Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Verge
For Chimera Squad, I'll be starting with Verge partly because he's on the boxart, partly because he's one of the automatic first teammates in your first run, and partly because he's a good entry point for talking about various core mechanics points incidentally.
For starters, weapons; in the prior two games, each class had a primary weapon to set them apart from others, and then a secondary weapon, which XCOM 2 used to further set everybody apart. In both cases primary weapon access was mostly roughly class-unique, the only caveats being that Assaults and Rangers were both able to use Rifles in addition to Shotguns and in XCOM 2 Psi Operatives were another Rifle-using class as well.
In Chimera Squad, there are no secondary weapons -not as explicit gear, anyway, as some agents conceptually carry something like a secondary weapon- and each agent is restricted to a single primary weapon type. (Aside Androids, but that's for another post) Unsurprisingly, most weapon types are shared by multiple agents, as Chimera Squad only has four standard primary weapons plus a fifth special one, yet it has 11 agents.
In Verge's case, he uses a Rifle. The Rifle is the most generic, relatively long-ranged weapon, gaining Aim climb sooner than other weapon types and with average damage output when it lands a hit. This goes well with Verge's incentives to behave as something of a turret, which I'll get into later, and means that though Verge's ability set is focused on his psionic powers he's actually plenty solid a shooter.
Every other equipment slot consideration is, by default, a universal experience, not something used to set agents apart. ie everybody has access to the same armor and armor slot types, etc. There's some sort-of-exceptions to this, but these exceptions are largely the game not letting the player make certain obviously dumb decisions; I'll get into that more when we get to an agent it actually applies to.
Base Stats
7 HP (9 on lowest difficulty)
65 Aim (75 on lowest difficulty)
10 Mobility
50 Will (60 on lowest difficulty)
50 Psi Offense (60 on lowest difficulty)
Additionally, the easiest difficulty provides +15 passive crit chance, raises the crit chance bonus from a flank to +40 instead of +33, and provides a passive +5 Defense.
Verge is technically not your only agent to have Psi Offense, but he's the only agent to actually use Psi Offense for anything.
Possible Scars
Weakened: -3 HP
Blunted: -15 Crit chance
Unfocused: -30 Psi Offense (-49 if Deepened)
Scars are Chimera Squad's way of producing long-term consequences when agents go down in spite of death per se not being allowed to happen. (Well, that's a misleading way to put it, but the point is you're not supposed to lose people and carry on) Anytime an agent ends up Bleeding Out, they will acquire a Scar, or if they already have one it can 'deepen'. (ie its penalty gets worse, usually stacking itself: a deepened Blunted would be -30 Crit chance, for example) This can also happen if they drop below half their maximum HP at any point in a mission, though it doesn't happen very often; only 10% of the time. The in-game post-mission summaries mostly correlate to these, in that an agent labeled 'lightly wounded' will never get a Scar, an agent labeled Wounded has the 10% chance, and normally being labeled Gravely Wounded means they for-sure got a Scar. 'Normally' because the game will also label an agent who got knocked down to 1 HP exactly as Gravely Wounded. I assume the mechanics here is that the summary at the end just checks the 'high score' for how low their HP got, and more specifically that agents who start Bleeding Out are stopped at 1 HP in engine terms.
Possible Scars
Weakened: -3 HP
Blunted: -15 Crit chance
Unfocused: -30 Psi Offense (-49 if Deepened)
Scars are Chimera Squad's way of producing long-term consequences when agents go down in spite of death per se not being allowed to happen. (Well, that's a misleading way to put it, but the point is you're not supposed to lose people and carry on) Anytime an agent ends up Bleeding Out, they will acquire a Scar, or if they already have one it can 'deepen'. (ie its penalty gets worse, usually stacking itself: a deepened Blunted would be -30 Crit chance, for example) This can also happen if they drop below half their maximum HP at any point in a mission, though it doesn't happen very often; only 10% of the time. The in-game post-mission summaries mostly correlate to these, in that an agent labeled 'lightly wounded' will never get a Scar, an agent labeled Wounded has the 10% chance, and normally being labeled Gravely Wounded means they for-sure got a Scar. 'Normally' because the game will also label an agent who got knocked down to 1 HP exactly as Gravely Wounded. I assume the mechanics here is that the summary at the end just checks the 'high score' for how low their HP got, and more specifically that agents who start Bleeding Out are stopped at 1 HP in engine terms.
Scars themselves have some hidden, difficulty-influenced mechanics. First of all, there's a cap on how many Scars your team can earn in a mission: one agent on the lower two difficulties, two agents on the second-highest, and still only three agents on the highest! Similarly, how many Scars a given agent can have in total is capped by difficulty: on the lowest difficulty, they can never have more than one Scar, on the middle two they can have up to two different Scars, and finally on the highest difficulty they can actually have all three of their Scars at once. Lastly, there's actually a 'cooldown' for Scars, where for a number of days after they first earned a Scar an agent can't earn new Scars: 20/14/10/8 days based on difficulty.
I'm not a fan of the Scar cooldown mechanic...
In any event, to be clear the Scar system completely replaces the injury recovery mechanic from prior games. Where an XCOM 2 soldier being knocked into the Bleeding Out state is going to need days to weeks to recover, a Chimera Squad agent is always ready to go right into the next mission, just at most with a stat penalty. Among other points, Chimera Squad actually expects you to get through missions having taken damage: a soldier in XCOM 2 who loses any HP whatsoever needs recovery time. A Chimera Squad agent will always shrug off anything that doesn't knock off more than 50% of their max HP, only rarely be impaired by even serious HP loss, and even a near-death experience doesn't prevent them from going out to battle literally the next day.
Scars are also personal, surprisingly; each agent has three possible Scars they can acquire, with the exact list differing between agents, hence why I'm listing Verge's possible Scars. Surprisingly, they don't have different icons, just one icon that... looks like the icon for Faceless and Chryssalid melee attacks, but red. Which is an odd choice.
Anyway, Verge's Scars are... uneven. A crit chance penalty is essentially ignorable for reasons I'll get into more later. An HP penalty is devastating if acquired toward the beginning of a run, but becomes tolerable to ignore late in the game when other factors have raised Verge's HP fairly significantly. The Psi Offense penalty is a huge burden no matter when it's acquired, and if at all possible you should probably bench Verge until you can get it fixed.
On that note, it's worth pointing out that Assembly duty, not Spec Ops or Training, is where you should stick people when you want them ready to be shuffled onto the team when someone needs to be benched. You can freely swap someone on Assembly duty with someone on the APC with no ill effects, after all, no matter the timing.
Subdue
Stabilize
1 action point: A move-and-use action, available only when an agent is Bleeding Out and within movement range. Stabilizes the agent, stopping their Bleeding Out timer.
Neural Network
Passive: Some of Verge's abilities will add enemies to his Neural Network. For each such enemy currently in his Neural Network, Verge gains +10 Aim. Enemies knocked Unconscious will remain part of the Neural Network, while enemies killed will be removed from it.
Scars are also personal, surprisingly; each agent has three possible Scars they can acquire, with the exact list differing between agents, hence why I'm listing Verge's possible Scars. Surprisingly, they don't have different icons, just one icon that... looks like the icon for Faceless and Chryssalid melee attacks, but red. Which is an odd choice.
Anyway, Verge's Scars are... uneven. A crit chance penalty is essentially ignorable for reasons I'll get into more later. An HP penalty is devastating if acquired toward the beginning of a run, but becomes tolerable to ignore late in the game when other factors have raised Verge's HP fairly significantly. The Psi Offense penalty is a huge burden no matter when it's acquired, and if at all possible you should probably bench Verge until you can get it fixed.
On that note, it's worth pointing out that Assembly duty, not Spec Ops or Training, is where you should stick people when you want them ready to be shuffled onto the team when someone needs to be benched. You can freely swap someone on Assembly duty with someone on the APC with no ill effects, after all, no matter the timing.
Base Abilities
SubdueTurn-ending action: A move-and-melee attack that does 2-3 damage to the target, ignoring Armor and with no chance to miss. If the target is reduced to 0 HP by Subdue, they're knocked Unconscious instead of killed. Some targets cannot be Subdued.
Subdue is a standard action every agent has unless they replace it with something better. Strategically, Subdue has a single purpose: KOing enemies instead of killing them is how you earn bonus Intel from missions. Specifically, you will earn 20 Intel if at least 5 enemies were knocked Unconscious in a single mission. If you KOed fewer than 5, it's instead a die roll for whether you get 20 Intel or nothing, 20% per KOed enemy. ie 2 enemies is a 40% chance to earn 20 Intel, 4 enemies is an 80% chance, etc.
Tactically, Subdue is surprisingly flexible. It's a way to secure a kill (Well, not usually a kill, but shhh) with no possibility of missing, a way to dish out damage without spending ammo, and a way to use an action point to reposition without spending it solely on movement, all as one action. This means even if you don't care about Intel collection -and you should care, as Intel is your most crucial resource- Subdue is an important part of most agents' toolkit. It is, of course, particularly useful for agents who are ammo-hungry (eg Godmother, Blueblood) and/or able to very reliably spend both action points on useful non-movement actions (eg Verge, Blueblood, Terminal...), allowing ammo-hungry agents to hopefully avoid the need to reload in a combat situation and turret-like agents to spend every action point efficiently while still managing to move, but you should keep Subdue in mind with every agent. (Except, technically, the agents who replace it) On top of all that, Subdue can actually be an agent's best damage option against an enemy if that enemy has high enough Armor compared to their per-shot damage. (And is also vulnerable to Subdue, a somewhat rare combination: you can't Subdue most mechanical enemies like Mecs or Turrets)
I also appreciate Subdue's existence on a narrative level, or more precisely the broader incentives to KO enemies instead of killing them. Narratively, you're playing a peacekeeping unit that shoots people as part and parcel of keeping the peace; it would have been so easy for Chimera Squad to end up accidentally depicting Chimera Squad as not even marginally more ethical than ADVENT's 'peacekeepers'. The incentives to KO enemies helps mitigate that; it's not unreasonable to argue that Chimera Squad is still a Police Brutality Simulator, but at least I can't earnestly say something like 'they might as well have had you playing an ADVENT death squad'.
Tactically, Subdue is surprisingly flexible. It's a way to secure a kill (Well, not usually a kill, but shhh) with no possibility of missing, a way to dish out damage without spending ammo, and a way to use an action point to reposition without spending it solely on movement, all as one action. This means even if you don't care about Intel collection -and you should care, as Intel is your most crucial resource- Subdue is an important part of most agents' toolkit. It is, of course, particularly useful for agents who are ammo-hungry (eg Godmother, Blueblood) and/or able to very reliably spend both action points on useful non-movement actions (eg Verge, Blueblood, Terminal...), allowing ammo-hungry agents to hopefully avoid the need to reload in a combat situation and turret-like agents to spend every action point efficiently while still managing to move, but you should keep Subdue in mind with every agent. (Except, technically, the agents who replace it) On top of all that, Subdue can actually be an agent's best damage option against an enemy if that enemy has high enough Armor compared to their per-shot damage. (And is also vulnerable to Subdue, a somewhat rare combination: you can't Subdue most mechanical enemies like Mecs or Turrets)
I also appreciate Subdue's existence on a narrative level, or more precisely the broader incentives to KO enemies instead of killing them. Narratively, you're playing a peacekeeping unit that shoots people as part and parcel of keeping the peace; it would have been so easy for Chimera Squad to end up accidentally depicting Chimera Squad as not even marginally more ethical than ADVENT's 'peacekeepers'. The incentives to KO enemies helps mitigate that; it's not unreasonable to argue that Chimera Squad is still a Police Brutality Simulator, but at least I can't earnestly say something like 'they might as well have had you playing an ADVENT death squad'.
I mean, you, as an individual player, are free to play Chimera Squad as a Police Murdering People Simulator, and nobody in the game will get on your case about it, but doing so is sub-optimal enough you really shouldn't be doing that. (At least, not until fairly late in a run) The closest thing to a complaint I have in this regard is that the universal incentive of Intel collection caps out so rapidly you're not so much encouraged to secure KOs whenever possible as you are encouraged to capture a handful of enemies in each mission and murder the rest, and that's mitigated some by Verge's mechanics providing additional incentives to go for KOs if he's in the squad.
Well. The other complaint I have is that a bug or oversight means your squad doesn't get experience credit for captures, only kills. Unless you use a mod to fix this, you technically should actually KO exactly 5 enemies per mission and murder the rest for the experience. Fortunately, the game's experience curve is such that you can easily have 2 full squads at max level by endgame even if you're very aggressive about captures and don't have the bug fixed (As in, I did exactly this on multiple runs before learning of the bug), as for one thing your agents get a certain amount of experience from just participating in a mission at all. Indeed, this is probably why this was missed; there is a fairly noticeable difference in how fast your squad grows between 'KO every enemy in every mission' and 'kill every enemy with not a single capture' (I tested it once I learned of the bug, and it wasn't that subtle), but the kind of play I suspect is more typical is only mildly impacted by this bug, easily able to get a full squad to max level before the first Investigation is finished.
Anyway, as for Verge in particular, his propensity for turret-type play and preference to keep Neural Networked enemies alive makes Subdue a fairly key part of his arsenal. You'll be using it to re-position, to take down enemies without sacrificing the Neural Network boost, and of course having other agents go for Subdues more readily. Verge also trends by default toward spending one action point on a psychic power and then another on shooting, so he's actually one of the easier agents to end up needing a combat reload, as well as one of the main agents where spending an action point on a reload is pretty reliable at cutting into his ability to contribute. Thus, using Subdue to not shoot for a turn can be quite helpful: if you're never having Verge Subdue, you're probably using him wrong.
Also, a final mechanical oddity with Subdue is that it actually functions even when an agent is on fire. This means even an agent who is out of ammo and on fire -which prevents reloading, just like in XCOM 2- still always has access to a way to attack!
Stabilize1 action point: A move-and-use action, available only when an agent is Bleeding Out and within movement range. Stabilizes the agent, stopping their Bleeding Out timer.
Also nearly universally available, though I won't be listing it on other agents. Just remember they almost all have it -you'll know the ones that don't.
Also, you might notice I'm explicitly labeling actions in terms of capacity to use them in a turn. I didn't feel a need to do so in the prior games because they largely defaulted to 'needs one action point and ends the turn', but Chimera Squad is much more experimental with actions, and the game itself is unfortunately very unreliable about communicating whether an action automatically ends the turn or not. It does at least reliably communicate actions being free: mid-mission, such actions will have their icon rendered in the same white-and-black style XCOM 2 used for assorted free actions... not that it explains tis, mind...
Anyway, if I label an action as '1 action point', that means it spends an action point and only ends the agent's turn if that was their last action point, while if I label it 'turn-ending action', that means it requires at least one action point and consumes all of the unit's current action points. Chimera Squad has no actions that require 2 action points to initiate, surprisingly, so I don't have a label for such. I've got other labels, but I don't think they require explanation.
Anyway, Stabilize itself is of course the Stabilize action of the prior two games, except it no longer requires either equipping a medikit or being the innately heal-capable class to be able to perform it. It's also actually hidden by default, only becoming visible if an agent is in need of stabilization, which I understand the impulse but feel was probably a mistake -it means a player may well simply fail to notice it quietly appearing in the action bar when they need it, or that they'll notice it but make incorrect assumptions. (eg an agent goes down, then an agent carrying a Medikit gets a turn, and the player incorrectly ends up believing that, just like the prior two games, Stabilize access was tied to the Medikit) The game would've needed to more aggressively tutorial the player in a mildly-obnoxious way for this to not be janky.
Still, I do really appreciate Stabilize being an action with no equipment requirement. One of the things that was really crazy-making about Enemy Unknown/Within's design was that the game clearly intended for casualties to be expected, but then required you burned a precious Item slot on a Medikit and hold onto its charge(s) to be able to perform the Stabilization at all. It was severely constrictive to team composition, even once Enemy Within introduced Tactical Rigging so 1 item slot wasn't all most soldiers got, and had a lot of janky implications like encouraging you to hold onto Medikit charges instead of expending them on soldiers who were very low on HP, since healing was weak enough compared to enemy damage bringing a soldier from 2 to 6 HP could easily fail to even delay their death by one shot, and then if they went into Bleeding Out mode the fact that you had used the Medikit would mean you couldn't save them!
XCOM 2 had this jank less relevant, due to the game's design defaulting so heavily to the assumption you'd be killing enemies before they got the chance to act, and addressed some issues more at the edges like making your medical-specialty class actually good at the job, but the jank remained present and very painful when a situation contrived to make it immediately relevant.
Whereas Chimera Squad letting anyone Stabilize any soldier without need for particular equipment or anything is finally getting this bit of design just plain right.
I really hope XCOM 3 follows in these footsteps, or at least recognizes some solution in this vein is necessary.
Anyway, returning to Chimera squad, note that once an agent in Chimera Squad goes down, they're stuck where they fell. You can't revive downed agents -there's no Revival Protocol equivalent- and you also can't carry bodies in Chimera Squad. I imagine this is because that would require a large number of animations to look right, as your agents come in a wide enough range of sizes and shapes the one-size-fits-all approach XCOM 2 took wouldn't work, or at least wouldn't look good. (It should come as no surprise that Chimera Squad also lacks mission types centered around carrying bodies)
Surprisingly, Chimera Squad does have missions you need to evac the squad for. It resolves the obvious questions here by just ignoring downed agents: once you've evacced everybody else, the mission will end and the downed agents are automatically extracted too, no penalties or anything. One of the more bizarre implications of this is that in such a mission abandoning Bleeding Out agents can be the objectively correct thing to do: the game doesn't count the Bleeding Out status against you when assessing evac conditions. Indeed, it's possible to win a mission in the form of three agents evaccing, and then the fourth gets taken out and the game immediately announces your success. Or one evacs and then the other three all go down, mission accomplished!
I'm honestly a little surprised Chimera Squad kept in evac-based missions, given how surreal the final result can easily be. Normally it's fine to run with 'completing the Encounter/mission renders the Bleeding Out timer moot'; it can still lead to edge cases where the outcome is absurd, but broadly speaking it makes sense to assume that once an Encounter is cleared your squad stabilizes the downed agent, and if there's more to the mission the squad calls in the regular police or whatever -maybe the APC has androids loaded to scoop up and fix up downed agents that just never get depicted- and moves on.
But then evac missions throw out the ways in which this is broadly sensible. Whoops!
Also note that, in what seems likely to be an oversight rather than an intentional design decision, Chimera Squad inherits from the prior two games that a downed agent is mostly safe (Enemies will not fire on them, or deliberately execute them with abilities), but will be instantly killed if caught inside the radius of an explosive. In Chimera Squad's case, an agent dying instantly triggers a game over, which can make for incredibly frustrating moments in conjunction with this point. Enemies won't deliberately toss a grenade at a downed agent, but they may well toss a grenade at the agent who just performed the Stabilization, and whoops that kills the downed agent.
This is actually the primary reason I'd caution against trying out Ironman mode in Chimera Squad; unlike the prior two games, Chimera Squad is sufficiently stable (As of its current patch) that you're extremely unlikely to have an Ironman save ruined by any of the various issues that could kill an Ironman run in the prior games. (eg in XCOM 2, sometimes the game would just mismanage loading a mission so badly the only solution was to load an earlier save... an option Ironman denies you) If you're pretty reliable about not having agents go down in the first place, though, Ironman is pretty safe to turn on in Chimera Squad.
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Chimera Squad, it should be noted, has... one sort-of-equivalent to Rookies we'll be covering later... point is, your agents start the game with non-standard Abilities unique to them. In fact, in Chimera Squad many agents have at least one passive ability out the box and two active abilities! In conjunction with Chimera Squad having fewer level-ups (And keeping their individual impact on the low side), agents have a lot of power right out the gate, and are immediately distinct from each other to an extent that in XCOM 2 took a few levels to reach. It also makes it more tolerable to turn to less-experienced agents, as the gap between a new agent and a fully experienced agent isn't so hugely stark as the gap between a Rookie and a max-level soldier of the prior games was.
As such, for each agent I'll be covering their baseline distinct abilities before getting into their level up options.
Neural NetworkPassive: Some of Verge's abilities will add enemies to his Neural Network. For each such enemy currently in his Neural Network, Verge gains +10 Aim. Enemies knocked Unconscious will remain part of the Neural Network, while enemies killed will be removed from it.
A bizarre bug or something is that units in Verge's Neural Network gain +2 Will. Particularly odd is it seems to be tied to a line in the SoldierSkills config file labeled 'Will reduction'. I really have no idea what this was supposed to be, but I doubt this result is the intention. It's admittedly not terribly important, but it's weird.
Anyway, Neural Network encourages knock-out tactics over lethal tactics, making Verge pair well with teammates who either are naturally good at securing KOs (eg Cherub) or who can be built to readily secure KOs where you've taken that route (eg Zephyr), as well as encouraging passing out Tranq Rounds to the squad so you're free to shoot at Verge's victims without it costing him the benefits of Neural Network. Conversely it makes him pair somewhat poorly with Claymore and especially Torque, as they both have multiple automatically lethal abilities, with Torque in particular making use of Poison and so potentially causing unexpected deaths because the numbers end up lining up so you don't quite down an enemy and then the Poison finishes them lethally.
Levitate is a cute shoutout to The Bureau. (If you're not aware: in The Bureau, one of the player character's key abilities from almost the beginning of the game is levitating enemies out of cover) The inability to target units immune to mental effects is a little puzzling at this step, but makes more sense in context of a later ability.
Field Agent
+3 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Crowdsource
Passive: Each enemy in the Neural Network is worth +5 Aim and +10 Crit chance, on top of the usual +10 Aim.
OR
Collar
Passive: Enemies in the Neural Network will be knocked Unconscious anytime they should have died.
Essentially, you're choosing between either having bigger payoff from adding people to the Neural Network, vs ensuring people won't exit the Neural Network. (Bar Andromedons and Codices, who can never be knocked Unconscious but can be added to the Neural Network)
Collar is probably the better choice, overall. It makes it less important to pair up Verge with squadmates who are naturally inclined toward knockouts (Concrete example: Torque helps keep Verge mobile in spite of his turret-y tendency, but is herself biased toward lethal tools she has no way to make nonlethal), lets you replace Tranq Rounds on the squad with some other Item (Preferably lethal ammo) with minimal loss, makes it so you pretty consistently end up with Intel from missions without specifically going out of your way to make it happen, and crucially Crowdsource's benefits are less than you might assume.
The thing is, in Chimera Squad, all of your weapons get exactly 1 point of damage added when triggering a crit. This makes the +10 crit from Crowdsource not merely unreliable of a benefit in most situations, but a benefit that basically doesn't matter when it does apply. A low-roll crit will actually be weaker than a high-roll non-crit on most weapons in Chimera Squad, and the exceptions -Pistols and Gauntlets- are merely tied. Non-weapon attacks aren't any better: they do +1 as well, or do +0, or are simply incapable of getting crits in the first place!
This means the only part of Crowdsource you really care about is the +5 Aim, and while it's nice to have Neural Network's Aim boost ramp faster, it doesn't take many people inside it for Verge to hit the point of regularly hitting 100 accuracy on enemies in Low Cover, especially if other Aim support is involved, such as Verge's Rifle having a Scope of some kind. Being able to hold onto the benefits at little effort will usually be more useful; the only exception is that Crowdsource is unequivocally better when dealing heavily with Andromedons and Codices, since even Collar won't prevent them from leaving the Neural Network upon being downed.
Mind Flay itself is fairly situational. Unless you're specifically utilizing eg a Motile Inducer to let Verge grab a bunch of enemies in a single round, it's unlikely you'll have more than one, maybe two enemies active (ie not Unconscious) in the Neural Network at any given moment, and if you're only hitting one enemy it's literally equivalent to a Subdue, except the Subdue would let you make movement happen if you need it and can be targeted on several enemy types Verge can't add to the Neural Network.
Senior Agent
+2 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Network Healing
Passive: At the end of each of Verge's turns, he heals 1 HP for each enemy currently in the Neural Network.
OR
Slam
Passive: Levitate now does 1-3 damage, ignoring Armor, to the chosen target at the end of the Breach phase, while also adding the target to Verge's Neural Network. If the damage from Slam brings them to 0 HP, they are knocked Unconscious instead of killed.
Slam's in-game description is extremely misleading and makes it sound like a weak attacking action you can use freely, like Stupor and Battle Madness, rather than communicating that it's an upgrade to Levitate. Nnnot ideal wording.
Slam adding the target to the Neural Network is, of course, why you can't target units immune to mental effects with Levitate. That way, you don't either have your upgrade to Levitate include a secret disadvantage, or have to address what happens when a Neural Network-adding action is used on units you're not supposed to be able to add to the Neural Network. Kind of a weird final outcome, but understandable when you have the whole picture.
Principal Agent
+2 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Final Stats
10 HP (Counting Training, but not other boosts)
79 Aim
90 Psi Offense
Puppeteer
Turn ending action: Verge attempts to mind control every enemy in the Neural Network, performing a test of his Psi Offense against each individual's Will with a bonus of +50. Each victim who fails this test is under your control for their next 2-3 turns. One use per mission, though this use is only expended if Verge takes control of at least one enemy. Failure to control any enemies will instead result in a 2-turn cooldown.
Something worth pointing out is that Puppeteer peaks in your second Investigation, realistically speaking: it's very difficult to get Verge to max level during your first Investigation (By default, in part due to the 'no experience for KOs' bug), and the vast majority of enemies gain 10 Will for each Investigation completed. So eg Shrike troops in your third Investigation will be a little more likely to shrug off Puppeteer than in your second Investigation, with no tools offering any possibility of offsetting this -it's not like there's any gear that raises Psi Offense, for example.
Also note that when a unit's Mind Control ends, they immediately get a full turn. This actually applies to both your own people being Mind Controlled and to enemies being grabbed by Puppeteer, but the point is that you should prefer to have controlled enemies who last two turns get into a position where they can't threaten your forces. This itself is oddly buggy; I've had cases where an enemy had the Mind Control end, their icon got moved to the bottom of the Timeline, then the next enemy took their full turn, then the Mind Controlled enemy took a full turn while the game insists it's currently the turn of that other enemy. I suspect the under-the-hood behavior is something like switching their team, then gifting them two action points, as this final behavior bears similarities to what happens when you gift action points to someone and have the gifter finish the turn: the game will still display it as being the gifter's turn until the recipient is also done acting.
Also note that Mind Flay will, in fact, do damage to all of Verge's puppets if you use it. Be careful, if your plans call for a puppet to stay conscious for another turn; don't mindlessly Stupor or Battle Madness followed by a Mind Flay if you've controlled some people.
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Visually, I'm a little frustrated by Verge's design, and indeed by the design of most of the hand-drawn Sectoids we see in the game, in that while you can tell they're derived from the XCOM 2 Sectoid design, they're not really true to it, and specifically 'soften' it to make them look less menacing. I somewhat understand why; the Sectoid death's-head grin is achieved in part by simply not giving them lips and cheeks, and lips are a big part of visually communicating emotional content in characters.
Even so, it's not the only part of how Sectoids get drawn in a more friendly fashion, and this whole thing is a fairly clear-cut example of a trend I've always found disturbing in fiction: that of propaganda-esque twisting of visual facts to serve current emotional agendas.
That is, in XCOM 2, Sectoids are baddies you're supposed to kill without remorse, so they have a skull-face that helps make them look perpetually angry, make weird hissing noises for their speech, don't bother with clothes, have an unnerving glowing chest, and their height and movement is clearly outside the range seen on your human soldiers. This was all selected to mark them as Other, as creepy and evil and kill-it-with-fire.
And now Chimera Squad is wanting you to view Sectoids as another kind of person, albeit one that's stranger than average, and so Sectoids have had their actual physical structure semi-retconned (You still see death's-head Sectoids, including in the hand-drawn art, they're just less prominent/common) to make them seem less menacing.
I'm actually essentially okay with the rest of the tweaks to how Sectoids are presented; Verge and enemy Sectoids wearing combat protection makes more sense than XCOM 2 Sectoids wandering around naked, honestly, and by a similar token civilian Sectoids wearing clothing is inoffensive. In turn, the fact that this hides the glowing chest, incidentally obscuring one of their creepier features, is also innocuous. I'm similarly okay with Sectoid hissing having not been represented as some manner of speech oddity, with the closest thing to a complaint I have being that Verge in particular doesn't ever use it, even when eg injured, even though enemy Sectoids still make hissing noises when, for example, injured but not downed.
I'm similarly fine with the subtle tweak to how Sectoid eyes are presented so they're not trapped in a perpetual glare. This is actually ambiguous and genuinely falls inside the umbrella of perception-as-reality fiction plays with; that while XCOM 2's Sectoid model is designed so that it's more or less physically impossible for them to not look like they're glaring, it's a sufficiently small, subtle thing that I can buy that it is, in-universe, more like a representation of how Sectoids stick in your soldiers' memories; that the Perpetually Glaring Sectoids of XCOM 2 is what you'd get if a talented artist fighting for X-COM came back to the Avenger and sat down to draw what they saw on the battlefield, and subtle elements like the perpetual glare are their own emotional experience leaking in to the drawing, while Chimera Squad's hand-drawn Sectoids are more like what that same artist might draw when doing a painting of a Sectoid model after the war was over.
But the removal of the skull-face thing, while I'm sympathetic to the lips-as-expression component, still feels a step too far.
On the plus side, the in-engine models and animations do a better job of straddling that line. While Sectoids in Chimera Squad don't use their amazing climbing-down-ladders-face-first animation, I can forgive that given they're also now carrying guns, and notably Chimera Squad shies away from the 'soldier stows weapon on back with no visible way of keeping it attached' thing XCOM 2 does anytime it wants a soldier to use their hands as part of the animation. Otherwise, all Sectoids, including Verge himself, do actually animate notably differently from human and Hybrid combatants; that for example Verge will hop directly up to a ledge in some cases where your human agents would climb up, and aside the lack of hissing Verge's 'ow, I was shot' animation is very close to one of the XCOM 2 Sectoid animations that genuinely looks odd coming from a humanoid frame.
Anyway, Neural Network encourages knock-out tactics over lethal tactics, making Verge pair well with teammates who either are naturally good at securing KOs (eg Cherub) or who can be built to readily secure KOs where you've taken that route (eg Zephyr), as well as encouraging passing out Tranq Rounds to the squad so you're free to shoot at Verge's victims without it costing him the benefits of Neural Network. Conversely it makes him pair somewhat poorly with Claymore and especially Torque, as they both have multiple automatically lethal abilities, with Torque in particular making use of Poison and so potentially causing unexpected deaths because the numbers end up lining up so you don't quite down an enemy and then the Poison finishes them lethally.
In practice Neural Network tends to lose effectiveness over the course of a run even though enemies get more numerous and battles longer. Early in a run you really ought to be shooting for captures a lot anyway: you spend the early-to-midgame perpetually hungry for Intel, there's little opportunity cost to building and equipping Tranq Rounds, and enemies are weak enough you'll regularly have opportunities to KO enemies via Subdue. Later in the game, you should be switching to lethal ammunition so you can keep up with rising enemy durability, you eventually reach the point where Intel is low-value, and enemies will much more rarely end up in the somewhat narrow HP range where a Subdue can take them out. (As Subdue's damage does not innately rise)
As such, Verge tends to be one of your better shooters early in the game, sometimes able to reliably land shots through Low Cover, while late in the game its his abilities that tend to impress, enough so you may at times have him spend his entire turn on non-shooting actions.
(Assuming you avoid a specific level-up pick, mind, and I'd argue it's the better choice...)
Verge also cares unusually greatly about mission type, in that Neural Network is 'cleaned up' when going through an Encounter transition in particular. That is, in a mission where you clear a room in Encounter 1, then move to another Encounter, Verge will perform worse than in a different mission that is also clearly two distinct stages, but where the second stage isn't a separate Encounter but instead is the objective changing and reinforcements showing up. In cases where an individual Encounter can go on for a while, Verge can potentially stack up an absolutely absurd number of Neural Network connections, reaching the point of casually shooting enemies in High Cover with perfect accuracy.
This also means Verge tends to be at his low point in the Sacred Coil Investigation, as Sacred Coil relies heavily on robots that Verge cannot add to his Neural Network. Individual Encounters in the Sacred Coil Investigation can at times be so robot-heavy Verge won't necessarily get more than maybe 1 enemy added to his Neural Network. So even though he can leverage Neural Network's Aim bonus against the robots, he still tends to perform a bit worse in robot-heavy Encounters in practice.
Stupor
1 Action Point: Verge attempts to Stun a non-robot enemy, testing his Psi Offense against their Will with a bonus of +100. If he succeeds, the enemy is Stunned, losing either 1 action point or 2 action points on their next turn, with equal odds of either result occurring. Regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, the target is added to his Neural Network. Stupor itself cannot be used on enemies that are a part of the Neural Network. 1 turn cooldown.
Notice that this doesn't end Verge's turn, and the cooldown doesn't prevent you from spamming it every turn. Also notice that +10 Aim from Neural Network is just under half the maximum Aim bonus you can get from closing with Verge's Rifle, which caps out at +21 Aim for a point-blank shot.
This means that if moving can't get Verge a flank, movement is not useful for enhancing Aim, by default. Verge is better off using one of his Neural Network-adding actions and then shooting, if he intends to shoot, as he'll often get a comparable Aim bonus that will last beyond the immediate turn, potentially through the entire Encounter, while also limiting a chosen enemy's options or even skipping its turn outright. This strongly encourages using Verge like a turret, never moving in an Encounter, or only moving via the assistance of squadmates, such as Torque using Tongue Pull to reposition him.
It also means he's a poor fit to encounters that demand a lot of movement, such as VIP extraction missions. (Which is too bad, as VIP Extraction's being a single Encounter with infinite reinforcements theoretically can let him get wacky Aim bonuses from Neural Network)
Stupor1 Action Point: Verge attempts to Stun a non-robot enemy, testing his Psi Offense against their Will with a bonus of +100. If he succeeds, the enemy is Stunned, losing either 1 action point or 2 action points on their next turn, with equal odds of either result occurring. Regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, the target is added to his Neural Network. Stupor itself cannot be used on enemies that are a part of the Neural Network. 1 turn cooldown.
Notice that this doesn't end Verge's turn, and the cooldown doesn't prevent you from spamming it every turn. Also notice that +10 Aim from Neural Network is just under half the maximum Aim bonus you can get from closing with Verge's Rifle, which caps out at +21 Aim for a point-blank shot.
This means that if moving can't get Verge a flank, movement is not useful for enhancing Aim, by default. Verge is better off using one of his Neural Network-adding actions and then shooting, if he intends to shoot, as he'll often get a comparable Aim bonus that will last beyond the immediate turn, potentially through the entire Encounter, while also limiting a chosen enemy's options or even skipping its turn outright. This strongly encourages using Verge like a turret, never moving in an Encounter, or only moving via the assistance of squadmates, such as Torque using Tongue Pull to reposition him.
It also means he's a poor fit to encounters that demand a lot of movement, such as VIP extraction missions. (Which is too bad, as VIP Extraction's being a single Encounter with infinite reinforcements theoretically can let him get wacky Aim bonuses from Neural Network)
Stupor itself is a great tool, able to protect teammates from flanks, fish for opportunities to ignore an enemy entirely for a turn, and comboing well with effects that de-facto eat action points. For example, if you drain a target's ammunition and then hit it with Stupor, and it's an enemy type that lacks non-shooting actions, Stupor will functionally skip their turn no matter what: either it eats both action points directly, or it eats one and then they reload or move instead of attacking. (Mind, the list of enemies whose ammo can be drained, who are susceptible to Stupor, and who lack other options for contributing to the fight is... quite small)
It's also helpful against all melee enemies by reducing how far they can run, potentially costing them an attacking opportunity entirely. (It's too bad you can't see enemy movement ranges...)
Battle Madness
1 Action Point: Verge attempts to Berserk a non-robot enemy, testing his Psi Offense against their Will with a bonus of +100. If he succeeds, the enemy will immediately spend one action point, with the usual result being that they will attack a fellow hostile with their weapon. Regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, the target is added to his Neural Network. Battle Madness itself cannot be used on enemies that are a part of the Neural Network. 1 turn cooldown.
Battle Madness is a surprisingly finicky ability.
First of all, it combines poorly with effects for draining ammo from enemy weapons, which is to say anything that claims to 'disable' weapons, as Battle Madness will cause an enemy that's out of ammo to promptly reload their weapon... and they don't even then take a shot. Extra-frustrating is that most pistol-wielding enemies have inconsistent behavior when it comes to ammo-draining effects, where draining ammo doesn't necessarily prevent them from shooting but Battle Madness will still force them to reload if they've been hit by such an effect.
Second, Battle Madness is dangerous to use it on melee-only enemies like Chryssalids, as they're prone to doing nothing, or attacking a civilian, or even attacking one of your people! They can end up attacking one of their allies, but it's far from guaranteed, and in my experience it is in fact much less common than it giving them a free attack on one of your agents.
Third, short-range non-melee enemies like Purifiers will, if there's nothing close enough to them, burn the Berserk action on scrambling somewhere, very possibly closer to your forces. Oops.
That said, under 'generic' conditions, it can be very good, letting Verge effectively shoot twice in a turn, auto-scaling with enemy progression since enemy damage rising with each Investigation means Battle Madness has better damage output, and if you have a good eye for possible lines of fire it can often be reliably predicted that Enemy A will for-sure fire on Enemy B, with said shot being a flanking shot and so quite likely to hit. Used well, Verge can single-handedly remove a threat, potentially one that would otherwise have acted before someone else could do anything about that enemy.
Battle Madness1 Action Point: Verge attempts to Berserk a non-robot enemy, testing his Psi Offense against their Will with a bonus of +100. If he succeeds, the enemy will immediately spend one action point, with the usual result being that they will attack a fellow hostile with their weapon. Regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, the target is added to his Neural Network. Battle Madness itself cannot be used on enemies that are a part of the Neural Network. 1 turn cooldown.
Battle Madness is a surprisingly finicky ability.
First of all, it combines poorly with effects for draining ammo from enemy weapons, which is to say anything that claims to 'disable' weapons, as Battle Madness will cause an enemy that's out of ammo to promptly reload their weapon... and they don't even then take a shot. Extra-frustrating is that most pistol-wielding enemies have inconsistent behavior when it comes to ammo-draining effects, where draining ammo doesn't necessarily prevent them from shooting but Battle Madness will still force them to reload if they've been hit by such an effect.
Second, Battle Madness is dangerous to use it on melee-only enemies like Chryssalids, as they're prone to doing nothing, or attacking a civilian, or even attacking one of your people! They can end up attacking one of their allies, but it's far from guaranteed, and in my experience it is in fact much less common than it giving them a free attack on one of your agents.
Third, short-range non-melee enemies like Purifiers will, if there's nothing close enough to them, burn the Berserk action on scrambling somewhere, very possibly closer to your forces. Oops.
That said, under 'generic' conditions, it can be very good, letting Verge effectively shoot twice in a turn, auto-scaling with enemy progression since enemy damage rising with each Investigation means Battle Madness has better damage output, and if you have a good eye for possible lines of fire it can often be reliably predicted that Enemy A will for-sure fire on Enemy B, with said shot being a flanking shot and so quite likely to hit. Used well, Verge can single-handedly remove a threat, potentially one that would otherwise have acted before someone else could do anything about that enemy.
One surprising bit of utility is that Battle Madness will also interrupt effects that can be interrupted, such as the Archon's Burnout ability or the Acolyte's Psionic Suplex ability. Conversely, it will not cancel out Hunker Down, even though you might intuitively expect it to do so. Alas.
Overall Battle Madness is less staple an ability than Stupor, but you certainly shouldn't forget it.
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A concept Chimera Squad introduces is Training; in addition to improvements gained from leveling and of course from improving equipment, agents can spend a few in-game days on Training duty to provide an improvement to themselves. Every agent starts with access to a basic Training action to add +2 HP, then when they reach Special Agent (ie after gaining 3 levels) they gain an 'Unlock Potential' Training option that provides a different set of stat bonuses that is actually agent-dependent, and finally at Principal Agent they gain access to a new Training option to unlock a whole new skill that can only be unlocked through Training, with these each being unique to a given agent.
Also, the Training duty is where you send an agent when you need a Scar cleared up.
I like some of the impact of the Training system; among other points, shifting some of the HP growth load onto Training instead of leveling lets the game escalate stats as things progress without having low-level agents risk being taken out too easily. It's also nice as a way to produce some of the squad variety effects of Fatigue, but in a way where a player is unlikely to feel punished by the game; agents in Training are unavailable for APC duty, after all, so somebody will have to substitute.
Unfortunately, I feel like Training doesn't really live up to its potential. In terms of squad variety, a player can really just have a fifth squad member they sub in when their 'real' squad members are cycling through Training; it doesn't really encourage anything approaching the squad variability of War of the Chosen.
Similarly, I feel like Training tying its options heavily into leveling, where 2/3rds of an agent's Training is gated behind leveling and those tend to be the stronger benefits, is somewhat wasting the potential of the concept. If Training options were unlocked over the course of the campaign in a manner disconnected from agent levels (Or perhaps in the way the Officer Training School and Guerrilla Tactics School gated upgrades behind getting someone high enough level), then a a new agent the player was interested in giving a try could spend a month Training and be much better prepared for mid-to-late-game conditions, where enemy scaling has meaning but level isn't overly-strong a determiner of ability to contribute.
If XCOM 3 brings back Training as a recognizable concept, I hope it doesn't stick too closely to Chimera Squad's implementation; the concept has a lot more useful potential than Chimera Squad itself tapped.
I'll be covering each Training option at an appropriate access point for the agent, meaning placing Basic Training after their basic abilities, Unlock Potential Training after Special Agent abilities, then their final Training all the way at the end -since of course an agent can't have a Training benefit without first getting the benefits of the level that unlocks it.
So: now Basic Training in regards to Verge.
Basic Training: +2 HP.
Basic Training always takes 2 days to complete, which means an agent will miss exactly 1 mission in typical conditions -the game tries to alternate between missions and Situations (ie non-missions), though a player's actions can cause multiple days in a row to all be missions.
Also notice that Basic Training is less of a boost than the HP penalty an agent can get from the Weakened Scar. This is good design, as otherwise the correct thing to do when getting Weakened with an untrained agent would be to have them boost their maximum HP permanently first, and then maybe bother to fix the Scar, which would be silly.
Verge is one of the better agents to get Basic Training done quickly, due to having particularly poor base HP; he's much more at risk of being 2-shotted in the early game than some agents. Of course, every agent should do Basic Training eventually if you have any interest in using them, so it really is mostly just a matter of priority order for agents getting it done: when, not if.
Basic Training: +2 HP.
Basic Training always takes 2 days to complete, which means an agent will miss exactly 1 mission in typical conditions -the game tries to alternate between missions and Situations (ie non-missions), though a player's actions can cause multiple days in a row to all be missions.
Also notice that Basic Training is less of a boost than the HP penalty an agent can get from the Weakened Scar. This is good design, as otherwise the correct thing to do when getting Weakened with an untrained agent would be to have them boost their maximum HP permanently first, and then maybe bother to fix the Scar, which would be silly.
Verge is one of the better agents to get Basic Training done quickly, due to having particularly poor base HP; he's much more at risk of being 2-shotted in the early game than some agents. Of course, every agent should do Basic Training eventually if you have any interest in using them, so it really is mostly just a matter of priority order for agents getting it done: when, not if.
Also, it should be pointed out that you can't ever end a day with fewer than 4 agents assigned to the APC, and at the beginning of the game you only have 4 agents. As such, while Training is technically available immediately, you have to actually wait until your fifth agent is added to be able to take advantage. An odd side effect of this is that agents getting Scarred in the very early game is particularly punishing, because you have to just send them right back out with their potentially crippling stat penalty. Later in a run, even a Scar that imposes a serious stat penalty is just a minor nuisance where you shuffle agent assignments around until the Scarred agent has Trained away the Scar, no need to send them back in the field with it.
Fortunately Chimera Squad's early game doesn't last very long and Chimera Squad's approach to early missions is overall much less likely to go wrong for the player than in prior games, so this is more a funny curiosity than anything else.
Deputy Agent
+4 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Unlike XCOM 2, Psi Offense growth is fixed and predictable, which is good. It would be pretty terrible if Verge's viability in a run was heavily influenced by strategic RNG; you wouldn't be able to just roll the dice anew with someone else, for one.
Levitation
Breach Phase Action: Instead of taking a shot, Verge lifts a chosen victim into the air. This removes their Cover-provided Defense (And Armor, if they're in High Cover) for the Breach phase, and if they were Alert or Aggressive prevents them from taking any action in the Breach phase. Can only be used on humanoid enemies who are susceptible to mental effects.
Deputy Agent
+4 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Unlike XCOM 2, Psi Offense growth is fixed and predictable, which is good. It would be pretty terrible if Verge's viability in a run was heavily influenced by strategic RNG; you wouldn't be able to just roll the dice anew with someone else, for one.
LevitationBreach Phase Action: Instead of taking a shot, Verge lifts a chosen victim into the air. This removes their Cover-provided Defense (And Armor, if they're in High Cover) for the Breach phase, and if they were Alert or Aggressive prevents them from taking any action in the Breach phase. Can only be used on humanoid enemies who are susceptible to mental effects.
I already covered the Breach Phase a little in the intro post, but let's get into more detail now that we're touching an ability that's used inside it.
The Breach Phase can itself be divided into two distinct phases: Pre-Breach, and During Breach. Pre-Breach presents the player with at least one entrance to assign agents to, as well as decide their turn order for that Encounter -the turn order selected in Pre-Breach is the order your agents will take their Breach Phase actions, and also the order they start out taking their turns in after the Breach Phase is over. Additionally, agents can potentially perform special actions Pre-Breach; by default agents have no such special actions available, but all agents have a Breach Item slot that can be filled, and different Breach Items give access to different actions. Some agents additionally have access to Pre-Breach actions innately or through leveling.
Pre-Breach actions themselves are always basically free bonus benefits (The agent doesn't replace a standard action when they take advantage of a Pre-Breach action), with the caveat that most of them can only be performed once in a given mission. So for one thing the player really ought to be aggressive about using Pre-Breach actions if a mission only has 1 Encounter anyway. (When they're allowed to, of course, which isn't consistently so)
Now, I said 'at least one entrance', and there's several wrinkles here. First of all, different entrances can have different caps on how many agents can be assigned to them: most Encounters have at least one main entrance all four agents can be assigned to, and some Encounters have only the one entrance where of course four agents can be assigned to it, but individual entrances can alternatively cap at 2 agents or even 1 agent. (An entrance never caps at exactly 3 agents, though)
As for why you'd consider sending agents into alternate entrances, there's two basic reasons, one of which is an explicit mechanic while the other is an implicit design sensibility point. The explicit mechanic is 'Breach Modifiers' -effects that are applied only to agents taking that particular entrance. Breach Modifiers can be positive or negative, and a given entrance can have 1-2 positive modifiers, or one negative, or sometimes simultaneously at least one positive modifier and a negative modifier. Positive modifiers include stuff like agents assigned to that entrance getting additional Aim in the Breach Phase, or taking reduced damage if they get shot in the Breach Phase, or being guaranteed to crit if they hit. A handful of modifiers actually apply to the first turn after the Breach Phase is over, but they're atypical. Negative modifiers include things like taking additional damage if shot, enemies getting more Aim against them, or the agents having reduced Aim during the Breach Phase. (The game is good about not letting modifiers overlap when they directly cancel each other out: 'agents take 2 more damage' can't be on the same entrance 'agents take 2 less damage' is on, for example)
The implicit design sensibility point is that different entrances give different starting points on the map. This is unfortunately a bit of a blind choice if you don't already have things strongly memorized, but generally speaking if there's a main entrance and alternate entrances, the alternate entrances have fewer enemies watching them (Making them safer), are more likely to result in easy flanks once the Breach Phase is over, and tend to have lower Alertness on enemies where applicable. The game is also imperfect at it -there's some cases where side entrances are more visible to enemies and/or worse at getting flanks than the main entrance is. In conjunction with it being a blind choice where the player isn't making an even partially-informed decision in relation to the map layout, this aspect of the game is not ideal. (Qualifier: certain Encounters have you able to see into the map area during the Pre-Breach section, where it actually is a slightly informed choice. You don't get to see enemy positions or the like, though, hence 'slightly informed')
So that's Pre-Breach. The During Breach portion (Which is what I'm usually referring to on this site when I say 'the Breach Phase') is the point at which your agents burst in and ambush the enemy. You get a brief series of animations of everyone bashing in doors, jumping in through windows, etc, as appropriate to their entrance, and then the camera follows whichever agent is set to act first, culminating in an over-the-shoulder view of the room.
I'm bothering to explain this perspective point because it actually ties into mechanics: in the Breach Phase, you do not get to assess the map as a whole. You see only what that first agent can see (Well, not literally) until they take their action, at which point you move on to the second agent and see only roughly what they can see, and so on until the Breach Phase is over entirely. Crucially, you have to choose each agent's decision with no ability to check what the options of following agents will be; this can result in situations where you have a couple agents take out 2 out of 3 enemies in view, and then discover your third agent has no enemies they can affect because that third enemy is not visible to them, where they actually could have shot one of the two enemies you already took down. Getting a sense for how to avoid this kind of situation is one of the game's more subtle and difficult-to-articulate bits of mastery/learning curve; I got better at it as I played, but I'm not sure how I'd explain what changed in my approach to get that result.
Anyway, by default agents have exactly two options: they can shoot an enemy, or they can 'Cover Rush', which is them basically skipping their turn. It does get them in Cover before the enemy takes their shots, so enemies will have reduced odds of hitting them and if they're in High Cover they'll take 1 less damage if hit, but you really should just treat it as skipping their Breach Phase turn; it should basically only be done when an agent has no targets. (With... one partial except we'll get to later)
I specify 'by default', because as we're seeing with Verge here, most agents gain a Breach Phase action at Deputy Agent. (Also one agent innately replaces 'shoot people' with a different action, but we'll get there when we get there) Note that in all such cases performing the Breach Phase action means not taking a regular shot; Verge can't shoot anyone in a Breach Phase where he Levitated someone.
I should also explicitly note that each Breach Phase action resolves immediately, before the next agent gets a chance to make decisions. Conceptually the Breach Phase represents your squad bursting in and attacking simultaneously (With time stop-y visualization being used to make it look like that's happening), but mechanically you get to see agent 1 fire, see if they hit, see if they downed their target, etc, before picking agent 2's action.
Anyway, once all of the player's agents have taken their Breach Phase actions, it's time for the (surviving) enemies to get their own Breach Phase actions. This brings us to Alertness; when the Breach Phase starts, each enemy is in one of three states: Surprised, Alert, or Aggressive. These are clearly delineated in-game through, among other things, the color of their target icon at the bottom of the screen: Surprised enemies get a green icon, Alert enemies are orange, while Aggressive enemies are red. These determine exactly what possible actions they can take in the Breach Phase.
Surprised is slightly special, in that it additionally actually matters during the player portion of the Breach Phase: your agents get +30 Aim against Surprised enemies, while Alert and Aggressive enemies have no special modifiers like this.
Back to 'enemies taking action', though.
Surprised enemies are straightforward: they don't get a Breach Phase action, standing there in dumbfounded shock, completely caught off-guard by the Chimera Squad bursting into the room and opening fire. They behave normally once the Breach Phase is over, though.
Aggressive enemies are also straightforward: they take a regular shot at an agent of yours they can see. This is one way entrances can matter: if an agent comes through an entrance, and there's an Aggressive enemy that only has sight on that entrance, then that agent is going to be shot at if they don't prevent that Aggressive enemy from acting. Note that agents who did not Cover Rush are in fact in the open when Aggressive enemies shoot at them, meaning enemies have maximum accuracy against them and have boosted crit chance against them, so Aggressive enemies are pretty dangerous!
Alert is the most complicated to talk about because it varies pretty widely. Alert enemies can re-position with 1 action point, Hunker Down, or use abilities unique to them; this latter point means the Alert state has wildly variable implications, as some enemies are sufficiently bland all they have is 'move elsewhere' and 'Hunker Down' while other enemies have extremely high-impact Alert actions -some enemies you'd rather they be Aggressive than Alert! When we get to enemies, I will in fact be listing the individual Alert actions a given enemy can take. That said, no Alert action will ever result in damage on an agent; special Alert actions are generally defensive actions, like throwing a smoke grenade.
One general wrinkle to all this I should point out is that dedicated melee enemies (Such as Chryssalids and Faceless) are handled... poorly by all this, in that they get an assigned such alertness level, but the only way it matters is that being Surprised gives your agents the Aim bonus against them. Aggressive dedicated melee enemies don't charge and attack your squad, and Alert dedicated melee enemies won't even reposition! No matter their state, they sit there and do nothing in the Breach Phase. So Aggressive such enemies can and often should be ignored, and Alert ones are similarly a much lesser priority than other enemies being Alert.
Dedicated melee enemies really should've replaced Alert and Aggressive with their own special 'not Surprised' alertness state, with its own color (dark blue or something else not readily mistaken for the other colors), even if the actual mechanics weren't touched. (That is, I think dedicated melee should've been able to do something in the Breach Phase, but am mostly focusing right now on UI clarity, where the current state will confuse a learning player)
Anyway, the distribution of Surprised/Alert/Aggressive enemies is partially randomized but heavily influenced by how far along in a given Investigation you are plus how far into the campaign overall you are. At the beginning of a given Investigation, enemies will always all start out Surprised, and as missions progress you'll start seeing some Alert but none Aggressive, and eventually Aggressive enemies start occurring, all while Surprised increasingly becomes a rarity. In your first Investigation, the period in which every enemy is Surprised lasts several missions and only slowly starts adding the occasional Alert enemy, and by the time you're at the end of your first Investigation Aggressive enemies are still a minority and Surprised enemies merely uncommon.
In your third Investigation, only its very first mission will have every enemy Surprised, with Alert and Aggressive counts rising sooner and higher afterward; toward the end of your third Investigation, it's not unusual for a room to be made of 9 Aggressive enemies, a couple Alert enemies, and no Surprised enemies, that kind of thing. This is actually one of the main ways difficulty goes up over a run, as it becomes harder to entirely prevent offensive action from the enemy.
Though as noted earlier it can also be influenced by which entrance you take, including by Breach modifiers. Security doors that require a keycard (Or Terminal or Haywire) to access have as their primary selling point that going through them downgrades a bunch of enemies to Surprised, for example. (They were just sure nobody could attack from that direction, after all)
A side effect of all this is that special Breach Phase actions rise in prominence as a run goes on: initially, special Breach Phase actions are of little or no value, where you're better off just shooting Surprised enemies instead of bothering with special actions that are designed to do things like prevent Aggressive enemies from attacking. This is slightly unfortunate in terms of initial teaching of a new player, where a player will get their initial agents to Deputy Agent, see these interesting-sounding Breach Phase abilities, and then if they try to make use of them are liable to be underwhelmed. The Breach Phase actions unlocked at Deputy Agent probably should've been assigned to a later level -swapped with Special Agent, for example.
This isn't a dire flaw, thankfully, and Chimera Squad clearly did build with an eye toward individual players playing 3+ runs, so it's an understandable oopsie, but... it's still not ideal.
Anyway, as for Verge's own action...
Levitate is a cute shoutout to The Bureau. (If you're not aware: in The Bureau, one of the player character's key abilities from almost the beginning of the game is levitating enemies out of cover) The inability to target units immune to mental effects is a little puzzling at this step, but makes more sense in context of a later ability.
Note that 'humanoid' in Chimera Squad is a broader pool than in XCOM 2: in addition to regular humans and hybrids, it also includes Sectoids, Mutons, and Vipers, as Levitation is really operating under the same limitations as eg Justice in XCOM 2; that it can only be targeted on enemies who use the core animation sets. Chimera Squad has four core animation sets, one for humans (That hybrids also use), one for Sectoids, one for Mutons (Not Berserkers), and one for Vipers. By extension note that even though Andromedons could be described as humanoid, they are not susceptible to Levitate, presumably because they have a custom animation set rather than deriving from the core animations. Codices are susceptible, conversely, even though they're a very unusual enemy in a lot of ways -they still use a human animation set at their core.
As for its actual utility, Levitate is a straightforward example of what I said earlier about special Breach Phase actions: it's of limited use initially, but gets better later. A Surprised enemy in High Cover can theoretically be useful to Levitate, taking away 40 Defense and a point of Armor so your other agents can shoot them, but usually Verge will be better off shooting someone himself when he's in the phase of the game where Surprised is the dominant alertness level.
Though on the note of shooting things, I should point out that Levitate is not a way to save ammo in the Breach Phase: one of the less intuitive and more easily-overlooked decisions in Chimera Squad is that shots your agents fire in the Breach Phase don't cost ammo. This is probably for the best in terms of the design, but it's unexpected and the game itself doesn't tutorialize you on this point.
Anyway, once Alert and especially Aggressive enemies start becoming regular, Levitate starts gaining real utility. Keep in mind that against frail enemies that are in the open it may be better to simply shoot them, though -if you can readily down the only Aggressive enemy by shooting them, it's a bit of a waste to Levitate them, even if it will take three shooting actions to down them. But against Alert or Aggressive enemies that have high HP, and/or are in High Cover where taking them down is implausible, Levitate is amazing.
Conveniently, Andromedons are the only enemy type in the game Verge can't Levitate where you would potentially really want to do so; enemies outside the core animation sets mostly don't have Alert actions at all, and there aren't many enemies that are immune to psionics while using the standard human animation set. (By which I mean there's one non-boss case, and said case is low-threat in the Breach Phase) Andromedons are really the only enemy that is tough enough to be difficult to gun down, deadly enough to want to force them to stop, and actually a meaningful participant in the Breach Phase where Verge can't Levitate them.
Anyway, Levitate's utility also rises as the number of Alert and Aggressive enemies goes up. As noted earlier, if there's just one Aggressive enemy and they're in the open, gunning them down is generally smarter than Levitating them. When there's 4+ enemies you really don't want acting, being able to spend a single agent's action on preventing a deadly attack or powerful Alert action becomes an incredible bit of utility.
Surprisingly, even though Levitate is a callback to The Bureau (Where Levitate's primary utility was to mark a target for death by denying them the protection of cover), the utility of negating Cover bonuses is relatively rare to be the draw of Levitate. Often when you're making real use of it, the optimal thing to do is to use it to negate a problematic action while the rest of the squad ignores the affected enemy in favor of trying to stop other problematic actions, or exploit the Surprised status of other enemies to get in easy damage (Among other points, a Surprised enemy in Low Cover is still easier to hit than a non-Surprised enemy whose Cover defenses have been removed by Levitate: Surprised providing +30 Aim is more than the 20 Defense Low Cover provides), or whatever.
Part of this is that Chimera Squad isn't a big believer in having clear top priority targets. A given enemy might be more dangerous overall than its buddies, but you simply don't see cases of one key enemy who accounts for 50% of the entire room's damage output and 75% of its HP, or anything like that.
Another part of this is that Levitate is less of a boost to lethality against a target than you might expect. (Certainly, less of a boost than its equivalent in The Bureau, where removing a target from Cover could spike the damage it was taking more than ten times) By which I mean that, counterintuitively, Levitate does not cause a target to be considered to be in the open; your agents won't get a crit chance boost for firing on a Levitated target. It merely removes the Defense and, if they were in High Cover, Armor. (Okay, and also makes them more visible: there's situations where an enemy in High Cover will be impossible for a fellow agent to shoot, unless the target is Levitated)
Mind, even if it did give a crit chance boost, this would barely matter... but Verge's next level provides a perfectly good launch point for talking about that whole thing, so wait a minute.
Anyway, yeah, Levitate starts out pretty 'what is this for?' but by the end of the game is constantly incredibly useful, especially when dealing with Sacred Coil's Guardians. (Who are far too tough to take down readily and have a high-impact Alert action you really don't want going off) I'd argue it's probably actually the best special Breach Phase action in the game!
But onto that next level.
Field Agent
+3 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
CrowdsourcePassive: Each enemy in the Neural Network is worth +5 Aim and +10 Crit chance, on top of the usual +10 Aim.
OR
CollarPassive: Enemies in the Neural Network will be knocked Unconscious anytime they should have died.
Essentially, you're choosing between either having bigger payoff from adding people to the Neural Network, vs ensuring people won't exit the Neural Network. (Bar Andromedons and Codices, who can never be knocked Unconscious but can be added to the Neural Network)
Collar is probably the better choice, overall. It makes it less important to pair up Verge with squadmates who are naturally inclined toward knockouts (Concrete example: Torque helps keep Verge mobile in spite of his turret-y tendency, but is herself biased toward lethal tools she has no way to make nonlethal), lets you replace Tranq Rounds on the squad with some other Item (Preferably lethal ammo) with minimal loss, makes it so you pretty consistently end up with Intel from missions without specifically going out of your way to make it happen, and crucially Crowdsource's benefits are less than you might assume.
The thing is, in Chimera Squad, all of your weapons get exactly 1 point of damage added when triggering a crit. This makes the +10 crit from Crowdsource not merely unreliable of a benefit in most situations, but a benefit that basically doesn't matter when it does apply. A low-roll crit will actually be weaker than a high-roll non-crit on most weapons in Chimera Squad, and the exceptions -Pistols and Gauntlets- are merely tied. Non-weapon attacks aren't any better: they do +1 as well, or do +0, or are simply incapable of getting crits in the first place!
This means the only part of Crowdsource you really care about is the +5 Aim, and while it's nice to have Neural Network's Aim boost ramp faster, it doesn't take many people inside it for Verge to hit the point of regularly hitting 100 accuracy on enemies in Low Cover, especially if other Aim support is involved, such as Verge's Rifle having a Scope of some kind. Being able to hold onto the benefits at little effort will usually be more useful; the only exception is that Crowdsource is unequivocally better when dealing heavily with Andromedons and Codices, since even Collar won't prevent them from leaving the Neural Network upon being downed.
Furthermore, as I noted earlier you're increasingly incentivized to shift to lethal measures later in the game, which means Collar tends to win out as the better ability in the long haul, even though early on Crowdsource will impress more. This is sufficiently true that unfortunately I consider this a bit of a non-choice, where you should just always take Collar unless you're specifically planning to permanently bench Verge anyway at some future date. (Maybe you intend to go for Sacred Coil last, and intend to bench him at that point) This is especially dramatic in missions that involve heavy use of reinforcements, where Collar can result in Verge kind of incidentally reaching +50 or more Aim from Neural Network bonuses without requiring the player to actively try to hold onto Neural Network bonuses.
If crits were higher-impact (eg if they could be up to +5 damage, as per XCOM 2/War of the Chosen), I'd personally still prefer Collar, but Crowdsource would be a gamble-y alternative, not 'functionally the same-but-worse'. As-is, though?... alas.
As an aside, one point of note about Chimera Squad is that it does such a good job of communicating that it's a game-y game, not a photorealism-as-ideal game, that it took me a few days to have the thought that Collar doesn't make the slightest bit of in-universe sense. The gameplay isn't meant to be as literal a representation of in-universe reality as a turn-based game can get; it's meant to be a game with reality as inspiration, not what defines the underlying logic of the gameplay.
A related point is that XCOM 2 went over better with me, overall, for basically the same reason but less so; that the first Firaxis XCOM game presented itself in a manner that placed photorealism as the highest aesthetic, and much of the game's secondary signaling made it clear that wasn't just a visual ideal, but that the game really was going for gritty realism in more or less every layer, and the times it didn't fit to that were failings, not deliberate decisions to eschew reality in favor of gameplay. XCOM 2, meanwhile, not only has a slightly cartoonized aesthetic, with colors a touch too vivid and whatnot, but has myriad secondary elements communicate that it's a game willing to consciously sacrifice realism for gameplay reasons, even if something in the vicinity of photorealism remains it's preferred default outcome.
So even though XCOM 2 still shares some glaring realism holes with its predecessor, I've found myself much less inclined to criticize it for them than the prior game, because reasonably often when XCOM 2 has something not make in-universe sense, it's clearly because it makes for better gameplay, not because the devs inexplicably thought 'this is how reality works, right?'
As an aside, one point of note about Chimera Squad is that it does such a good job of communicating that it's a game-y game, not a photorealism-as-ideal game, that it took me a few days to have the thought that Collar doesn't make the slightest bit of in-universe sense. The gameplay isn't meant to be as literal a representation of in-universe reality as a turn-based game can get; it's meant to be a game with reality as inspiration, not what defines the underlying logic of the gameplay.
A related point is that XCOM 2 went over better with me, overall, for basically the same reason but less so; that the first Firaxis XCOM game presented itself in a manner that placed photorealism as the highest aesthetic, and much of the game's secondary signaling made it clear that wasn't just a visual ideal, but that the game really was going for gritty realism in more or less every layer, and the times it didn't fit to that were failings, not deliberate decisions to eschew reality in favor of gameplay. XCOM 2, meanwhile, not only has a slightly cartoonized aesthetic, with colors a touch too vivid and whatnot, but has myriad secondary elements communicate that it's a game willing to consciously sacrifice realism for gameplay reasons, even if something in the vicinity of photorealism remains it's preferred default outcome.
So even though XCOM 2 still shares some glaring realism holes with its predecessor, I've found myself much less inclined to criticize it for them than the prior game, because reasonably often when XCOM 2 has something not make in-universe sense, it's clearly because it makes for better gameplay, not because the devs inexplicably thought 'this is how reality works, right?'
This was an element I didn't consciously register as a factor until I played Chimera Squad, hence part of why I'm commenting on it here and not in one of my many, many XCOM 2 posts.
That and there's a progression here; I will not be at all surprised if XCOM 3 is even blunter about moving in this direction.
Special Agent
+1 HP
+3 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Mind Flay
Turn ending action: Does 2-3 damage on all conscious enemies in the Neural Network, regardless of location and Armor. Enemies reduced to 0 HP by Mind Flay are knocked Unconscious instead of killed. Unconscious enemies are unaffected. 1 turn cooldown.
In theory this slightly reduces the value of Collar, since if you're successfully leveraging Mind Flay it would knock victims Unconscious regardless, but Collar is still usually going to be better than Crowdsource.
Special Agent
+1 HP
+3 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Mind FlayTurn ending action: Does 2-3 damage on all conscious enemies in the Neural Network, regardless of location and Armor. Enemies reduced to 0 HP by Mind Flay are knocked Unconscious instead of killed. Unconscious enemies are unaffected. 1 turn cooldown.
In theory this slightly reduces the value of Collar, since if you're successfully leveraging Mind Flay it would knock victims Unconscious regardless, but Collar is still usually going to be better than Crowdsource.
Mind Flay itself is fairly situational. Unless you're specifically utilizing eg a Motile Inducer to let Verge grab a bunch of enemies in a single round, it's unlikely you'll have more than one, maybe two enemies active (ie not Unconscious) in the Neural Network at any given moment, and if you're only hitting one enemy it's literally equivalent to a Subdue, except the Subdue would let you make movement happen if you need it and can be targeted on several enemy types Verge can't add to the Neural Network.
Trying to set up for a mass Mind Flay is a cool trick shot in theory, but in practice the base damage is low and Chimera Squad tends to shy away from serious mass-damage tools, making it harder to set up for Mind Flay to be KOing multiple enemies, or to soften them up enough for other agents to down enemies en mass themselves.
I kind of wish Mind Flay had gained a point of damage to each target per enemy in the Neural Network. That would've made the trick shot potential more obviously worth pursuing (Grab three enemies, and now you're hitting all three for 5-6 damage, for a total of 15-18 damage), and more importantly it would make a steady accumulation of Unconscious enemies in the Neural Network slowly boost its effectiveness against later enemies, where it would be a lot more likely to end up worth using on even a single target.
It needed something to make it more reliably relevant, in any event. You'll use it every once in a while, but... not often. Sometimes an enemy will move somewhere out of line of sight of Verge, or an enemy he added to his Neural Network on a prior turn ends up low enough on HP Verge should Stupor someone else and Mind Flay for an action-efficient KO, or otherwise circumstances contrive so Mind Flay is a smart thing to do in the moment, but much of the time he's better off shooting someone. This only gets worse as the game progresses: you'll ultimately upgrade Rifle damage twice, adding a point of Shred with the second upgrade, and equipping Verge with a lethal ammo type functionally adds a minimum of 2 damage against valid targets. At the beginning of the game, shooting someone with the Rifle is 3-5 damage vs Mind Flaying a couple people is 4-6 damage: Mind Flay has wider damage variance, but is competitive in such a case. Shooting someone with a Mastercrafted Rifle and, say, Dragon Rounds, results in them immediately taking 6-8 damage plus more damage when their turn rolls around, at which point Mind Flay needs to hit three targets to be competitive.
To be fair, Verge does get to upgrade Mind Flay later, adding a point of damage so it's also 6-8 total if hitting two targets, but if you're playing the game well Verge often doesn't get opportunities to Mind Flay multiple targets without using Teamwork or otherwise giving Verge more opportunities to act.
Also to be fair, Mind Flay entirely ignores Armor, but... there's only really one enemy in the game this is particularly noteworthy against once you have Mastercrafted Rifles. The fact is, Chimera Squad is a lot less Armor-happy than XCOM 2; the majority of enemies are entirely without Armor even into the and of the game, and where XCOM 2 went up to 6 Armor on the highest difficulty, in Chimera Squad no regular enemy can ever rise above 2 Armor as a baseline. (There is exactly one boss enemy that can have more, fought in one Investigation) In practice only Gray Phoenix's Legionnaires are a regularly-existent threat that present enough of an Armor problem for ignoring Armor to be an inherently substantial quality. (They can gain additional Armor mid-combat) Not helping is that, just as in XCOM 2, Armor is biased toward robotic threats -so enemies Verge can never use Mind Flay on.
If, say, Psi Operatives had had access to Mind Flay in XCOM 2, it would've been a little niche but notably appreciated when dealing with ADVENT Shieldbearers, Andromedons, and ultimately Gatekeepers, just as for example Volt can be useful against those targets because it ignores their high Armor and potentially-high Defense. Chimera Squad's reluctance to pass out Armor to enemies really hurts Mind Flay, alas.
Bizarrely, one advantage of Mind Flay is it's one of those rare abilities that works even if Verge is on fire. I suspect it was overlooked, rather than this being deliberate, but it has very limited ability to come up (Almost no enemies can set your agents on fire) so it's not like it matters that much.
Unlock Potential Training: +20 Dodge.
An noted earlier, every agent gets to 'unlock potential' at this level via Training, which is always a stat boost package and it always takes 3 days. Unlike basic Training, the specifics vary by character; this +20 Dodge isn't universal.
Unlock Potential Training: +20 Dodge.
An noted earlier, every agent gets to 'unlock potential' at this level via Training, which is always a stat boost package and it always takes 3 days. Unlike basic Training, the specifics vary by character; this +20 Dodge isn't universal.
Oh, and Dodge is unchanged from the days of XCOM 2: it's a percent chance to halve incoming damage, rounding down the damage (ie 5 damage would become 2), and a Dodged hit cannot be a crit. This includes you find it primarily on the same sorts of enemies as XCOM 2, like Vipers. There's... one wrinkle to this that could've been communicated better, but that's for a later post.
As for Verge getting Dodge out of Training... um, okay? If you're using Verge, yeah, you'll have him perform this Training eventually just because he's only going to sit out 1, maybe 2 missions and it can help, but I'm pretty confused as to why Verge gets Dodge. On a more narrative or conceptual level, Dodge continues to be a stat for representing that a unit has fast reflexes and manages to duck out of the way of weapons fire enough it only grazes them, so... why does Verge get this?... and in terms of more raw gameplay, I'd have sooner expected a Psi Offense boost, or maybe a Mobility boost to make his turret behavior a bit less constrictive on his movement.
To be fair, I'm not sure what would be both a good choice for Verge and also one that stays inside the framework the game cleaves to. Chimera Squad is even more reluctant than XCOM 2 to pass out Defense, for example, which I find understandable given how wonky non-Cover Defense was in Enemy Unknown/Within, and Chimera Squad clearly also prefers to only give Armor to specific agents who could be described as specialists in survival. It also clearly prefers to avoid repeat bonuses (Both within an agent and across agents), when of course all agents have Basic Training give HP. You could theoretically give him Aim from Training, but that goes wonkily with Neural Network's benefits, where it wouldn't benefit him anytime Neural Network was already bringing him to or past 100% accuracy.
Passing out Dodge to Verge may well have been done because it's a relatively safe thing to give him that doesn't step on the toes of any other design rules, basically.
(It's alternatively possible this is meant to be 'Verge uses telekinesis to protect himself, but it's limited in its effectiveness', but I'd be a little surprised if a dev said that was in fact the explicit thought process. It's too bad the Training options never provide narrative justifications for the effects: it makes it impossible to judge how meaningful it is that the game suggests no such explanation itself)
Senior Agent
+2 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Network HealingPassive: At the end of each of Verge's turns, he heals 1 HP for each enemy currently in the Neural Network.
OR
SlamPassive: Levitate now does 1-3 damage, ignoring Armor, to the chosen target at the end of the Breach phase, while also adding the target to Verge's Neural Network. If the damage from Slam brings them to 0 HP, they are knocked Unconscious instead of killed.
Slam's in-game description is extremely misleading and makes it sound like a weak attacking action you can use freely, like Stupor and Battle Madness, rather than communicating that it's an upgrade to Levitate. Nnnot ideal wording.
Slam adding the target to the Neural Network is, of course, why you can't target units immune to mental effects with Levitate. That way, you don't either have your upgrade to Levitate include a secret disadvantage, or have to address what happens when a Neural Network-adding action is used on units you're not supposed to be able to add to the Neural Network. Kind of a weird final outcome, but understandable when you have the whole picture.
Also, to be clear Slam doesn't add the target to Verge's Neural Network until it actually delivers the damage. If you target an enemy with Levitate and then other agents follow up with enough firepower to down the target, the target will not be Slammed and will not be added to Verge's Neural Network. Fortunately, damage ranges in Chimera Squad are sufficiently tight it's reasonably feasible to precisely knock a target low without risk of a damage spike leading to an unexpected kill; among other points, as noted earlier crits only add 1 damage.
Surprisingly, Slam's damage is affected by relevant Breach modifiers! This can allow Slam to secure a reliable KO at times if you keep it in mind, which is notable since its damage minimum is so low it can normally only be counted on if a target is at literally 1 HP.
Personally, I tend to prefer Network Healing, especially if I'm not including Terminal in the team. While Chimera Squad's optimal play involves rarely letting enemies act, this ideal isn't always possible to achieve completely reliably, especially later in a run, and/or on higher difficulties, and/or if you've selected a weaker team of agents. (There is, unfortunately, a pretty noticeable extent to which some agents are simply less useful/powerful than others, where I can clearly pick out a team that is handicapping the player to use) Among other points, several of the game's most powerful tools for avoiding damage cannot be counted on being reliably acquired; a given run may get few or none of them!
Verge getting free healing in bad situations is thus more reliably appreciated than you might assume. Among other points, while Medikits don't take an action point to use in Chimera Squad, by default they have a very limited range, and it can be a burden to move somebody close enough to heal Verge. The Timeline turn order mechanics mean it can also be tricky to arrange for whoever has the Medikit to act before enemies without creating some other problem. And of course you might not want to use the Medikit yet, just in case you need it later n the mission. Free healing that doesn't depend on anyone having to take action is really useful for simplifying a variety of potentially-sticky situations.
Slam is useful, but burdened with wonkiness that I think genuinely makes it less generally useful than Network Healing.
First is the point that the damage on Slam is unreliable and weak. You can only count on it doing 1 damage under usual conditions, with limited ability to create conditions in which it does better. In terms of contributing to an Encounter, 1-3 has quite good odds of literally not mattering: say you Slam a target that has 6 HP and do 1 damage, followed by other agents firing a couple follow-up shots that each do 3-4 damage. (Blueblood can do this on his own by double-firing his Pistol, for example) In that case, Slam's damage literally didn't matter, and in fact even if the first of these follow-up shots is a crit and high roll Slam's damage still hasn't done anything.
This leads to another subtle issue, in that you can reduce this problem by placing Verge at the end of the turn order, and having him Levitate any enemy that happens to end up at 1 HP, ensuring it takes them out. This is pretty opposed to the default pressures of Levitate: to take advantage of it removing Cover's defensive benefits, Verge needs to go before at least one agent in the Breach Phase. Put more simply: Levitate by default prefers Verge take the first turn slot, while maximizing the odds of Slam being a finisher means having Verge take the last turn slot.
The fact that Slam ignores Armor doesn't really help. For starters, just as I noted with Mind Flay earlier, penetrating Armor isn't a hugely useful quality in Chimera Squad. For another, just like in XCOM 2 any damaging attack that connects always does at least 1 damage, no matter how much Armor the target has; anytime Slam rolls 1 point of damage against an Armored target, that's the exact same outcome as if Slam didn't ignore Armor!
Also not helping is that it's actually preferable if possible to set it up so enemies don't go down in the Breach Phase, but rather as soon as their first turn rolls around, since turn order is decided at the end of the Breach Phase. Poisoning an enemy and leaving them with low HP in the Breach Phase can result in them being slotted in early in the Timeline and then 'wasting' the slot by the Poison finishing them without them actually acting. Notably, Venom Rounds or Dragon Rounds are guaranteed to be accessible no later than shortly after finishing your second Investigation, and Caustic Rounds can randomly be acquired as early as partway through your first Investigation: a run eventually reaches the point of it being the case this situation can be arranged, hurting Slam's utility.
Alternatively, one could focus on Slam adding the victim to the Neural Network right at the start of the Encounter. That's a passive +10 Aim, or +15 Aim and +10 crit if you took Crowdsource earlier.
But... this is a bit of a double-edged sword, since Verge can't use Stupor or Battle Madness on enemies already inside his Neural Network. A Verge who takes Network Healing can Levitate a key target he really doesn't want performing its Alert action, then Stupor them once the Breach Phase is over, and 50% of the time this means delaying any chance of them being a problem all the way to the second Round. A Verge who takes Slam can't chain disables on such a target.
This is particularly problematic during the Sacred Coil Investigation, as Sacred Coil forces are so heavy on robots it's not unusual for Verge to have only one or two Neural Network targets in the first place, and Sacred Coil has one of the enemies you'd most want to chain-disable!
It's also a really big qualifier because it means you can't try to argue that if you like Levitating targets a lot it's free damage and a free Neural Network link: it's an upgrade that can be actively taking away useful options from you. And once you've taken Slam, you can't have Verge choose to use a non-Slam Levitate! If you could have Verge do a 'plain' Levitate as an option still, Slam would at least be cleanly an upgrade, even if I'd still personally argue it'd be the overall weaker and less useful choice at this tier.
As-is, though, I think Slam is right at the edge of 'trap choice' territory. It has uses, but taking it can actively create problems, and it's never particularly great.
It's too bad, because I really like the idea of Slam a lot. If you can telekinetically lift someone, it makes sense you can telekinetically bash them into the ground. Even just abruptly 'letting go' could be quite dangerous to the target! But for whatever reason I rarely see pop culture acknowledge such possibilities.
Principal Agent
+2 Aim
+8 Psi Offense
Final Stats
10 HP (Counting Training, but not other boosts)
79 Aim
90 Psi Offense
It should be pointed out that Verge actually has one of the better Aim scores in Chimera Squad, even though in XCOM 2 80 was 'average' for a max-level soldier. In general Chimera Squad has somewhat deflated peak Aim scores relative to XCOM 2 -though on the other hand XCOM 2 had 10 Defense passed out pretty freely to enemies by the end of a run, whereas Chimera Squad is loathe to give enemies innate Defense. Period. As such, in the long haul agents functionally have about 10 more Aim than their raw stats suggest, in terms of expected final accuracy, compared to XCOM 2 soldiers.
Verge's Psi Offense is in a similar boat: 90 is 10 less than Psi Operatives could cap out at in XCOM 2, but Verge's primary Psi Offense abilities get bigger bonuses than the Psi Offense-using Psi Operative abilities, and enemy Will trends overall lower to boot. Stupor and Battle Madness rarely have odds below 100% in real play.
PuppeteerTurn ending action: Verge attempts to mind control every enemy in the Neural Network, performing a test of his Psi Offense against each individual's Will with a bonus of +50. Each victim who fails this test is under your control for their next 2-3 turns. One use per mission, though this use is only expended if Verge takes control of at least one enemy. Failure to control any enemies will instead result in a 2-turn cooldown.
Note that the cooldown is... janky. Sometimes I've had Verge able to try Puppeteer two turns in a row, sometimes not. I suspect action-gifting and other forms of turn manipulation like Teamwork are part of the problem, but regardless, always double-check Puppeteer if it completely fails, just in case you can already use it.
Puppeteer is an action that can be amazing with proper teamwork, including use of the Team Up ability, such as having Verge go first, add enemies to his Neural Network, then Terminal gifts him an action and uses Teamwork to make him go after her, and so he gets to add two more enemies to his Neural Network and finally try to Mind Control all four of them. (Potentially five, if you used Slam to grab someone in the Breach phase!) Suddenly half the enemies are fighting for you, not to mention drawing fire away from your proper squad members. That's a trick that can take a nightmare encounter and make it effortless.
So it's a good thing, design-wise, that it's a trick you can't do more than once in a mission.
Without support of that sort, Puppeteer is still a fairly solid action, though. Even grabbing one enemy can be useful -if Verge grabs the next enemy in the Timeline and has them contribute damage that leads to another enemy going down before it can act, that's very efficient!
Conveniently, anybody in the Neural Network who is currently Stunned will be un-Stunned if Puppeteer successfully takes control of them, avoiding wasting a turn of control. Also convenient is that the game does not count Mind Controlled enemies against you for determining whether you still need to clear an Encounter -if everything alive is under your control, even if they're about to leave your control, the game simply kills them off. (Not captures, which is a bit unfortunate)
Puppeteer is an action that can be amazing with proper teamwork, including use of the Team Up ability, such as having Verge go first, add enemies to his Neural Network, then Terminal gifts him an action and uses Teamwork to make him go after her, and so he gets to add two more enemies to his Neural Network and finally try to Mind Control all four of them. (Potentially five, if you used Slam to grab someone in the Breach phase!) Suddenly half the enemies are fighting for you, not to mention drawing fire away from your proper squad members. That's a trick that can take a nightmare encounter and make it effortless.
So it's a good thing, design-wise, that it's a trick you can't do more than once in a mission.
Without support of that sort, Puppeteer is still a fairly solid action, though. Even grabbing one enemy can be useful -if Verge grabs the next enemy in the Timeline and has them contribute damage that leads to another enemy going down before it can act, that's very efficient!
Conveniently, anybody in the Neural Network who is currently Stunned will be un-Stunned if Puppeteer successfully takes control of them, avoiding wasting a turn of control. Also convenient is that the game does not count Mind Controlled enemies against you for determining whether you still need to clear an Encounter -if everything alive is under your control, even if they're about to leave your control, the game simply kills them off. (Not captures, which is a bit unfortunate)
That said, if you're confident Verge will Mind Control a target, it's generally better to use Battle Madness and then Puppeteer, not Stupor, since Stupor's distinctive benefit is wasted if you Mind Control the target, whereas Battle Madness potentially generating free damage isn't negated by using Puppeteer successfully.
Something to keep in mind is that Verge's Mind Control will be broken early if he's disabled, such as by a Stun. Most surprising is that Psionic Suplex on Acolytes is part of the list of things that will break Verge's Mind Control!
Something to keep in mind is that Verge's Mind Control will be broken early if he's disabled, such as by a Stun. Most surprising is that Psionic Suplex on Acolytes is part of the list of things that will break Verge's Mind Control!
Something worth pointing out is that Puppeteer peaks in your second Investigation, realistically speaking: it's very difficult to get Verge to max level during your first Investigation (By default, in part due to the 'no experience for KOs' bug), and the vast majority of enemies gain 10 Will for each Investigation completed. So eg Shrike troops in your third Investigation will be a little more likely to shrug off Puppeteer than in your second Investigation, with no tools offering any possibility of offsetting this -it's not like there's any gear that raises Psi Offense, for example.
Also note that when a unit's Mind Control ends, they immediately get a full turn. This actually applies to both your own people being Mind Controlled and to enemies being grabbed by Puppeteer, but the point is that you should prefer to have controlled enemies who last two turns get into a position where they can't threaten your forces. This itself is oddly buggy; I've had cases where an enemy had the Mind Control end, their icon got moved to the bottom of the Timeline, then the next enemy took their full turn, then the Mind Controlled enemy took a full turn while the game insists it's currently the turn of that other enemy. I suspect the under-the-hood behavior is something like switching their team, then gifting them two action points, as this final behavior bears similarities to what happens when you gift action points to someone and have the gifter finish the turn: the game will still display it as being the gifter's turn until the recipient is also done acting.
Also note that Mind Flay will, in fact, do damage to all of Verge's puppets if you use it. Be careful, if your plans call for a puppet to stay conscious for another turn; don't mindlessly Stupor or Battle Madness followed by a Mind Flay if you've controlled some people.
Puppeteer itself is another reason why it's a bit difficult to justify using Mind Flay. Why go for a trick shot that does low damage to a bunch of enemies when you could have said trick shot mind control a bunch of enemies? Mind Flay does admittedly come two levels sooner, but once Verge is maxed it becomes a very relevant concern. And sure, Puppeteer only has one charge, but most missions are 1 Encounter anyway. It's mostly in plot missions, which are normally 3 Encounters, that Puppeteer isn't pressuring Mind Flay out of viability.
All that said, I also feel Puppeteer tends to lose value as a player's skill level goes up. It's most amazing when struggling to efficiently pull through an Encounter with a ton of enemies, where you can potentially arrange to turn things around by Puppeteering 2-4 enemies at once and suddenly not be under intense pressure. When you're at the point of being fairly reliable at downing enemies before they can act even when faced with 8+ enemies, it becomes a lot less likely to be all that worthwhile to set up a mass-Puppeteer, and there's almost no enemies in the game that are both possible to Mind Control and sufficiently high-impact as threats and/or in player hands that stealing one can be a 'big win'.
Also not helping is that some of the more notably durable threats where it'd be nice to bypass their HP are also some of the higher-Will threats (Or just straight-up immune), where Puppeteer is an actual gamble. Often you're better off just using Stupor and gambling on it rolling the 2-action-point Stun, and in some cases (Like pure melee enemies) even a 1-action-point Stun may be adequate to reliably neuter them for the turn.
I like Puppeteer's design overall and think the framework is broadly solid, but is hampered a bit by how it lines up with Chimera Squad's design. Among other points, since controlled enemies aren't taken into the next Encounter, it misses out on some possible use-cases: you're not going to get the Encounter down to 1 enemy who won't go until after Verge and two other agents have taken their turns and decide to gamble on the Mind Control to bring them into the next Encounter, because it doesn't work like that. You'll just down them. Puppeteer would probably hold up better in a framework more like XCOM 2's, not only for the 'I can grab this pod member to help against the next pod' aspect but also because turn order mechanics would favor it better: in XCOM 2, Verge could start his team's turn by using Battle Madness on an enemy, attempting to control them with Puppeteer, and then if it didn't work his squad would take the pod apart. In Chimera Squad's Timeline mechanics, generally if Verge can count on allies mopping up after him, the Encounter is nearly done and there's no point to taking control of an enemy.
If Puppeteer's framework returns in XCOM 3, with XCOM 3 sticking broadly closer to XCOM 2's design than Chimera Squad does, it will probably be a stronger and more interesting ability, basically.
Final Training: Gain Mind Lash.
Everybody unlocks final Training at their final level, which always takes 5 days. Unlike prior Training, this is straight-up unlocking a new ability, with completely unique effects to set each agent apart from the others.
Final Training: Gain Mind Lash.
Everybody unlocks final Training at their final level, which always takes 5 days. Unlike prior Training, this is straight-up unlocking a new ability, with completely unique effects to set each agent apart from the others.
I suspect this is conceptually an evolution of purchasing a skill for each class at the Guerrilla Tactics School in XCOM 2, though in practice it's so completely different in implications and context I suspect very few players draw such a connection. If XCOM 3 decides to use something like a hybrid of the two systems -say you need somebody of X class to reach Y rank before Z Training option becomes available, but then anybody of that class can spend a few days Training to get the benefit- that could potentially be quite interesting, at least if XCOM 3 is broadly following in the footsteps of War of the Chosen's design.
Mind Lash
Passive: Mind Flay does 1 more damage, for a total of 3-4 damage to each victim.
Bumping up the minimum damage by 50% is a pretty big boost to Mind Flay's ability to actually secure KOs. It doesn't really help it keep up with rising enemy durability and all, honestly (The standard is for enemies to gain 2 HP per Investigation you advance: +1 damage is still behind), but it does make it that little bit more likely to be used; if nothing else, Mind Flay is nice to have Verge simultaneously finish off a weakened enemy while still getting in some damage on another enemy, and Stupor in particular can have Verge add an enemy to his Neural Network that you then ignore for most or all of a Round, at which point on Verge's second turn it's reasonably natural for him to have 2 conscious enemies in his Neural Network and such a damage splitting scenario has a real chance of mattering to real play.
Mind LashPassive: Mind Flay does 1 more damage, for a total of 3-4 damage to each victim.
Bumping up the minimum damage by 50% is a pretty big boost to Mind Flay's ability to actually secure KOs. It doesn't really help it keep up with rising enemy durability and all, honestly (The standard is for enemies to gain 2 HP per Investigation you advance: +1 damage is still behind), but it does make it that little bit more likely to be used; if nothing else, Mind Flay is nice to have Verge simultaneously finish off a weakened enemy while still getting in some damage on another enemy, and Stupor in particular can have Verge add an enemy to his Neural Network that you then ignore for most or all of a Round, at which point on Verge's second turn it's reasonably natural for him to have 2 conscious enemies in his Neural Network and such a damage splitting scenario has a real chance of mattering to real play.
It also helps that Mind Lash bumps Mind Flay up to above a regular Subdue's damage, reducing the 'why not just Subdue?' issue. Unless you give Verge an Impact Frame, mind, but he's one of the poorer recipients for such, so that's a pretty mild qualifier.
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Visually, I'm a little frustrated by Verge's design, and indeed by the design of most of the hand-drawn Sectoids we see in the game, in that while you can tell they're derived from the XCOM 2 Sectoid design, they're not really true to it, and specifically 'soften' it to make them look less menacing. I somewhat understand why; the Sectoid death's-head grin is achieved in part by simply not giving them lips and cheeks, and lips are a big part of visually communicating emotional content in characters.
Even so, it's not the only part of how Sectoids get drawn in a more friendly fashion, and this whole thing is a fairly clear-cut example of a trend I've always found disturbing in fiction: that of propaganda-esque twisting of visual facts to serve current emotional agendas.
That is, in XCOM 2, Sectoids are baddies you're supposed to kill without remorse, so they have a skull-face that helps make them look perpetually angry, make weird hissing noises for their speech, don't bother with clothes, have an unnerving glowing chest, and their height and movement is clearly outside the range seen on your human soldiers. This was all selected to mark them as Other, as creepy and evil and kill-it-with-fire.
And now Chimera Squad is wanting you to view Sectoids as another kind of person, albeit one that's stranger than average, and so Sectoids have had their actual physical structure semi-retconned (You still see death's-head Sectoids, including in the hand-drawn art, they're just less prominent/common) to make them seem less menacing.
I'm actually essentially okay with the rest of the tweaks to how Sectoids are presented; Verge and enemy Sectoids wearing combat protection makes more sense than XCOM 2 Sectoids wandering around naked, honestly, and by a similar token civilian Sectoids wearing clothing is inoffensive. In turn, the fact that this hides the glowing chest, incidentally obscuring one of their creepier features, is also innocuous. I'm similarly okay with Sectoid hissing having not been represented as some manner of speech oddity, with the closest thing to a complaint I have being that Verge in particular doesn't ever use it, even when eg injured, even though enemy Sectoids still make hissing noises when, for example, injured but not downed.
I'm similarly fine with the subtle tweak to how Sectoid eyes are presented so they're not trapped in a perpetual glare. This is actually ambiguous and genuinely falls inside the umbrella of perception-as-reality fiction plays with; that while XCOM 2's Sectoid model is designed so that it's more or less physically impossible for them to not look like they're glaring, it's a sufficiently small, subtle thing that I can buy that it is, in-universe, more like a representation of how Sectoids stick in your soldiers' memories; that the Perpetually Glaring Sectoids of XCOM 2 is what you'd get if a talented artist fighting for X-COM came back to the Avenger and sat down to draw what they saw on the battlefield, and subtle elements like the perpetual glare are their own emotional experience leaking in to the drawing, while Chimera Squad's hand-drawn Sectoids are more like what that same artist might draw when doing a painting of a Sectoid model after the war was over.
But the removal of the skull-face thing, while I'm sympathetic to the lips-as-expression component, still feels a step too far.
On the plus side, the in-engine models and animations do a better job of straddling that line. While Sectoids in Chimera Squad don't use their amazing climbing-down-ladders-face-first animation, I can forgive that given they're also now carrying guns, and notably Chimera Squad shies away from the 'soldier stows weapon on back with no visible way of keeping it attached' thing XCOM 2 does anytime it wants a soldier to use their hands as part of the animation. Otherwise, all Sectoids, including Verge himself, do actually animate notably differently from human and Hybrid combatants; that for example Verge will hop directly up to a ledge in some cases where your human agents would climb up, and aside the lack of hissing Verge's 'ow, I was shot' animation is very close to one of the XCOM 2 Sectoid animations that genuinely looks odd coming from a humanoid frame.
Interestingly, Verge doesn't wear shoes. He has bandages around his feet, and not even covering their entirety. Particularly interesting is if you compare him against some civilian Sectoids...
... you find that this seems to be something of a preference among Sectoids. Some of them wear boots or the like that cover the entirety of their feet, but a lot of them have a wrapping around the middle of their foot and nothing more. If you're not paying attention it's easy to think you're just seeing the strap of a sandal or something of the sort, but no, Sectoids apparently aren't big fans of shoes. This is interesting!
Also have a screenshot of a death's-head civilian Sectoid: like I said, Chimera Squad doesn't actually do away with the death's-head entirely.
Moving back to Verge himself, though...
Broadly speaking, Verge is... well, he's Spock of the original Star Trek. He's a not-quite-human buddy whose displayed emotional range is fairly low, who is presented as overall on the smart side but not really 'getting' the emotionality of his teammates. There's nuance there, but it's pretty clear Verge was patterned pretty heavily after Spock.
It feels a bit weird, because this image of Sectoids as brainy but low-emotion only maybe exists in classic X-COM. In the Firaxis games, they've been quite consistently feral-seeming; if anything, I'd have expected a Sectoid character to have anger problems or something.
On the other hand, while I think it could've been communicated better, Chimera Squad actually stays away from stereotyping the Sectoids; this can be invisible in a given run, unfortunately, as the only unambiguous Sectoid characters you're guaranteed to not only see/hear but know are Sectoids in the initial run are Verge and the Sectoid newscaster, both of whom come across a bit similarly.
However, Floyd Tesseract is another Sectoid character in Chimera Squad, just one it's easy to miss is a Sectoid. You mostly hear him as a voice on the radio, and the game doesn't go out of its way to explicitly spell out that he's a Sectoid: you have to have a specific mission generate, and then actually bother to do the mission (it can be ignored when it generates, in addition to not being guaranteed to generate), to see clearly that he's a Sectoid.
And Floyd Tesseract is very different from Verge and the newscaster. He's very expressive of his feelings in both tone and, when you meet him, he's actually smiling, and is basically the opposite of the 'logical and unemotional intellectual' trope Verge and the newscaster cleave closer to. Floyd is riffing on conspiracy theorist types of dialogue (And depending on which agents you're using, you may hear one of them characterizing him as a conspiracy theorist), which of course is a stereotypical example of not-rational thinking, and if you do the mission he's in he's very audibly very grateful, among other examples of how very different he is.
So while I find Verge's characterization a bit odd and unexpected. I'm hesitant to call it an actual mistake: Chimera Squad is not looking at aliens and engaging in low-key racist thinking of assuming all members of a given species fit within a relatively narrow range of possible personalities, so Verge isn't clearly meant to be a 'normal' or 'representative' Sectoid; maybe Verge is the Sectoid equivalent of being mildly autistic, or otherwise actually on the unusual side.
And of course it's also worth pointing out that newscasters are expected to largely deliver their information in an emotionally-distant manner, regardless of their own feelings on the topics they're relaying. So the Sectoid newscaster is probably really meant to just be doing Newscaster Things, not Sectoid Things, when his approach to speech is emotionally-distant and all.
It's unfortunate that it's really easy to miss all this nuance, but it's a pleasant surprise that Chimera Squad actually is, on a very real level, staying away from these kinds of problematic thinking. It's especially striking given the contrast with Enemy Unknown/Within being much more 'cringe-y racist thinking' -the series has come surprisingly far compared to what I'm used to seeing. I hope XCOM 3 continues this progression; it seems likely, thankfully, given XCOM 2 and then War of the Chosen were both improvements over what came before on exactly this front and now Chimera Squad is too.
Verge is also our first example of an element I really appreciate about Chimera Squad and that the handles really differently from most video games and indeed from a lot of other pop culture: Bad Guy Peoples Who Are Now On Our Side.
Thing is, what I'm used to seeing when a series decides to switch a Bad Guy Faction to now being a Good Guy Faction is... subtly dishonest.
Often, the explicit narrative presented is redemptive: the Bad Guy Faction, we'll be told, has seen the errors of their ways and feels bad for all the wrongs they have committed, and is now trying to make up for their prior badness.
But then conspicuously two things tend to happen: first of all, individual characters will often fail to participate in this arc. We'll have a party member who is a member of the Ex-Bad Guys, but the narrative will go out of its way to assure the audience that this Ex-Bad Guy was actually never a bad guy at all, never participated in the crimes of their people, and often will be written as totally ignorant of said crimes. (Even when this is extremely difficult to believe is true) Ex-Bad Guy NPCs we meet will fail to have a bloody history come up. Everywhere our party goes in the world, not a single member of the Ex-Bad Guys has anything to personally feel guilty over. (Though they often feel guilty on behalf of their fellow Ex-Bad Guys anyway) If we do meet someone who genuinely participated in Bad Guy Badness, it's all but guaranteed they'll be currently a Bad Guy who rejected their people's overall attempt to redeem themselves.
Second of all, often severe historical revisionism will kick in to reduce the severity of the Ex-Bad Guy crimes. If they had allies who were previously presented as coerced by the Ex-Bad Guys into doing bad things, then the story will now inform us that actually those coerced allies were independently very bad through no fault of the Ex-Bad Guys. Some portion of their crimes as Bad Guys will be retconned to have actually been some manner of misunderstanding, where for example the Ex-Bad Guys murdering some innocent will be changed to the innocent secretly being a much worse Bad Guy that the Ex-Bad Guys were heroically trying to stop the dastardly deeds of.
This is all absurd and inane and sketchy, yet depressingly it's very normal in pop culture, so normal I've essentially resigned myself to suffering through it anytime a series I otherwise like decides to switch a Bad Guy Faction to now being a Good Guy Faction -which is to say I was expecting Chimera Squad to do the same with XCOM aliens, even with XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen not clearly falling into this pattern.
But it doesn't.
This can be easy to overlook if you only play through the game once and didn't watch any of the game's pre-launch trailers and don't read agent profiles and so on: the game doesn't relentlessly hammer the point, and a given conversation touching on it won't necessarily occur in a given run.
Nonetheless, Chimera Squad is actually quite explicit that Verge was a participant in ADVENT/Alien badness: that he used psionic influence to manipulate government officials and so on, and only later concluded he was helping make terrible things happen and should stop.
And Verge isn't anomalous: of your several not-plain-human agents, only one is persistently presented as a total innocent who was entirely uninvolved in the ADVENT/Alien atrocities.
This is a tremendous relief: the usual pop culture route has a worrying undertone, as if the people making such works don't really believe in redemption at all, where if you've ever done even a single bad thing you are forever marked as A Bad Person, and no amount of effort to make up for what you did will ever reduce that in their eyes. Chimera Squad actually imagining a world where people manage to at least partially set aside old hurts and give peaceful cooperation a chance is unexpectedly optimistic, especially given the nature and scale of what prior games gave us as Ethereal Empire crimes.
It's especially appreciated that the game doesn't rely on Ethereal mind control as a copout: 'the top bad guys have mind control' is depressingly common for pop culture to exploit when it wants to switch a character or people from Team Bad Guys to Our Side, where it's specifically used to say their crimes don't count because someone else made them do it. I don't like this tendency for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that real people, when coerced with extreme force into doing awful things, still often feel guilty for their participation: I doubt even literal mind control would be adequate to erase this aspect of human behavior.
So it's a pleasant surprise Chimera Squad doesn't abuse this stock answer; it would be so easy for it to do, after all, as the Ethereals have always had mind control! (Contrasting with how I've seen series retcon in mind control to get their Ex-Bad Guys That Are Innocent of Wrongdoing)
So while I find Verge himself a bit odd and don't find him particularly compelling myself, I certainly appreciate his existence as part of these larger trends.
I also appreciate Verge's own personal handling on the topic of guilt or moral conscience: a less egregious variation on the trends I've been describing is to have any Ex-Bad Guys have always had moral objections to what they were doing. This is a toxic, unrealistic trend: in real life, people often take a bit to have the information to understand what they're doing and even have the opportunity to have an informed opinion on its wrongness or lack thereof. And even once they start having suspicions that they're participating in wrongness, it can take a while for them to be sufficiently confident as to be willing to risk social censure and so on by openly objecting.
And Verge cleaves to this kind of realistic progression: it comes up in conversation that he understands now he was doing terrible things, and he wants to make up for it, where the implication is that he started out doing his duty without thinking about things from a moral perspective and only later started going, "Wait, am I.... doing bad things? Oh no. I think I am."
No other agent has quite this exact arc: they each have their own little story, distinct to them.
Which is, it should be said, one of the things I appreciate about Chimera Squad.
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On a largely-unrelated topic, something else I was pleasantly surprised by about Chimera Squad that's difficult to find a clean place to put it because the distinction is a lack of something rather than the presence of something is: there is no Scientist Character.
I've talked before about how Vahlen in Enemy Unknown/Within and Tygan in base XCOM 2 and to a lesser extent War of the Chosen are both Scientist Characters whose approach to the world is extremely unscientific, where they jump to extremely specific conclusions off of barely any data where the narrative tends to clearly validate as intended-to-be-true whatever strange theory they jumped to, and how much I dislike it, and was glad to see War of the Chosen actually have some moments in opposition to this trend. I was, quite frankly, expecting Chimera Squad to retain this obnoxious quality, albeit I was hopeful it would be toned down a little further than War of the Chosen already toned it down, and was quite caught off guard when I realized there is in fact no Vahlen or Tygan equivalent character.
And I should clarify that I don't just mean there's literally not a scientist among the cast; I'm using Verge as the jumping-off point here because I honestly would've expected the role to be substantially foisted off on him, especially since Chimera Squad does force your first run to include Verge in the initial squad. Pop culture is perfectly happy to decide that the brainy alien character is of course overly-broadly-knowledgeable in exactly the way Vahlen and Tygan being Scientist Characters is used to justify inappropriately wide knowledge: I have literally seen other series where such a brainy alien character smoothly stepped into the role previously filled by Scientist Characters, with all the problems more or less fully retained, even though no character was technically a scientist.
But no, Chimera Squad is actually pretty good about having different characters bring different knowledge bases and perspectives and mentalities to the table. For example, during the Progeny Investigation, one of the conversations you can have happen is Verge informing the team that the Progeny Sectoids have human thought processes in them, and communicating that this is weird and unnatural, all of which is sensible for a psionically active Sectoid to be able to pick up on and find weird, and which in turn points the player to likely theories of what's going on as far as things like 'why do the Progeny have Sectoids in their unit list?'
I'll be getting into specific examples more later, because the point here is less 'it makes sense for Verge to bring this up' and more 'the game is good about spreading this stuff around', where other agents get opportunities to reveal useful/interesting info because the things that set them apart from their fellow agents give them unique perspectives and insights.
But it was very much a pleasant surprise, and is part and parcel of the game's broader drive toward presenting diversity as a positive, which is a theme it doesn't try to hammer the player with explicitly but is very much baked into a lot of what it does in both gameplay and narrative, and which it's unusually successful at selling. I'm much more used to games saying 'diversity is strength' while constructing the gameplay and narrative so it's not true in either of them: it's genuinely notable that Chimera Squad gets this right.
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Next time, we move on to number two of your agents forced into the first run: Godmother.
See you then.
For what it's worth, I think the "collar" part might be a reference to NYPD slang, in which it means "arrest". The ability basically guarantees you can "arrest" those people, rather than kill them.
ReplyDelete...Or it could be in reference to a leash, in that once you "catch" them, they won't escape your grasp anymore. Dunno, didn't shock me too much.
I enjoyed the discussion on how much heavy lifting Floyd Tesseract does to show that there is variation in the personalities of Sectoids. Honestly he might be my favourite character in the game. Still wish the game hadn't "retconned" lips onto Sectoids, but I get why they did.
I'm familiar with and readily understood the cop slang aspect of Collar; the point I'm making is about the in-universe mechanical reality aspect, where somehow Verge having a telepathic connection to people means that pumping a bunch of bullets into them results in them falling unconscious instead of being filled with holes and dead. The game makes no attempt to suggest an in-universe explanation for how this could work, and it'd be pretty hard to come up with one that makes plausible sense! But I had to actually think about it to go 'actually, this is intensely silly' because Chimera Squad clearly communicates that the gameplay isn't meant to be a realistic depiction of in-universe reality; it's ridiculous from a realism standpoint, but that's fine because that sense that the gameplay is a direct representation of a plausible reality is not a primary goal of Chimera Squad's.
DeleteFloyd's pretty great, yeah. While I think it's a bit unfortunate how easy it is to be unaware he's a Sectoid and thus get a misleading impression of what the game is doing with Sectoids as a whole, I do actually like how finding out he's a Sectoid puts more properly into context a lot of the stuff he's saying about ADVENT lies and people making you think things you shouldn't be thinking and so on; he's not just talking about propaganda, but actual psionic influence! The 'works on two layers' aspect to his writing is fun.
Ah, that's what you meant. Hmmm, if I was trying really hard, I could say maybe he uses the neural network to slow down their body functions after they go into shock, sort of like an induced comma (?), so they don't bleed out before they get medical care. Normally some would still die (not much slowing the body can do if you have a bullet-sized hole in your brain), but for gameplay reasons they make it guaranteed.
DeleteBut yes, mostly it's gamey, and clearly we're not expected to think too hard about it :p
If I REALLY wanted to justify it, I'd argue it's some form of telekinesis, like Verge is diffusing impacts telekinetically or some such. I wouldn't want to actually try, though, as the game fundamentally isn't trying for that kind of in-universe realism -it similarly makes no attempt to explain why your agents always enter Bleed Out mode instead of instantly dying, no matter what took them down, as another example of the game clearly being perfectly fine with tossing 'realism' aside for gameplay reasons.
Delete