, even in the context of the possible no-Ethereal-robots-retcon I've laid out. What we're told is that papa Shen developed a chess-playing AI, then had plans to upgrade it into an AI for managing the X-COM base (It's not clear whether this plan ever came to pass or not), and then when the aliens attacked the X-COM base they found the SPARK prototype and Julian and made off with both, building the Lost Towers (Well, tower singular as far as we see...) and dumping Julian there to study him alongside the SPARK, with the general implication being that the purpose of this complex was to replicate the SPARK and reverse-engineer Julian, too.

In the first place it's pretty eyebrow-raising to indicate that papa Shen built a fully-functional human-intelligence sort of AI. For one thing, the dialogue really makes it sound like papa Shen is supposed to have done this with no alien technology to explain it. The Firaxis XCOM games do make it clear Earth's own technology is supposed to be ahead of real Earth's (The holographic map of Earth, for example), but that doesn't really explain this whole setup: if 'strong' AI was just all-around on the cusp of development, papa Shen's construction of Julian shouldn't be that notable. If Julian is supposed to be hugely notable, why is he a fairly casual, incidental project of papa Shen's that apparently got made with little or no assistance from other people?

This actually all gets jankier in key ways if you assume the no-robots-retcon isn't the intention, especially if you try to explain Julian as a product of papa Shen taking advantage of alien robotics technology. (In spite of no dialogue hinting at such a possibility) In that scenario, why would the Ethereals be impressed enough by a human first effort at 'strong' AI to coopt it? They'd surely have better AI, not to mention their AI would be vetted so 'goes crazy and betrays us' is a supremely unlikely possibility. The more natural thing for AI-having Ethereals to do would be to purge Julian, or at most stuff him into a metaphorical box and study him if they think there might be something worth studying, but either way it's absurd he'd be in a position to take over the Lost Towers complex successfully, as you'd expect the Ethereals to know better. (Whether from prior bad experiences with AI or from having built-in cultural fears of such a possibility that had led to their Best Practices successfully avoiding such issues for the centuries-or-whatever they've had robots)

Furthermore, there's the meta point that in the no-robots-retcon scenario, the setting is effectively positioning humans as having a Species-Level-Specialization in robotics/AI. While that doesn't realistically make it more tolerable to have papa Shen inventing a 'strong' AI in this way, it makes it more narratively functional, not to mention just emotionally better: I, at least, am more willing to tolerate a certain amount of 'that doesn't really make sense' if it's in service to a broader goal that both does make some kind of sense and is actually interesting. 'Humans are Good As A Species at developing AI/robotics' is certainly a lot more interesting than the usual scifi staples of 'humans are well-rounded' (Because the creators are just using humans as the baseline for designing their alien species and so can't think of anything interesting for them to have over their aliens) or 'humans are good at diplomacy/social stuff/inexplicably likable'. (Which is something, but in non-games is generally an Informed Attribute, and in eg 4x games is generally carefully selected to keep humans the Boring Baseline Species without literally giving humans no mechanical distinctiveness)

So to a certain extent in the no-robots-retcon scenario I'm willing to accept some resulting narrative jank in the process of showing the audience the Ethereals being interested in this Weird Human Idea of robotics/AI.

Anyway, another layer of weird to Julian's backstory is that if the devs do intend for him to have been X-COM's base management AI, the most natural thing to connect that to is the voice in the prior game that told you things like 'excavation complete'... which wasn't Julian's voice actor, and indeed was a voice actress. Admittedly, Julian's status as an artificial intelligence makes gender very much a meaningless concept to apply if you're thinking realistically, but usually when companies end up using a different voice actor (Such as because the original one died) they try to stick to the same gender, even in cases where gender technically isn't a meaningful concept, often even if they don't try that hard to keep the voice sounding the same otherwise.

So if Julian is supposed to have been implemented as the base AI and that's intended to be the voice from the prior game, that's... confusingly-handled.

And if he's not meant to have been that voice, the references to him being intended to be a base management AI are also confusing, in the sense of pointing the player to a particular conclusion not intended to be true.

So either way, that's a bit of a mess.

In general, it's pretty clear the world context of Lost Towers' story was a bit of an afterthought. The focus of Lost Towers' story is on the emotional core of...

... the Shen family.

Which isn't necessarily a terrible thing, but I personally have trouble taking it seriously precisely due to how slipshod the world context is.

If you focus on the emotional/metaphorical story and ignore the XCOM trappings, there's a very straightforward story here: a father has a son and a daughter, the son was expecting to be the favored child who would get the family legacy passed on to him, a will is cracked open and says 'no, pops picked his daughter', son throws a tantrum while daughter is surprised and moved. Audience is intended to be invested in daughter and therefore it's a happy ending. The End.

Which is honestly interesting for meta reasons, consistent with the stuff I talked about in the Avatar post of XCOM 2 being less All Our Players Are Twenty-Something Men, Right? than its predecessor.

But, said emotional core doesn't really fit into the world it's being shoved into.

Like, lady Shen's Avenger dialogue makes it clear that she and her father worked together on the Avenger to get it running, with her father dying sometime during the process of getting it online. (She talks as if he died as a result of working on the Avenger, actually, though we don't get details, just a vague statement about him 'sacrificing the only thing he had left to get this ship off the ground') This whole Touching Reunion With My Dead Dad Where His Ghost Tells Me He Loves Me stuff is pretty strange in that context. Similarly, the part where papa Shen never mentioned to his daughter 'oh, by the way, I built a combat robot and keyed it to your handprint' is really unbelievable from any remotely realistic, in-universe perspective.

But okay, let's gloss over that for a second. That's like two lines of Avenger dialogue: I can buy the devs forgot they had this stuff established and are writing Shen's Last Gift under the assumption of  papa Shen having died when the X-COM base went down. That makes lady Shen's reaction more coherent and makes it more believable that she never got told about the robot -presumably papa Shen developed it in top-secret, and then died before he could get in contact with her- but we're still left with a bunch of other jank like 'why is SPARK-001 in mint condition?' and 'why did Julian happen to only patch through to ROV-R shortly after the Commander was retrieved?' The Lost Towers have been abandoned for so long the robots are rusted hunks of junk, plants have grown over large parts of the building, and major structural elements have collapsed. (The first map actually has two elevator spots, but you only get to use one because the other has fallen apart. Similarly, there was clearly originally two landing pads, but the one the Skyranger doesn't land on has fallen away into the foliage) Julian's dialogue makes it clear he did, in fact, only recently activate the signal, as he comments that he thought the odds of you showing up within less than a year were really low.

So... why did he laze around, stewing, for somewhere over a decade? Yes, Julian has a chunk of dialogue alluding to being trapped in the building, but no explanation is provided for why he'd be trapped, and indeed the backstory is that he escaped containment to take over the facility, and then during the mission he uploads himself into a Sectopod. You'd think Julian would've, at minimum, uploaded himself to one of his pre-built robots and walked out: the narrative is explicitly establishing that this is an option, after all! (That is, one can't posit that XCOM 2 intends for Julian to be, say, tied to a specific chunk of hardware, where he'd have to arrange for said hardware to be physically hauled out of the complex if he wanted to meaningfully leave the facility)

Then there's fairly arbitrary, unexplained plot beats, like...

... the handprint thing.

No, I don't mean the part where lady Shen activates the SPARK with her handprint. That part more or less makes sense in and of itself. I'm talking about the Dark Mirror part, where Julian broadcast the signal to lure lady Shen here, because... he seems to think he needs her handprint to get himself uploaded into the SPARK body? Why?

It's doubly weird precisely because it would've made a lot more narrative sense to say Julian discovered the handprint scanner, decided it was the thing needed to have the SPARK let him in, discovered ADVENT's researchers couldn't do it (Whether back before his spree of murders or after, with a corpse), and desperately guessed lady Shen was the key. (If only because papa Shen is dead, so even if it might be more logical to guess his handprint is key that can't help Julian as a theory) Even better, this would make Julian's outrage at discovering SPARK-001 was never intended to be his body have more bite to it, since the very act he thought would prove his view would be the thing that busted it.

Admittedly it would be harder to get lady Shen to go along with the insane AI's plans, what with it having spent the entire first map trying to kill your forces, but there's several ways to fix that, such as having Julian spend the first half of Lost Towers insisting he's lost control of the facility's robots (eg blaming it on their corroded state) and so the robots are trying to kill you due to base programming. Then Julian could've revealed this was a lie once he hit his outrage point, and have his dialogue indicate the initial attacks were to herd you to the SPARK, but now he's seriously trying to kill you -that seems to be the general intention of the story as-is, honestly.

There's also a lower-key issue, where the entire situation of Julian being a hostile bad guy is... pretty confusing. It's consistent with the emotional core element, but if you ignore the emotional core and focus on the mechanical reality it's pretty confusing that Julian would approach things this way, and that lady Shen would never try to initiate real diplomacy. She treats ROV-R like a person or at least a beloved pet, so it's not like she's just biased to thinking of faceless machines as 'just things' or something.

Like, yes, Julian is bitter and angry and stir-crazy from having had no one to interact with for over a decade, but for one thing that comes back to the issue of 'why did he just sit around doing nothing for so long'? and for another... like, one of the things that seems to have Julian bitter is that he seems to have a combination of wanting to believe he was papa Shen's favored child while emotionally recognizing he wasn't, and that of course fits to the story's emotional core but with the facts we're given it's pretty confusing that Julian the AI would have this belief. If he was in the X-COM base, and lady Shen was not, and papa Shen only really got Julian into a fairly advanced state sometime after bringing Julian into the X-COM base (Which is what everybody's dialogue seems to indicate), you'd think if anything Julian wouldn't even know lady Shen existed, or would genuinely believe on every level he was the favorite because it's not like he ever saw the two together whereas papa Shen would've logically spent a lot of time interacting with Julian while working on him.

So... honestly, I'd really expect the emotional core of the story here, given the facts, to be less 'son raging that the daughter is designated family heir' and more 'siblings who discover the other exists only after their parents are dead', with one of the more probable results being 'embrace one another and bond over how much they miss their parents'.

So like I said, the net result is I have trouble finding what we got compelling, as the emotional core and the mechanical reality are simply too removed from each other, and indeed too at odds with each other.

It's too bad, because if I pretend those problems don't exist, the execution is surprisingly solid given this was the team's first venture into trying to do a more emotionally-driven story. If somebody had told me, back when Enemy Within was still relatively new, that this team would go on to make an actually kind-of-competent emotionally-focused narrative in an XCOM 2 DLC, I wouldn't have believed them.

Ah well.

It is worth noting that it's distinctly possible the devs did notice a lot of this jank. I've mentioned before that there's a decent amount of evidence suggesting there were intended to be four Resistance factions, with the fourth one very likely intended to be a robot faction led by Julian. That would be a pretty weird thing to do if they stuck to Crazy Jealous Killer AI Julian Stewing For Years Doing Nothing, but would make a lot more sense if it was retconning Julian into having spent his time productively, plotting revenge on ADVENT and using his robots to build more robots and so on, and being a Resistance faction would naturally demand a relatively friendly disposition, at minimum to the point of being willing to cooperate against ADVENT. I can easily imagine that, if War of the Chosen hadn't been so severely rushed, we might've actually gotten lady Shen and Julian making nice with each other and so on.

Anyway, two other relatively minor-but-interesting notes: firstly, Julian is internally labeled as 'Markov'. While the Julian name is probably a reference to Julian Gollop, much like the Gollop Chamber was a reference to the Gollop brothers, Markov is a bit more opaque; possibly it's a reference to Markov Chains? Or maybe it's a pop culture reference I'm not familiar with. It's difficult to be sure, and I'm curious what the original name was about.

The other interesting bit is that Julian actually refers to the Ethereals as 'ADVENT's false gods' at one point in dialogue. I suspect the team was thinking more metaphorically at the time, but this is a clear precursor to War of the Chosen going on to use this 'Ethereals presenting themselves as gods' framework more broadly. It ends up with that line coming across rather differently in War of the Chosen runs: in the base game, it's consistent with Julian's general trend of dismissiveness, cynicism, and snark, but in War of the Chosen it comes across much more... factual. It's probably not at all intentional, but it helps maintain a degree of consistency on how the Ethereals present themselves to the world, which is cool.

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Like the prior two maps, the final map of Lost Towers has its own unique music. It plays continuously from start to finish, no need to actually spot any enemies or trip a particular event flag.

Unlike the prior two tracks, I'm actually not a huge fan of this one. It's not bad, but I don't feel like it's an active shame how little cause there is to hear it in-game. Which is a bit weird, given it's clearly Julian's Boss Music, and usually boss music is a high point in games.

In any event, it too is a tune that doesn't have different versions based on whose turn is underway, just like the previous Lost Towers-exclusive combat tunes.

On a different note...

... this is a menu screen possibility you can only get if your most recently loaded run has Lost Towers activated. Which is frustrating, because this is a really great menu screen visual (You can tell the devs know this, too, as it's unique and doesn't immediately put up the actual menu elements the way other possibilities do, giving you a few seconds to just enjoy the picture), and probably most players have never seen it -even the ones who actually got Shen's Last Gift. Even the ones who turned on Lost Towers!

Such a waste.

On a less frustrated note, one odd quirk of Lost Towers is that if Shen ends up injured during the mission, you'll eventually get told that 'Chief Engineer Lily Shen' is no longer injured; apparently the soldier version of Shen doesn't get completely deleted after you've done the mission!

Sadly, this doesn't actually correlate to anything. Shen being injured has no mechanical effects, and indeed you won't even get Shen visibly resting or bandaged or whatever until she's recovered. Alas, that would've been a neat bit of attention to detail.

A similarly weird mechanics oddity is that fighting Julian the Prototype Sectopod is actually counted as having fought a regular Sectopod for Shadow Chamber purposes -that is, if you do Lost Towers, the Shadow Chamber will just casually inform you of future Sectopod presence (eg at the Forge) instead of saying ENEMY UNKNOWN until you've fought a regular Sectopod. This makes a kind of realistic sense, but I'm surprised the devs put in the effort to make it a thing, as I'm pretty sure this isn't an oversight/side effect thing, but rather something they had to manually code in. Not that it's super-important for a veteran player, but still, it's neat.

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I really like Julian's 'face', it does a nice job of balancing 'humanizing' him (The eye-looking bit) while keeping him looking like a computer thing. The sound line bit is particularly nice, getting a lot of the benefits of a face (Clearly connecting Julian's voice to his 'face', providing visual info on the emotional intensity behind his speech) using a well-recognized tool that nonetheless isn't human-looking at all. (As opposed to eg having him display actual lips)

Anyway, there's a cool thing I suspect literally 99% of XCOM 2 players are unaware of.

After you complete Lost Towers, back on the Avenger Shen will give a not-very-sensical-but-whatever explanation about Julian having ended up leaving a chunk of himself in ROV-R, and proposing the possibility of using Julian's AI. This can be pretty readily connected to the fact that one of the SPARK voice options is Julian's voice (Or more accurately several of them are, since the three core SPARK voice sets all have versions in several languages), but it actually goes deeper, in that if you build a SPARK in a Lost Towers run and it gets randomly assigned Julian's voice you'll actually get a chunk of Avenger dialogue with Julian waking up, confused, starting to swear vengeance, interrupting himself, and then realizing he's been coded with loyalty and flying into a bit of a rage.

Which itself gives a lot of context to SPARK-Julian's attitude. I'm particularly thinking of his 'I'm compelled to agree' line -he means that pretty literally, that he doesn't want to do whatever you just told him to do but some other program is forcing him to obey.

It's an amazing bit of characterization and done really well, and it's pretty unfortunate that SPARK's are designed so you usually only want just the one anyway, discouraging actually hearing this sequence. I meant it when I said I suspect 99% of players don't know about it: you have to buy the DLC, then do a run with Lost Towers enabled, and then not only build another SPARK but have it randomly assign Julian's voice. Among other points, that's only a 1-in-3 chance your second SPARK will even pick the right voice!

In general, SPARK-Julian is written amazingly well, not to mention his voice acting is great. It's so dramatic that SPARKs are one of the only cases where I tend to actually touch the soldier customization system, specifically to make sure my first (And usually only) SPARK has Julian's voice. (Unless I did Lost Towers, anyway: I don't mess with the Lost Towers' SPARK-001) He's by far the most entertaining soldier voice in the game, and a clear precursor to War of the Chosen writing multiple people who are deeply unpleasant people and yet quite entertaining to listen to. (The Chosen, to be clear)

The XCOM 2 devs are surprisingly consistent at writing such characters well, contrasting with characters meant to be likable/friendly/whatever being much more erratic. (I've already commented before on how base-game Bradford comes across as disturbingly bloodthirsty at times, as well as how your 'bridge crew' from Enemy Unknown/Within are just all-around awful)

For that matter, Lost Towers Julian is pretty entertaining, in spite of the core plot's core not holding up. I'm especially fond of one of his first-map lines, where he says something very similar to an ADVENT propaganda line about cooperating to build a better tomorrow. (Which is another line that works even better in War of the Chosen, where you'll intermittently hear the propaganda line in question in the post-mission loading screen)

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That's the Shen's Last Gift enemies. Next time, we move on to Alien Hunters, starting with Neonate Vipers.

See you then.