XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Archon


HP: 12/18/20/24
Armor: 0
Defense: 25
Dodge: 25
Aim: 75
Mobility: 14/15/15/15 (9/18 on Rookie, 10/20 otherwise)
Damage: 7-8 (+3)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/10%/10%/10%
Will: 50/100/100/100

Primary weapon has unlimited ammo.

To be honest, I suspect this is pretty much purely because the staff provides no obvious way to have a reload animation, especially in conjunction with the Archon's own body providing nowhere to hide ammunition. It's not like it's a gameplay design problem or anything, thankfully, but I still kinda doubt game design was a motivating factor in this particular decision.

Flight
Is a flying unit, allowing it to reach locations without regard for intervening terrain. Additionally, the unit will not change position if the terrain it is 'standing' on is destroyed entirely, and thus cannot suffer fall damage.

This is yet another capability with no actual in-game icon or description, hence the recycling of the old flight icon.

One might get through most of an XCOM 2 run under the impression it's completely removed flight as a mechanic, but said impression is... technically incorrect. Only technically, thankfully: flight is rare in XCOM 2, and more importantly it's vastly more limited than in the prior game. No longer can flight-capable units jump to arbitrary points in the air, and also flight-capable units are no longer tuned under the idea of being flankable while having the ability to enter an unflankable Cover-benefiting state anywhere, anytime.

Instead, flight is now only slightly different from Leap, in that the primary implication of both is the ability to travel to high ground without need of a climb point. Flight is a little better than Leap in that it removes fall damage from the equation and there are certain rare cases where a flying unit can cross terrain a Leaping unit cannot, such as large rivers, but a lot of the time it's basically the same thing. Even fuel is gone as a consideration, further minimizing the differences.

It's a bit strange of a result, but far and away better than flight's mechanics in the prior game.

Overall, the main tactical note of interest to keep in mind is that lobbing explosives at an Archon isn't going to cause fall damage or knock it to a lower level, and so can't be used for free damage or to bring an Archon on a roof into sight of units down at the ground level. This isn't even that important anyway: Archons don't use Cover and don't have Armor, so the primary tools for smashing floors are low-value against Archons anyway. It's only their high Defense that pushes you toward considering chucking a Plasma Grenade or similar at them, and the grenades that are most useful against them don't wreck terrain anyway. (eg Gas Grenades)

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

One unusual quality of Archons that is particularly apparent in War of the Chosen is that they are (almost) the only enemy in the game to lack a walking animation.

No, I don't mean the part where they don't have feet to walk with. What I mean is that enemy alertness level correlates to how they animate: in most missions, every enemy pod starts out unaware X-COM is around, and their animations reflect this. You can see ADVENT troops animating as if they're casually talking to each other about the weather or whatever when idle, nobody ever initiates Cover-using animations even when directly adjacent to Cover, everybody moves slowly and calmly, ADVENT soldiers in particular stand ramrod-straight instead of perpetually hunching over like they do when alert, etc.

Even monstrous or robotic enemies do this! Chryssalids will walk about fairly daintily if not alert, vs having a distinctive animation with briefly rearing back before charging forward for their alert movement animation, ADVENT Mecs have a very stereotypically robotic walking animation when not alert vs much smoother movement when alert... even Gatekeepers animate noticeably differently when alert vs not alert, in spite of being a nearly featureless sphere that floats about magically! (When alert, they have a brief pulling-back moment when starting to move, whereas when not alert their motion is straightforwardly smooth)

Archons don't do this. Regardless of their alertness level, they rocket about at full speed with no variation, and since they don't take Cover in the first place they don't switch to visually taking Cover when alert either.

This isn't terribly important, overall, as Archons are usually grouped up with other units and so you'll be able to work out the pod's alertness level anyway, and even if you can't alertness level isn't important to Archons themselves: since they don't take Cover, the fact that yellow alert enemies take Cover while green alert enemies do not has no relevancy to Archons. The only extent to which it matters is that yellow alert pods move farther in their patrols than green alert ones, where it's easier to avoid being flanked/caught by green alert pods than yellow alert pods, and with all-Archon pods you won't be able to tell whether they 'walked' in from just outside your squad's view or if they 'ran' from noticeably further, and so won't be able to tell how cautiously you need to move around them if you want to stay hidden.

But mostly this is a neat technical note, not something strongly pertinent to player planning. It's mostly something I feel is worth mentioning because it's the sort of thing that can nag at you like you're missing something important, unable to put your finger on why Archons seem different from other units.

On a different note, it's worth pointing out that the Archon's high innate Defense is basically a bit higher than it seems, in the sense that it looks like a 5-point bump over Low Cover -but usually an enemy in Low Cover can not only be flanked to bypass its Defense entirely, but even just getting most of the way to a flank will remove up to 10 points. You can't do something equivalent to the Archon's innate Defense.

This is true of innate Defense in general, of course, but the Archon is the first enemy I've discussed to have enough innate Defense for this distinction to be particularly significant.

Notably, this means it's often easier to hit even enemies with 10 Defense (eg Mutons, Elite ADVENT units of various stripes) in Low Cover than an Archon in spite of them on paper having 5 more Defense than the Archon if they're in Low Cover.

Of course, this doesn't apply to High Cover, so aside full flanks enemies in High Cover are properly, consistently harder to hit than an Archon.

Staff Strike
A melee attack that does 6-9 damage (+3 from crit) with +10 Aim. This melee attack is not a move-and-melee attack.

Surprisingly, while Stun Lancers lose access to melee when on fire in War of the Chosen, Archons do not. Better to Poison them than to Burn them if you're worried about their melee attack.

Archons are noteworthy for being one of the only enemies to have a melee attack with zero side effects, just raw damage. This makes them one of the only melee-capable enemies where ignoring them for a turn in favor of other threats has no possibility of massively backfiring. You do need to keep in mind the potential for them to crit, as the potential for 12 damage is painful if it happens, but if all your soldiers have at least 13 HP it can make sense to ignore an Archon for a turn if it will let you reliably deal with all the other threats in the area, particularly if you've got solid medical support.

Also, while Archon melee can spike higher than their ranged attack and has higher base accuracy, it's actually not the case that their melee is clearly better than their range on average, as their ranged attack can get the flanking crit bonus and the height advantage Aim bonus. If they can get a flanking high ground shot, their ranged attack is on average noticeably better.

So for one thing if you Dominate an Archon, you shouldn't default to pursuing melee attacks. Try to get them high ground flanks and shoot, if possible. Melee is better if one of Holo Targeting or Aftershock applies, hitting 100% hit rate at that point, but if both apply a flanking ranged shot is much more likely to crit and so overall better since they'll both be perfectly accurate.

Battle Frenzy
When the Archon suffers damage, it has a 75% chance of going into a Frenzy, granting it an additional Action Point for one turn.

Curiously, the code indicates that Battle Frenzy was at some point intended to have a chance of subtracting Armor from the Archon when it activated. This is a quirky mechanic all by itself, but it's especially puzzling since Archons don't have Armor and the player can fairly casually Shred Armor anyway. It has me wondering if at some point in the development the plan was for Armor to be impossible to remove and so the devs had planned for the Archon to negate its own Armor to compensate for what a pain it is to kill. A related point worth noting is that everything that has Armor has a config file entry for 'mitigation chance'; this number is always 100, but my suspicion is that at some point the plan was that Armor would be a chance to reduce incoming damage, likely rolled per point. (That is, a mitigation chance of 33 with 2 points of Armor would roll two times at a 33% chance for each point to actually apply) I'm rather curious to what the thought process was there, even while I'm glad they abandoned such plans if my inferences are correct; having randomized damage reduction would be frustrating and obnoxious, where the current system adds depth and nuance to the game.

Regardless, in addition to the mechanical impact of adding an action point, a non-obvious aspect to Battle Frenzy triggering is that it actually alters Archon behavior: once Battle Frenzy has triggered, the Archon will obsessively pursue melee combat, to the point that if they can't reach a target to melee on a turn they'll just Dash with all three action points toward your nearest unit!

This can be useful if you really don't want them to use Blazing Pinions, or inconvenient if you're planning around them taking a shot or using Blazing Pinions and aren't aware of the AI change element.

It's also probably why being on fire doesn't disable their melee attack, incidentally.

To be clear, this element is specifically an AI thing. If you Dominate an Archon and then it has Battle Frenzy trigger, it will gain an additional action point, but it won't lose access to ranged attacks or Blazing Pinions. Pursue high ground flanks instead!

Also, note that while Battle Frenzy can trigger an infinite number of times within a turn, this doesn't meaningfully matter. Only the first trigger gives an additional action point, and later triggers don't extend the duration or something.

On the topic of the visual end of things, you can always tell whether an Archon has gone into a Battle Frenzy or not, as triggering it switches their jet flame color from yellow to red. (This is funny to me, given that red fire is lower temperature than yellow fire...)

In any event, if you would prefer an Archon not pursue melee for some reason, you should avoid shooting them until you're expressly gunning to kill them that turn. Conversely, if you would prefer they spend their time charging to melee, you should attempt to get damage on them in hopes of triggering Battle Frenzy.

Overall, I like the idea of Battle Frenzy, wherein an enemy gets a mechanical benefit in exchange for AI shackles causing it to make iffy decisions. It's a neat idea, the kind of thing I'd like to see in turn-based games more often.

I'm iffier on the execution, unfortunately. The main thing being that the game doesn't communicate that an AI change occurs at all; in conjunction with how melee-capable enemies are normally obsessive about melee anyway, it's easy to assume that Battle Frenzied Archons charge for melee because the action point added lets them reach something to melee and that melee just has a higher priority in general, and thus be completely oblivious to an actually interesting decision in the game.

In actuality, Archons aren't that focused on melee. They're perfectly happy to hold still and shoot if they can't readily reach melee range (As opposed to advancing and shooting, say), and in particular heavily prioritize...

Blazing Pinions
An area-of-effect attack where the Archon flies into the air (Rendering it immune to explosives, melee attacks, and any other attack that's trapped at ground level) and launches a volley of missiles at up to 4 units in an area; the turn after the Archon uses Blazing Pinions, the missiles arrive at their targeted locations, doing 4-7 damage to impacted units (These missiles have a 3x3 area of effect centered wherever their chosen target was standing, and thus can catch multiple units per missile) and potentially destroying environmental objects. The Archon lands with the completion of Blazing Pinions, and gets a full turn afterward. 2 turn global cooldown; multiple Archons will not stack or chain Blazing Pinions.

... this.

Surprisingly, if a soldier is in reach of multiple impact points, the damage won't stack. It's just a binary 'in reach y/n' mechanic, not actually a series of separate attacks, in spite of what you'd intuitively expect from the visuals. That's something of a relief given how incredibly lethal that could potentially be -if you had a squad clustered, stacking damage would potentially lead to 16-28 damage! That'd be basically guaranteed to result in an instant squad wipe, if a player didn't realize they urgently needed everyone out or couldn't get people out due to other problems. (Chosen mass-Dazing, say) 4-7 damage to each victim is already quite a lot of potential damage.

Blazing Pinions also has somewhat unintuitive behavior for completion, as while it's animated as 'rockets land and blow stuff up, then the Archon lands amid the carnage', the mechanics have it land before its own rockets, just immune to them. For the most part this isn't important... but when an Archon has caught an environmental explosive with Blazing Pinions, it leads to the Archon likely causing the object to instantly detonate and do immediate damage to the Archon, with the resulting animations looking very janky. Oops.

Also, a really bizarre mechanics point for Blazing Pinions is that if you temporarily Mind Control an Archon and initiate Blazing Pinions on the turn your control of them will end, it's entirely possible for the Archon to then immediately initiate Blazing Pinions during the enemy turn... in which case it will be completely wasted, because when your turn rolls around the Blazing Pinions you set will go off and the Archon will land and the Blazing Pinions initiated during the AI turn canceled out. This is mildly exploitable, potentially allowing you to ignore an Archon for an extra turn, which can be significant in the final mission.

Note that the target selection on Blazing Pinions is random within its massive strike zone. If there's four or less targets, it will reliably target all of them, with fewer targets resulting in random placement of the remaining shots, but when firing into a truly huge crowd there's no control over who, exactly gets hit. As in, if you Dominate an Archon, you designate the overall strike zone, but the game will pick the individual targets at random without consulting you. This generally only matters if you've managed to pull multiple pods occupying the same area -or are trying to use Blazing Pinions on Lost, but why would you do that to yourself?- but still something to be aware of when using an Archon.

Blazing Pinions' movement is also intensely weird in that it actually has no relation to the Archon's movement range, even though you'd intuitively expect it to operate off of move-and-melee-type rules. Instead it behaves like, say, aiming a Blaster Launcher, aside the caveat that the Archon moves itself to above the center of the target zone. This is particularly important to AI behavior, in that AI-controlled Archons generally attempt to initiate Blazing Pinions from their current position without moving first and so Mobility modifiers generally have zero impact on their Blazing Pinions usage, but even in player hands it means that eg Poison doesn't reduce the range of Blazing Pinions except in the indirect sense of impacting how far you can move the Archon before initiating Blazing Pinions.

Even more bizarre is that it doesn't count as movement at all. An Archon initiating Blazing Pinions will bypass all forms of reaction fire, up to and including Suppression targeting the Archon! This is only rarely noticeable with Bladestorm/Retribution, but for other forms of Overwatch it's pretty blatant, and pretty frustrating. So for one thing don't bother to have high-level Specialists gift Overwatch in an attempt to get damage in on an Archon unless it's a Frenzying Archon. For another, don't bother to Suppress an Archon unless it's very specifically Battle Frenzied and adjacent to someone already. And of course don't gamble on Guardian killing a non-Frenzying active Archon.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Blazing Pinions, though, is that the explosions don't count as explosions. Fortress offers zero protection from them, as does Blast Padding. This can be an unpleasant surprise if you were expecting your Psi Operative to be free to stay where they are and now they're badly injured, or thought a Grenadier could afford to Salvo instead of escaping the blast zone because surely they'll take trivial damage thanks to Blast Padding, right? (Nope)

More intuitive but still worth mentioning is that Blazing Pinion's second stage is not dependent on the Archon's ongoing survival or functionality. Killing, Stunning, or even putting into Stasis the Archon will not prevent the missiles from arriving. You just plain need to get out of the way.

Mechanics weirdness out of the way, Blazing Pinions is another example of a skill that's designed to make tricky situations nightmarish, rather than being a threat in itself. Aside Sharpshooters resenting potentially sacrificing a Sniper Rifle shot from having to move (And then in War of the Chosen Skirmishers having to give up one of their shots if they don't just Grapple or Wrath or Reckoning out of range), the need to move out of the area to avoid being hit is, by itself, usually no issue at all. When combined with other enemies, though, it can get quite problematic, whether it's forcing you to abandon high ground you wanted for dealing with some other enemy, or putting you in a situation where somebody has to move and trigger Overwatch fire (Like with Psionic Bomb, enemies like to Overwatch if Blazing Pinions is prepped to fire) or else be hit with Blazing Pinions next turn, or hey maybe a Codex has simultaneously put up a Psionic Bomb so some of your soldiers flat-out have to Dash to get to safe ground, giving up their turn entirely, possibly while missing ammo. As Archons tend to go for Blazing Pinions before any other decision, it's often a good idea to prioritize other targets before them, if you're confident Blazing Pinions won't create any problem situations.

One of the more subtle ways Blazing Pinions can be a problem is that it tends to vaporize a lot of Cover. As the default mission design in XCOM 2 is for you to advance fairly linearly toward an objective point under notable time pressure, this can readily create situations where you have to advance through a devastated zone with little or no Cover available because circling around it would take too long. This can make advancing very risky if there's any possibility of activating pods in the process, or straight-up impossible if you're still bogged down with fighting another pod, where normally you'd be advancing to the objective while working on the fight.

By a similar token, it's one of the more likely abilities to create mission-ruining problems in a VIP Extraction mission, as VIP Extraction missions are very prone to setting their pre-placed extraction point atop a roof, and Archons can easily end up breaking the extraction point even when you don't have anyone all that close to the extraction point. The game does have a fallback protocol where a new extraction point is immediately generated elsewhere if the original one is unusable, but if you're a couple turns away from timing out and the new extraction point is 3+ turns away from your squad's location, that's cold comfort. I tend to prefer to leave Archons for last in a given pod, overall, but in VIP Extractions I'm a lot quicker to target them, and more aggressive about using eg the Frost Bomb to prevent them from using Blazing Pinions. It's not like it's likely to crop up as a problem, exactly, but even a small chance of instantly being screwed out of mission completion/assuring some portion of my squad gets left behind is too large for me to be willing to risk it.

Overall, though, Blazing Pinions is usually pretty low-threat, to the point that if I'm not confident in my ability to kill an Archon first turn I usually ignore it entirely so it will go for Blazing Pinions.


The Archon is the primary late-game enemy where tools like Hail of Bullets start consistently mattering. It's generally not really worth specifically blowing explosives on an Archon unless you're confident there's no Armored targets on the mission, but if you're going to toss explosives nearby it anyway it's generally better to catch it in the blast radius than to catch eg a Spectre in the blast, if you're choosing between the two. Notably, since the Archon has high innate Defense and one of the highest Dodge ratings in the game, if you're not using guaranteed-hit attacks you're alarmingly likely to miss or Graze.

In the base game, it's also a poor target to be trying to melee outside of an initial Reaper-the-skill hit. In War of the Chosen this isn't nearly as true; a Ranger wielding a Katana doesn't care about its defensive stats, and a Templar just plain doesn't care. Indeed, Templar are one of the better options to bring into Archon-filled missions in general, particularly if your Templar has Deflect; injured Archons are liable to Battle Frenzy, and the AI doesn't 'see' Deflect, and of course the Templar is going to be the closest target if you just Rend them, and Archons prefer to melee an adjacent target if they're not going to go for a Blazing Pinions. (Where eg Stun Lancers are perfectly happy to zip away to an entirely different target)

These are both good things, to be honest, as in the base game it's actually frustrating how limited your ability to work around the Archon's defenses is. Something like a Sectopod is a harder target at base, but you can Shred their Armor to make them permanently easier to kill. There's not an equivalent ability to tear away an Archon's Defense or Dodge capability, and unlike other high-Dodge enemies it's not possible to flank them or destroy their Cover to push your Aim up to 100% and thus erase their Dodge score. Explosives bypass accuracy checks, of course, but they're limited in supply and are really designed so the removal of Armor is how you get the biggest bang for your buck; a Frag Grenade is actually weaker than just shooting a given target, a Plasma Grenade is weaker than shooting them with most magnetic weapons, etc. So relying on explosives to kill Archons isn't a great plan, but... you don't have a clearly good plan. Yeah, Hail of Bullets forces a hit and is a reloading ability, but it's more for ensuring you finish off a target (Or ensure you apply your cannon's Shred before everybody else starts shooting) than for pushing damage in a general sense.

It's not nearly as bad a design as flight was in the previous game, but it's still annoying and I'm glad War of the Chosen has done some things to reduce how irritating fighting Archons is. (A subtle example is how Bonds push up the expected effective Aim of your soldiers, making it more plausible to overcome an Archon's Defense entirely) It's not that their Defense+Dodge makes them dangerous in an interesting way; it just means the RNG has free reign to mess with you when fighting Archons if you haven't gone fairly over-the-top on your Aim boosting or leaned heavily into effects that bypass Aim.

Anyway, speaking more broadly the Archon is where I personally draw the 'you are entering the late game' line, as it's the first in a series of enemies with no form tiers whose threat profile is defined fairly heavily by the difficulty in easily killing them and which never cease to be durable from the player's perspective. That is, Mutons have a well-rounded defensive profile and only one tier, but your endgame firepower can take them out pretty trivially. Berserkers similarly can be intimidating durable, especially if you took too long to get magnetic weapons online, but by the end of the game their damage sponging ability doesn't stand out particularly. And of course Basic Stun Lancers are tough when they first show up, but get phased out for more elite variants and wouldn't have impressed anyway once your entire squad was kitted out in beam-tier weaponry.

More relevantly, I treat my first Archon sighting as a warning in the event that I've been a bit slow to get key improvements like Predator Armor: get them soon, or else my squad is going to face very serious problems they're not equipped for.

Archons are, in spite of their high Will score, a potentially quite appealing Domination target... or potentially a very unappealing one, depending in part on the rest of the mission's enemy composition.

When it comes to ranged enemies and move-and-melee enemies, Archons having high innate Defense means they only rarely get targeted over your proper troops, which is a bit unfortunate given one of the primary utilities of Domination is getting yourself a completely disposable meatshield to draw fire with. Conversely, they're incredible distractions when it comes to enemies like Mutons that can be predictably corralled into attacking the Archon in spite of its high innate Defense, at which point it of course will avoid attacks quite often, and Dodge a notable fraction of what hits do land in the first place. 

Archons are also one of the better enemies to Panic, as they'll never use Blazing Pinions as a Panic action, and in fact will basically always shoot at an ally. This is particularly convenient from the perspective of having the Alien Hunters DLC since Icarus Armor will lead to them Panicking periodically, but also means they're weirdly appealing targets for Insanity (Especially since the janky Mind Control/Blazing Pinions interaction makes it relatively safe to let them survive an entire Mind Control duration, unlike a lot of other enemies) and by extension Void Rift is really great to use on them. Defense-and-Dodge-bypassing damage that can potentially induce Disorientation, Panic, or Mind Control with absolutely no disadvantage? That's an excellent deal, and indeed they're arguably the single best Void Rift target in the game.

In general, Psi Operatives are very useful against Archons in spite of eg Fortress not blocking Blazing Pinions, to the point that Archons are one of the better reasons to consider pulling your Psi Operative(s) out of the closet earlier than the final mission. I doubt it's an intentional result, but it mildly amuses me that the only explicitly cybernetic enemy is one of the more Psi-susceptible enemies of the game -especially since that's actually consistent with Mechtoids being particularly psi-susceptible in Enemy Within.


Autopsy-wise, Archons are, curiously, necessary to get third-tier melee weaponry. Like okay yes their staff is a melee weapon, and yes they're one of the more late-game enemies, but it's still not remotely intuitive given how their melee attack is conceptually sort of incidental. In terms of animation and audio, the Archon really seems to just be hitting people with a metal pipe, no channeling plasma during the strike to burn the target or anything in that vein that would explain why we're learning anything of technological substance by studying their melee weapon. You'd think flight or evasive armor or something of the sort would come out of studying the Archon, not plasma-enhanced melee weaponry.

Regardless, this helps give melee weaponry a leg up for a decent chunk of the game, since doing the Archon Autopsy takes way less time than performing the ranged beam-tier weapon Researches. Like, individually, not even considering that the beam-tier primary weapons each have their own research instead of being grouped together like magnetic-tier weapons were.

In War of the Chosen, the Archon Autopsy becomes a little bit more important, as the Plasma Lance research project actually requires the Archon Autopsy be completed on top of requiring the Plasma Rifle research be completed. This actually makes more intuitive sense than the Archon Autopsy being necessary for flaming melee weaponry, but mechanically it means that it's easy for the Sniper Rifle and Vektor Rifle to be the last beam-tier weapons you unlock, particularly if you rushed straight for beam weapons in general and/or just kept failing to have Archons spawn in missions where you loot corpses.

Alternatively, given how unimportant Reaper direct damage is and how the Darklance exists, you could take the view that this Autopsy requirement is a final nail in the metaphorical coffin, cementing how the Plasma Lance research is just plain not a priority. I certainly often end up launching the final mission without bothering to research Plasma Lance, and indeed it's not unusual for me to skip the Archon Autopsy: the Katana displaces regular Swords, the Darklance displaces regular Sniper Rifles, Fusion Ripjacks aren't that important a upgrade, and getting Reapers a little more damage is kind of whatever. It's not like you need a Shadow Lance for Banish to kill late-game elite enemies.

At which point the Archon Autopsy barely adds anything...

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An interesting audiovisual consideration is that Archons seem to be drawing influence from Egyptian mythology (Though obviously they're also meant to be evocative of angels), and then their audio sounds a lot like the Cyberbeasts from X-COM: Enforcer, which were also heavily golden and drawing influence from Egyptian mythology. It's possible it's just a wild coincidence, but I'd be quite surprised if it wasn't deliberate on somebody's part.

Visually, I overall like the Archon's design. I didn't dwell on it in the analysis post, but one reason I wasn't terribly fond of the Floater's design in the previous game is how little physics sense it made: two sources of thrust is functional enough for something constantly on the move like a plane, but Floaters have to be able to visually hover in a stable position in the air while being free to aim and fire and whatnot, and it's pretty clear Floater animations have only a relatively small portion of their strangeness caused by the fact that the gameplay is turn-based even though the game is intended to represent real-time events. That is, in something like Advance Wars, planes just hanging in position when not actively moving is clearly not supposed to imply the planes are some hover-capable variant, but just a product of turn-based gameplay inevitably leading to units visually holding position anytime they aren't in the middle of taking their turn. Floater animations had some of that going on, but plenty of their animations -particularly their animations when in Cover- pretty clearly were premised on the idea of a Floater holding still for an extended period in 'reality', and then weren't believable with their thruster configuration.

Archons, meanwhile, seem at-a-glance plausible to perform extended hovering actions and careful, precise aerial movement more generally. I wouldn't be surprise if an actual expert in eg rocket physics would declare the Archon design doesn't actually work for that... but I also wouldn't be surprised if such an expert ratified it as perfectly functional. The sheer number of thrusters, and the spacing of them, provides a lot of potential precision -this is particularly impressive since more than half the jets are also serving the function of contributing to the angelic visual profile, the jets on the side being evocative of wings fanning out.

A related point is that Floaters also had believability problems when it came to fuel, a point exacerbated by the fact that fuel was an actual mechanic back then and so it was possible for a Floater to run out of fuel and... continue to have its thrusters perpetually firing. Floaters have so little body to them that you have to posit some fairly improbable scenarios to explain how they could fuel their thrusters for even the half an hour combat seems to be often intended to occur over in-universe -even if I ignore the point that Floaters already have their thrusters firing when you first spot them, implying they were burning fuel for some time before your team showed up.

Archons certainly seem impractical in this regard, but it's a believable impractical, especially in conjunction with the narrative elements making it clear that the Archon's form was defined primarily by its social function rather than its combat function. That is, an Archon's design doesn't leave a lot of room for fuel to be hidden aboard it, but it's both more than the Floater had and also the case that I can readily buy that, in-universe, Archons regularly stop to refuel out of civilian sight, while ADVENT pretends like Archons carry hours of fuel rather than twenty minutes worth. I don't mind designs being impractical in a game when they're supposed to be impractical: the Floater design grates in no small part because it's clearly supposed to be an illustration of ruthless pursuit of military efficiency without regard to treating one's people morally/ethically, only it fails to make sense as the kind of decision a ruthless military engine would callously produce. It only makes sense if one assumes Floaters are, like, Mutons being punished with suicide missions for daring to express political ideologies their masters disapprove of, which as I just explicated is clearly not remotely the intention. (Though War of the Chosen admittedly makes that retroactively more plausible...)

So where Floater visual design was an incoherent mess with myriad flaws, the Archon design directly addresses virtually every one of those issues to achieve something believable and functional.

The one thing I maybe take issue with is the face design, where we can't see eyes, a long helmet starting from where you'd expect to see such on a human face. Personally, I enjoy the facelessness of it and like how it gives them a visual consistency with ADVENT troops, but it doesn't seem like the game has a sensible explanation intended in-universe. That is, if the Autopsy had Tygan report that Archons have a series of implants hidden in their skin that are their eyes, I'd be curious why Archons were given this eyeless design, both from an out-of-universe perspective and an in-universe one, but I'd accept just fine that they function. As-is, it's not clear how an Archon is supposed to be navigating their environment: no eyes, no obvious ears, no nose, and none of the mechanical bits resemble Stereotypical Scifi Sensor Nonsense. In conjunction with your support staff not acknowledging or explaining it, it leaves the impression that the art team went with It Looks Cool and then literally nobody gave any thought to how it could, you know, function.

Still, it's a relatively small gripe given how good the rest of the design is.

Narratively, Archons are the first Alien where the game is clearly operating under the premise that oh yeah the Ethereal rulers need to maintain good public relations so maybe they shouldn't have everything look like a stereotypical evil monstrosity. Not only is their design just obviously less revolting than the Floater design, but the game explicitly spells out that Archons have been cleaned up to be more appealing to the masses. (Though Tygan also inexplicably theorizes that they're meant to act as some form of Alien leadership, which is weird because literally nothing supports this theory of his and it's not some kinda gameplay hint or anything) An interesting sub-point of this is that the Autopsy tells us that Archons are only pretty on the surface, describing the cybernetics underneath in unflattering terms that suggest Archons are just as unpleasant in how the intersection of flesh and steel is handled as Floaters appeared to be, it's just that it's hidden from the public now. This being interesting in part because of the wider trend of XCOM 2 rejecting the previous game's transhumanist trends.

From a different narrative angle, Archons are murky. On the one hand, the game deliberately draws a connection to Floaters, with it being easy to assume that Archons are meant to be Floaters 2.0 in lore terms, not just gameplay terms. On the other hand, the game never draws a connection to current-generation Mutons, and while it's not exactly impossible the Archon is a heavily altered Muton, it seems rather more likely that they're actually meant to be a separate species, much like Floaters from classic X-COM. But then the game never spells this out or does anything with the notion, so it's not actually clear, and some of the signs I want to take as 'proof' aren't; for example, Archons won't panic in the face of seeing someone wearing the Berserker Queen's flesh as a suit, but not only is there obvious mechanical motive from the Archon King existing but in the previous game Blood Call inexplicably didn't work on Floaters or Heavy Floaters, so there's precedent for mechanics disagreeing with narrative when it comes to cyborg Mutons.

It's noteworthy that the Archon 'ow that hurts' animation has notable similarities to Muton and Berserker damage response animations, in that they'll look at their tormentor and make an angry sound at them, which is not actually a default damage response in XCOM 2. Still not remotely clear-cut on 'Archons are cyborg Mutons', but a point in favor of it, and mildly interesting in that Archons are very emotive in spite of the usual cyborg stereotypes trending in the opposite direction. It's consistent with Battle Frenzy, but still interesting.

Overall, I think Archons are one of the better-handled enemies from the perspective of melding aesthetics and narrative together, but it's a bit frustrating the murkiness of what's actually going on with them as a species, in part because it makes the 'message' murkier: if Archons are cyborg Mutons, the fact that they look like cyborg humans instead of cyborg Mutons says distinctly unsettling things about the Ethereals, showing a willingness to horrifically butcher their minions as part of maintaining the fiction that their rule is a utopian one. If Archons are not cyborg Mutons, but some brand-new alien species... the Archons we're seeing might be only mildly modified from the base being's form, where them being appealing to the human eye is the Ethereals mostly taking advantage of happening to have an appealing-to-humans species to bolster their public relations. That's worrying in the broader dystopian context, of course, but it's not horrifying the way 'sculpted a Muton into an Adonis figure for public relations purposes' is. For one thing, sculpting Mutons into an appealing-to-human-eye design requires the Ethereals have some meaningful understanding of what humans find appealing; if Archons are a species that's naturally handsome to the human eye, it's easy to imagine the Ethereals noticing that Archons tend to go over well with humans, shrugging, and pushing the Archons to the forefront of 'aliens are your friends' campaigns without having any understanding of why the Archons are going over well.

Still, this is a vast improvement over Floaters in basically every way that matters.

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Next time, we cover the final regular enemy added by War of the Chosen: the Spectre.

See you then.

Comments

  1. Of note the Archon does have a reload animation - it does a one-handed racking motion with the staff, as if it was a pump-action rifle. I've only ever seen it in challenge missions.

    In the base game the archons are pests. The mixture of high dodge and relatively high health means that they tend to hang around after the rest of their pod is dead, and the high mobility means that you often have to divert part of the squad away from the objective to deal with them, which slows you down. They're excellent harassers.

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    1. I've actually seen them do the reload in normal play, but only ever after being hit with a Psionic Bomb's first stage, and they're not consistent about it even then. Psionic Bomb seems to be glitchily inconsistent with unlimited-ammo enemies in general. I've personally always suspected the nature of the reload animation is purely down to how the model doesn't really provide anything to work with -nowhere to slot in batteries or whatever.

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