XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Viper King

HP: 44/50/60/69
Armor: 2/2/2/3
Defense: 0
Dodge: 10/15/20/25
Aim: 75
Mobility: 14 (9/18)
Damage: 4-6 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0
Will: 50

Note that the Viper King's Bolt Caster ignores 1 point of Armor. In the base game this has limited relevance unless you turn the Nest on and then stall, but it makes Blast Padding even less appealing than it already was, and if you have Shen's Last Gift and get a SPARK fast enough (eg turn on Lost Towers and hit it before the Nest) it makes the Viper King a little more lethal against the SPARK than you might expect... but that's really all it's going to boil down to. Due to when the Viper King first appears, it's more or less impossible to have Predator Armor in time, and by extension you're not going to have an E.X.O. Suit. Nor, bizarrely enough, are Vests possible to get from Rumors, so it's not even possible to have an early Plated Vest, as the Viper King enters rotation well before Shieldbearers do. You could roll Blast Padding from the Advanced Warfare Center really early? But mostly this bit of Pierce is essentially trivia.

It's noticeably more relevant in War of the Chosen, or more precisely with Integrated DLC turned on, as you're likely to have unlocked medium armors before even reaching the Viper King's Facility, and it's actually entirely possible to end up not getting around to his Facility until you already have Warden Armor depending on how assorted bits of strategic RNG line up with your own priorities. It's only 1 Pierce so the effect still isn't huge, but hey, at least it gets to matter semi-regularly now.

Also note that, surprisingly, Ruler Reactions isn't an explicitly listed ability if you eg use Yet Another F1 to check the Alien Ruler abilities. No name, no icon, nothing. It's pretty weird.

Immunities
Immune to Poison.

Surprisingly, this is the only distinctive immunity the Viper King has. You might intuitively expect him to be immune to Freeze, but nah.

In the base game, this contributes to the superiority of Dragon Rounds and Incendiary Grenades, as getting them early will help against the Viper King where Venom Rounds and Gas Grenades won't and the other Alien Rulers are agnostic on the Poison-vs-Burn topic. Do note, however, that none of the Alien Rulers will ever have any of their abilities disabled by anything short of being totally disabled: the Viper King isn't actually impaired by being set on fire, it just means you get bonus damage. Which is worth it, mind, but not as amazing as shutting off his abilities would be.

In War of the Chosen, with Integrated DLC turned on, it basically just means you'll want to bring fire over Poison when hitting the Viper King's Avatar Project Facility. And honestly, if you can fish up an Acid Grenade/Bomb first, that's even better, and there's a decent argument for sticking to Plasma Grenades if you have those so you can smash his Cover. So mostly it just means that equipping Venom Rounds and Gas Grenades for that initial encounter is particularly undesirable.

I should also note here that, in the unlikely event that an ADVENT Priest uses Holy Warrior on an Alien Ruler, killing the Priest will remove the Holy Warrior buff without killing the Alien Ruler. So don't be thinking you can get clever with that.

Mental Fortress
The Viper King cannot be Mind Controlled and will never Panic.

This is standard to all three Alien Rulers. There's... a lot of obvious game design reasons to not let the player control them, so yeah, fair. Slightly unfortunate there's no narrative explanation, but oh well.

You might think this would discourage bringing Psi Operatives into Alien Ruler fights since Domination and Insanity are useless against them (The game literally won't let you target them) and Void Rift loses one of its bits of utility, but Stasis shutting off Ruler Reactions is so incredibly helpful that it more than offsets these losses.

Tongue Pull
Attempts to pull a humanoid target that is within 3-12 tiles of the Viper King. This has +20 to Aim, but Cover lowers its accuracy. On a successful hit the target is pulled adjacent to the Viper King and he immediately initiates Choke for free. 3 turn cooldown. Doesn't necessarily end the turn if it misses, costing only 1 action point.

This is just the standard Tongue Pull found on regular Vipers (The Viper King even has the same Aim as a Viper), except the follow-up is...

Choke
Binds an adjacent humanoid foe, which does 3-4 damage on initial use and will do 2 damage on each following turn/Ruler Reaction, while completely disabling the target. Both of these ignore one point of the target's Armor. The follow-up attacks have a 50% chance per trigger to knock the target Unconscious, ending the bind. Choke has no cooldown, and ends prematurely if the Viper King takes damage from any source. Has a 1-turn cooldown.

... a bit different.

I didn't recycle the Bind icon because Choke's icon actually is different, depicting the neck in particular being... well, choked. Bind and Choke both depict three loops, but the top-most loop isn't around the neck for Bind's icon, it's under the armpits.

I'm not actually sure why Choke does have its own icon, actually, given that you can never be in control of an Alien Ruler and normally you can't see the abilities of units not under your control. I suspect the Alien Rulers were originally intended to be controllable somehow but that it got scrapped partway through -some of their abilities have no icon at all, which doesn't matter in regular play, but then others do have custom icons even though you'll never see them without a mod's assistance.

Also note that the initial Choke hit is on average a little less threatening than it first sounds, as it has only a 25% chance of rolling its +1 damage instead of the usual 50%.

In any event, Choke is your introduction to Alien Rulers inflicting Unconsciousness, and is... something of a mercy. The Unconsciousness infliction rate means Choke will only rarely actually kill a soldier even though Choke's nature overrules the 'Alien Rulers strongly prefer to spread attacks around' AI bit. You also always get a chance to prevent the Unconsciousness, which... isn't a mercy the other Alien Rulers share...

... though conversely it's also uniquely nasty with the Ruler Reaction mechanics, or more precisely Tongue Pull is, in that the Viper King can pull someone out of Cover who was out of action points, and it's entirely possible there's not a lot you can do about it. The Viper King is liable to ignore them in favor of attacking people he hasn't attacked yet once you've knocked him out of the Choke attempt, but if there's other enemies active this can pretty readily result in someone dying where you never had an opportunity to prevent it, depending admittedly on what kinds of enemies are running about.

This is the earliest example of why I feel the best way for a player to cope with Alien Rulers is to just... not let them act, if at all feasible. This is a recurring issue with Ruler Reactions, where often the error you made was eg pulling the Viper King at the same time as another pod -and sometimes even that isn't your fault, such as if the Viper King using Tongue Pull on someone is what triggered a pod activating! The Alien Rulers are thus uniquely prone to getting people killed where the player didn't make a mistake at all, or the mistake was something that really shouldn't have resulted in a death and against literally any other enemy wouldn't have, especially in the base game where Ruler Reactions are so overbearing.

This doesn't have to be a problem, of course, but XCOM 2 is very much a game designed around the idea that a competent player will virtually never lose soldiers, and indeed will regularly clear missions with no injuries. You have a small squad size, high-level soldiers are vastly more powerful than low-level soldiers, and your ability to replace high-level soldiers quickly is very limited. Surprisingly, War of the Chosen is arguably worse about this even though it expects you to maintain a larger stable of soldiers, as Fatigue means soldiers tend to level slower, making a high-level death more painful, and it's gotten rid of the generic Resistance HQ and by extension taken away the ability to buy experienced soldiers at a modest Supply cost.

So deaths in XCOM 2 really should default heavily to being a punishment for bad play, not something that key enemies can force through within a turn using mechanics that significantly interfere with your ability to prevent the death through your decisions.

Anyway, returning to Choke itself, it should be emphasized that, just like Bind, the Viper King is not actually in the tile of the soldier he's Choking, but rather in the tile he started the Choke from. This is largely a bit of trivia when it comes to regular Vipers, but with the Viper King it's reliably important to know about, as it's vital to be able to interrupt the Choke with 100% certainty and area-of-effect attacks are one of your best tools for this: chucking a grenade so it just barely clips the Viper King without touching his victim is a regular lifesaver, especially in the base game where you don't have Integrated DLC as an option and so the default expectation is you'll be encountering him very quickly; your first encounter is unlikely to have tools like Hail of Bullets, nor sufficiently experienced soldiers to strongly expect to hit the Viper King when he's in Cover.

Also, unlike regular Vipers, the Viper King will almost never initiate Choke 'manually'. If you have someone move adjacent to him, such as by meleeing (Though you'd have to melee orthogonally adjacent, as Choke can't target diagonally, just like Bind), he's perfectly happy to Choke them, but he'll almost never spend an action point moving next to someone to manually Choke. Even during the regular enemy turn where he has 2 action points at once (In the base game), he'll usually do other stuff, like move for a flank and fire his Bolt Caster.

Like the Bolt Caster ignoring a point of Armor, Choke ignoring a point of Armor is largely a curiosity in the base game -and the Viper King can't even Choke SPARKs, so it's even less relevant than with the Bolt Caster! Also like the Bolt Caster, it picks up more relevance in War of the Chosen, where you're a lot more likely to have Armor on soldiers when you fight the Viper King thanks to Integrated DLC delaying the actual encounter. As Choke does less damage per hit, ignoring a point of Armor is noticeably more impactful to Choke as well, as the initial hit would be usually losing a third of its damage and follow-up hits half their damage to a single point of Armor if they didn't ignore it.

It's still not enough to really change how you play, though.

Frostbite
Doesn't necessarily end the turn, spending only 1 action point. Freezes all other units in a (4x4?) area for 2 turns and has a 5 turn cooldown.

I'm not entirely sure what Frostbite's radius is, as it's not exposed in a config file, you of course can't control the Viper King, and the actual visuals of the ability don't clearly indicate the size of the effect. I know it's larger than 3x3 due to how it's caught soldiers spaced out who couldn't be all caught by a 3x3 blast radius, though. I'll hopefully update this with the specific value someday when I've determined it more precisely.

This is actually the icon for the Frostbite ability on the Serpentsuit. Surprisingly, the Viper King doesn't have an icon for this ability himself. This haphazardness with Alien Ruler ability graphics is another one of those things that has me suspect Alien Hunters was originally one thing, then got switched to what we see and rushed out the door.

Also note that, though the Viper King is not immune to Freeze, Frostbite can't Freeze him, even if he eg fires it point-blank and catches himself in its radius. Another non-obvious-but-important detail is that, like many other ranged area-of-effect abilities on enemies, the Viper King will absolutely aim to catch soldiers no enemy can see, so long as they are near soldiers an enemy can see: having someone hidden just beyond a roof's edge can result in them being Frozen if a buddy is nearby and up against the roof's edge!

Anyway, Frostbite is another example of an Alien Ruler potentially horribly punishing things that usually wouldn't be a mistake. When you're moving, looking for your next pod, clustering your troops is generally a good idea, to minimize the odds you pull multiple pods, maximizing your entire squad's ability to respond if a pod patrols into them, maximizing the potential Overwatch triggers if you're moving slowly and Overwatching.... once combat is entered you should absolutely spread your soldiers out to minimize the harm caused by grenades/Micromissiles/Psionic Bombs/etc, but it's often a good idea to move a couple of soldiers with some space between them and then 'fill in' between them with the rest of the squad, so your initial advance is spread out, and then if no pod is pulled by those first two soldiers the rest of the squad gets to get all those clustering benefits (Among other points, minimizing the odds of activating a pod as they move) without you having committed to clustering.

And then the Viper King patrols into your squad and spends his first Ruler Reaction freezing 4 of your 5 soldiers, nothing you can do to prevent this except getting lucky with the Bolt Caster Stun or similar. Surprise!

Fortunately, War of the Chosen does a lot to reduce how horrible this is, between Reapers giving you much safer, more effective scouting (Not to mention being able to act without triggering Ruler Reactions), Integrated DLC ensuring the Viper King can't surprise you with his first appearance, and Ruler Reactions being less oppressive in general in War of the Chosen. Though... a big part of this is that 'don't let them act' principle I've alluded to before: I'm particularly insistent on using my Overwatch ambush on the Viper King, out of Alien Rulers, to minimize the odds of him pulling off a mass-Freeze and things going horribly wrong from there. (Like another pod patrolling in range immediately, my one non-Frozen soldier helpless to stop them)

In the base game, though, you're... pretty out of luck, especially on higher difficulties. Down on Regular, you might have a Ranger high enough level to have Conceal when the Viper King first jumps you: using Conceal doesn't trigger a Ruler Reaction and Concealment protects against Ruler Reactions, so if you took Conceal instead of Run And Gun, and the Viper King isn't too close, this can let you have a Ranger Conceal, move away from the squad, and then have somebody else act, reducing the threat posed by Frostbite. On the higher difficulties?... not likely, not unless you turned the Nest on and deliberately stalled on hitting it.

You might think the Frost Bomb, carried by a Grenadier, could reliably help resolve this problem, but using the Frost Bomb triggers a Ruler Reaction, ensuring its duration immediately ticks down. That buys you barely any maneuvering room. Sadly, this is... still one of your best options.

The good news is the Viper King will proceed to ignore your Frozen soldiers instead of taking advantage of the +10 accuracy against them and all, but that's not much help if any other enemies are active. Which odds are good there are, including that in the Nest there's automatically Neonate Vipers spawning in to help the Viper King.

Slightly more likely to save the day is that the AI, though it's coded to try to not catch its own forces with area-of-effect attacks, is pretty careless with them in practice. Thus, if the Viper King patrols into an active combat, he may well end up protecting you from the pod you were embroiled in combat with by Freezing some or all of its members. I've occasionally had him Freeze more of his buddies than mine, in fact. It's not something you can count on or do much to try to arrange, given Rulers Reactions and all, but still.

By a similar token, Frostbite will actually clear assorted negative effects from hit units (Just like the Frost Bomb), and so can actually save a soldier's life if eg they were on fire and would normally have died next turn. Again, not anything to plan around or try to specifically take advantage of, but a quirk to keep in mind. (And to be clear, I've literally had this happen: I'm not speaking purely hypothetically here, I had a soldier who should've burned to death because they had 1 HP instead survive thanks to Frostbite)

Also note that Medikit usage and Restoration do clear Freeze. You usually shouldn't try to take advantage given Ruler Reactions, but it can save the day to know if things line up right, especially in War of the Chosen where a Specialist can potentially release someone without triggering a Ruler Reaction by just being out of sight of the Viper King.

It's worth emphasizing that cooldowns on Alien Ruler abilities advance with Ruler Reactions. A 5 turn cooldown would normally be basically the same thing as an ability with 1 charge, but with the Viper King it's completely possible for him to use it twice in your own turn. Unlikely to happen given he's fond of Freezing half the squad and is perfectly happy to target people who haven't moved yet, but I've had it happen.

Conversely, since Alien Rulers always try to escape no later than turn/Ruler Reaction 14, 2 Frostbites is actually the upper limit, as even if he gets to act every time (ie no Stuns, Freezes, etc) and uses Frostbite as his first choice every time, the need to run will kick in and overrule further Frostbiting if you're not in the final confrontation. So that helps limit the damage some.

The Viper King is your introduction to Alien Rulers, one way or another, and as such the game is actually softballing things with him. Excepting Frostbite, everything he does only threatens one soldier at a time, and while Frostbite isn't a great thing to get hit by it's really not that bad compared to what the later two Rulers get up to. He's also the only Alien Ruler that makes use of Cover instead of innate Defense, making him more vulnerable to eg Ranger Slashes, allowing for crit bonuses from being in the open, and in general smashing his Cover is a useful option lacking an equivalent with the later Rulers.

One of the less obvious bits of softballing is an AI quirk, in that the Viper King has an extremely strong preference for alternating moving with non-movement actions, similar to the general AI preference to spend one action point on movement and another on attacking. Thus, only about half of his Ruler Reactions will be directly threatening, unlike the later Rulers. Surprisingly, this preference actually overrules his desire to avoid being in the open/flanked, where if he spends one Ruler Reaction on moving to a location and then you blast his Cover away he'll spend his next Ruler Reaction standing there, firing his Bolt Caster or Tongue Pull, instead of running to new Cover. As such, you should generally prefer to vaporize his Cover after he's spent a Ruler Reaction moving, so you've got a clear shot at him with good crit chances, instead of him just running to new Cover.

Note that Frostbite usage has a much higher priority, though, where the Viper King is perfectly happy to attack and then immediately Frostbite.

Curiously, the config files indicate this move/non-move alternating behavior is supposed to be universal to the Alien Rulers, but it isn't in actual play. I suspect this is connected to the other two Alien Rulers not using Cover. In any event, this is apparently an oversight, which explains why the later Alien Rulers are such big steps up in danger: because they're also tuned under an expectation of only attacking every other Ruler Reaction, and then break that assumption.

XCOM 2's relatively predictable, fixed early game is another contributor to the softballing: if you're playing the base game and don't have the Nest on, the Viper King will, in my experience, always jump you on the first Supply Raid mission. (Below Legendary. I haven't double-checked Legendary, and it has different schedules) This means you have all the time in the world to clean up other pods, reload weapons, and otherwise be optimally prepared to take on the Viper King when he shows up. Done right, he'll be so low on HP that even though his second appearance has decent odds of being on a timed mission it probably won't be a big deal because you'll kill him too fast for him to do much.

Running Integrated DLC in War of the Chosen furthers the softballing, since you'll know ahead of time the Viper King is present, still be encountering him in a timer-less mission, but now it's quite likely you've actually transitioned to magnetics by the time you hit his Facility, at least partially, and potentially have the second squad size expansion too. Five soldiers wielding Conventional weapons who all land their hit on the Viper King is 25~ damage in a single turn (Generously assuming no Rifles and no Grazes to drag down your damage, both of which are unlikely, but I'm making a point), less than half his Commander difficulty HP. (Ignoring his Armor, too, when it's fairly difficult to Shred both points immediately, reliably) Six soldiers wielding magnetics (Same previous assumptions, but also assuming no Breakthroughs or Dragon Rounds to drag the damage up) is 42~ damage, more than 2/3rds his Commander difficulty HP -and if you take my advice and actually go out of your way to Overwatch ambush him, you'll get some number of crits in there. (Armor will hurt a little, but only a little if you do set up that Overwatch ambush -such as tossing a Claymore and setting it off with a grenade) I've had cases where I literally killed him in the Overwatch ambush, never triggering a Ruler Reaction.

This isn't even touching on things like how SPARKs have more opportunity to leverage Overdrive against him if you take full advantage of Integrated DLC.

Though that said a War of the Chosen run that doesn't have Integrated DLC turned on is murkier. You have to deal with the possibility of the Supply Raid instead being Supply Extraction, which is to say the crate-stealing one that has time pressure, Resistance soldiers tend to drag down your average damage output, Fatigue means your soldiers will be lower-level... you still get to benefit from Ruler Reactions being less oppressive, and a given run may be benefiting from relevant Breakthroughs, but if someone felt non-Integrated DLC War of the Chosen runs have a rougher first Viper King fight than base game runs, I wouldn't consider that unreasonable.

Regardless, overall the Viper King isn't really that bad. A first-time player is liable to be traumatized by him, but once you know what you're doing it's pretty easy to mostly-reliably kill him in two missions, even up to Commander difficulty, even in the base game where you're not going to Overwatch ambush him.

It's the later Alien Rulers that are really problematic...

On a completely different note, something interesting is that the config files seem to indicate the Viper King was supposed to be able to be escorted by Neonate Vipers at some point. It clearly hasn't been implemented in the final version, but it's interesting they at minimum considered the possibility, and a bit sad they didn't run with it. The Viper King showing up with regular Vipers in the early game is fairly nasty, as he can be showing up with them when they're otherwise still restricted to acting as pod leaders, making for an even bigger spike in difficulty. If such early encounters had him escorted by Neonate Vipers instead, that would've been much smoother, more consistent design.

The fact that the Viper King is actually fairly easy to rapidly kill, and is the Alien Ruler least prone to killing soldiers or even injuring much of the squad, in turn makes him the Alien Ruler that is most slanted toward being a reward. The Serpentsuit is a fantastic armor for Rangers or, alternatively, Sharpshooters, providing astonishing mobility and a surprising amount of survivability while throwing in a useful panic button in the form of Frostbite. I often skip building a Spider Suit entirely because the Serpentsuit is 100% superior and potentially unlocked before building Spider Suits is an option, and I rarely want to have more than one soldier running around in light armor anyway. War of the Chosen just exacerbates this since Resistance soldiers can't make use of alternate armors at all, even with Integrated DLC delaying acquisition of the Serpentsuit.

On a different note, I alluded to this before, but something unique about the Alien Rulers is that the Autopsy cinematics don't have Tygan talking over them. Instead, we get Vahlen talking over them, with the voice filtering effects seeming to be intended to indicate this is supposed to be audio recordings done for her research. This is one of the more direct bits of Alien Hunters hearkening back to the prior game: here's Vahlen talking over an Autopsy cinematic, just like she did in the prior game.

I'd question what's supposed to be going on in-universe here, but it's not like Tygan talking over Autopsy cinematics is supposed to be an in-universe thing either.

In any event, the text portion once the Autopsy completes is still from Tygan.

Disappointingly, Vahlen's dialogue doesn't actually contribute anything of substance. The main of it is Vahlen talking about how it's been a long time since she studied an alien like this (Which seems... unlikely, in-universe), and what little she says that isn't under that banner is just more repetitions of things said elsewhere.

Also, I've alluded to this before, but it should be repeated that Alien Ruler Autopsies can never be Instant, what with not being able to collect multiple instances of a given corpse. Conversely, in War of the Chosen it's possible for an Alien Ruler Autopsy to get Inspired, which is mildly neat to get but often a bit of a waste of the Inspiration trigger given they already take very little time.

Narratively, the Autopsy is surprisingly uninteresting, especially if you've done the Nest, as Vahlen and Tygan largely just re-iterate the narrative bits from the Nest. Not helping is how some chunks are just lampshade-hanging, where Tygan openly questions how Vahlen was able to enact the changes she made, a point the Alien Rulers DLC has no answer for.

It's a bit disappointing for a special superboss enemy.

-------------------------------------

So back in the Neonate Viper post I covered several ways in which the Alien Hunters DLC really looks like it was meant to be more like 'favored aliens hunting X-COM at least partially for sport', and it's time to return to that topic because it's pretty central to talking about the Viper King.

Right away, let's note the term used for these enemies: Alien Ruler. That's an extremely strange choice of name for the scenario we got, where these three aliens are escaped science experiments Vahlen messed around with. They don't rule over other aliens: in fact, they'd be quite outside their respective societies, given the backstory. This would be a little like someone crash-landing on a desert island, and when, many years later, they manage to get off the island and try to re-integrate with regular society the news started reporting our hapless exile as The American King. (Or insert a different nation's name here, it really doesn't matter) That's... pretty obviously nonsensical.

Whereas it would fit perfectly to a scenario in which these three aliens were, in fact, major political figures within the Ethereal regime. The Viper King's visual design is notably consistent with this: his headpiece is evocative of a crown (And is of dubious defensive value), he has a scarf like an ADVENT Officer, and his chest piece looks much more like it's designed for cool factor than for protection. (It's worth pointing out here the XCOM site has a post for the Viper King, and it's explicitly stated the Viper King was supposed to look regal/like a ruler/etc; I'm not misreading his design) His design makes perfect sense for an elite Viper with extreme confidence in their Ethereal-enhanced physique, while being extremely baffling if one tries to work through how Vahlen might have caused it to be this way, and especially why she might've. Attempting to imagine the Viper King assembling his unique, polished look on his own post-escape is if anything even more bizarre of a scenario. Alternatively, one might look to the point that Vahlen found the Alien Rulers locked up and hypothesize the Viper King had this outfit when he got sealed away, but that's not really an explanation.

Indeed, this also touches directly on one of the main bits of obvious jank with the Alien Hunters DLC. The final product wants us to think that Vahlen found some unusual aliens locked up in metaphorical boxes in a random Earth cave, modified them further for some reason, and then they escaped as mad science experiments tend to do in pop culture...

... except first of all, the game can't keep straight the picture here. Most of the dialogue presents the Viper King as 'Vahlen took a Viper and made it male', but some of Vahlen's own dialogue in the Nest instead indicates she just... found a Viper that was already male. Similarly, some elements of the game -such as Tygan's Autopsy report- indicate Vahlen somehow induced the Viper King into having a frost-spitting ability instead of a poison-spitting ability, but others indicate it was like that when she found it. The only notion that's completely consistent is 'Vahlen did experiments on the Viper King', but the only ability the narrative is completely consistent about attributing to Vahlen is the psionic portal used to escape -which is, itself, very blatantly a game mechanic given a thin narrative excuse, not something the Nest's plot integrates. Vahlen emphasizes 'Gamma's' intelligence when talking about his escape: there's no references to the Viper King escaping via psionic portal, not even indirect references. (eg there's no 'we had psionic suppressors, but Gamma somehow sabotaged them!' idea, or anything even vaguely similar)

The Viper King is most blatant about this inconsistency, but it crops up with all the Alien Rulers: some parts of dialogue blame Vahlen for a given conspicuous oddity, other bits indicate that oddity was present when Vahlen found them. It's not that the devs had a nonsensical-but-consistent idea in mind: it's quite obvious that they hadn't fully locked in a particular concept when the DLC shipped!

Furthermore, the implied story of the environmental visuals and all are fairly questionable with the 'Vahlen found Ethereal science experiments and let them loose' scenario. At the broadest level, it's difficult to imagine why the Ethereals would make super-powerful science experiment aliens, decide to lock them up, and then decide to not only lock them up on Earth but then apparently promptly abandon the prison facility: the section of the Nest that has the Alien Ruler containers looks conspicuously like a chunk of the alien fortress that is the final mission, transplanted underground and left to rust and accumulate sand for years.

Not directly inconsistent or problematic but worth pointing out is that even though there's three Alien Rulers, there's actually four separate containment measures: one is a tank atop another tank and I imagine many players just gloss over it as 'one very tall tank', but there's no obvious reason why that tank would be taller, nor why it would be visibly segmented. It's not like the Viper King is too large to fit in the one tank. I honestly wouldn't be at all surprised if there were supposed to be four Alien Rulers before the DLC got rushed.

Anyway, an old, abandoned alien facility with super-experiments conveniently lying around, abandoned, is... pretty unbelievable, is the point, especially it just being randomly sitting in a large cave. This could be thoughtless, bad writing -I've seen this kind of scenario in other stories, where clearly the creator(s) thought it made perfect sense for some reason- but honestly the sheer oddness of this goes away if one instead imagines the Alien Rulers as elite troubleshooters of the Ethereal regime (Like the Chosen are shown to be in part), and guess that the Nest was originally imagined as Vahlen having found some abandoned alien research facility (Maybe something to do with the Viper/Thin Man connection?) that the Ethereals didn't care about up until uppity humans found it and started trying to reverse-engineer proprietary technology, at which point the Viper King showed up with his elite guard and murdered everybody.

It's worth pointing out here that if the Nest is enabled, one step in progressing toward it is scanning a Rumor that gives you the Alien Hunters gear -the Shadowkeeper, Hunter's Axes, Bolt Caster, and Frost Bomb. More specifically, completing the Rumor tells you that you found an old-style Skyranger with a box containing these items, and the general implication is that Vahlen got a hold of these, had a Skyranger, but it got shot down while carrying them and so now you're looting them. In the product we got, this is random and inexplicable and the story never provides anything remotely approaching an explanation for where Vahlen got these, let alone why they were being shipped somewhere on a Skyranger. (Excepting the Frost Bomb, which gets explained as 'bottled Viper King frost venom', but I've been over how strange a setup that is) In a scenario where Vahlen has been reverse-engineering alien technology (The Alien Hunters loot, specifically) in an abandoned, top-secret facility... suddenly there's an obvious explanation: the Viper King showed up, Vahlen/her team loaded up the gear to try to escape with it so it could be studied elsewhere, but the Skyranger got shot down by a UFO and the aliens either didn't know anything important was on board or didn't care, giving you the opportunity to loot the gear.

Mind, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that Rumor was a fairly last-minute kludge and the intended scenario was much different, but that's because of another major, problematic detail: the Bolt Caster, which in gameplay is a unique artifact you get one of early in the game, but then Neonate Vipers and the Viper King all have Bolt Casters. This is one of the more subtle-yet-extreme examples of the 'experiment' explanation quite obviously not being the original plan, as the narrative completely ignores this element of the models, and it doesn't make natural sense on the face of it. Escaped Experiment Viper King should be running around with a Conventional weapon stolen off Vahlen's crew, or maybe with a regular plasma weapon generously donated by a regular Viper sometime after the escape but before the player initiates the Nest mission. Or even be unarmed entirely! He should not have a semi-unique weapon not used by any standard forces.

There's ways this could be explained, such as suggesting Vahlen found a cache of gear stored with the Alien Rulers, but any such explanation is something you'd expect the narrative to address, not ignore entirely, and it's especially conspicuous that you don't loot a second Bolt Caster when you finish off the Viper King: I can wave off Neonate Vipers not providing any as a pure gameplay thing of avoiding enabling the Nest leading to the player getting a ludicrous number of copies of a weapon you're supposed to have a limited number of, as that would be obviously problematic, but the fact that the Viper King doesn't drop a Bolt Caster really looks to me like he was supposed to at some point and the DLC being rushed resulted in the kludge we got.

It's worth pointing out that alien plasma weapons normally visibly break when the alien is killed: the Bolt Casters wielded by Neonate Vipers and the Viper King just... drop, intact.

Meanwhile, Proto-Chosen Viper King having a custom weapon not seen among the general alien forces is perfectly natural. Not to mention consistent with the Chosen all getting unique gear, and Avatars getting a unique rifle: this isn't a dev team that defaults to giving elite enemies the same generic weapons as everybody else. Heck, even Bradford gets a unique weapon! Shen, too, if we connect ROV-R to her superior Gremlin gameplay behaviors!

Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised if at some point the intent was that all the Alien Hunters loot would be acquired by beating the Alien Rulers, where presumably the Frost Bomb and Bolt Caster would've been looted directly with the Viper King's corpse or both unlocked by his Autopsy. Though if this was ever the intent, I suspect the devs changed their mind on it a lot earlier than the other changes I'm talking about. The tiering used on the non-Frost-Bomb portion of the gear would be weird to cleave to if the plan was to be looting them later and later in a run. Imagine if the Chosen weapons had been designed with three tiers; that would be pretty bizarre of a decision, given you're supposed to be potentially transitioning to Plasma Rifles when you're taking out your first Chosen.

Regardless, returning to the proto-Chosen aspect of Alien Rulers, it's worth mentioning that some of the Chosen dialogue doesn't really fit the Chosen themselves... but would fit a group of aliens who broadly fit to the Chosen in terms of being elite trouble-shooters empowered by the Ethereals and so on. The most glaring example is the Chosen Hunter referring to how the Ethereals have never offered an entire planet before, where he's speaking as if the Chosen have been serving the Ethereals across several past conquests and 'you'll get this planet if you do well enough' was never on the table. The Chosen backstories all present them as modified humans or vat-clones of humans, and either way they're consistent about the Chosen having only come into existence as of the Ethereal conquest of Earth (Making all of them less than 20 years old), so that implication doesn't really fit the Chosen. Whereas I could imagine Proto-Chosen Viper King having been serving in this capacity for decades or centuries and musing about how this has never happened in his many years of service, no problem.

Furthermore, if one imagines that in this scenario the Alien Rulers were intended to be alien rulers, this also has fairly serious narrative heft; one of the Chosen getting a planet to theirself would be basically a vanity project, which is sort of whatever. The Alien Rulers as alien rulers scenario would instead carry the connotation that whichever Alien Ruler captures the Commander gets a permanent home for their species, and by extension gets at least a little bit out from under the yoke of Ethereal control. That would make a lot of sense, and better sell the notion that the Ethereals really want the Commander for some reason, as it would indicate they rate the Commander worth permanently trading away a sizable fraction of their slave-army.

A similar point is that some of the Warlock's dialogue where he draws parallels between the Chosen and the Commander would make more sense; Alien Ruler Whose Lines Got Pulled From The Warlock would be talking under the assumption that the Commander would end up the human version of an Alien Ruler, after all!

This script-recycling part isn't as wild of speculation as you might expect. I know for a fact that there are writers in the game industry who hold onto cut writing and look for opportunities to plug it into a later game. In the case of the Alien Rulers/Chosen connection theory, it's not like the recycling would seem likely to be obvious to an outside perspective; the Alien Rulers don't actually talk in the final game, so if they were ever meant to have personalities there isn't any possibility for a casual player to go 'hey, the Chosen Hunter is really just a slight variation on the Viper King in personality!' (Or whatever the connections actually are, if they do exist)

It's also worth pointing out that the Alien Rulers DLC is really obviously ambitious. Slingshot back in the prior game was basically a mission pack, plus a new set of soldier graphics and lines for Zhang; it didn't add any core content like new enemies. The Alien Rulers DLC adds brand-new weapons, with the Bolt Caster outright having unique animations (It's closest to a Sniper Rifle... and to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if it was originally meant to be a Sniper Rifle weapon... but it's completely unique in animations and audio), the Alien Rulers are not only new enemies but have multiple ambitious new mechanics attached to them (Persistent enemies across missions, including persistent HP and Armor, the Ruler Reaction mechanic, Freeze being a new status...) on top of the Nest having unique music and tons of new graphics and the actual scripting/voice acting/etc. Correlated to this is that the Alien Rulers have a progression of becoming less ambitious; the Viper King, while probably based on a Viper's core model, nonetheless has different core attack animations and so on; he's not a simple reskin. Our next Alien Ruler, the Berserker Queen, is... a Berserker, but green and with Venom stuff installed, and little in the way of new or changed animations. The last Alien Ruler is even worse, with only minimal model changes compared to a regular Archon, and only one whole new ability. (Which I'll address in more detail when we get there, but it's not necessarily as new as it seems)

This progression probably reflects the team scaling back their ambitions as it became obvious they were running out of time or money or whatever happened there: the Viper King is probably in the vicinity of their original intent for uniqueness of the Alien Rulers. The Berserker Queen is probably a compromise, meant to be more distinct than she ended up being, but still at least not a reskin. The Archon King was probably thrown together fairly hastily, with little opportunity to attach new mechanics or rejigger his model or anything like that. (Among other points, I have to wonder if maybe he was supposed to have legs at some point; the Icarus Armor's design would make a lot more sense if that was the case)

More speculatively, I have to wonder how much of the Chosen's mechanics are new-new, and how much of them are 'the Alien Rulers were supposed to do this, but it didn't make it into the game'. For example, the Chosen can all Daze your units, and the Alien Rulers are all able to knock your soldiers Unconscious; there's a rather strong parallel there, suspiciously so. Were the Alien Rulers supposed to perform battlefield interrogations/captures, pursuing information on where the Commander is to capture the Commander, like the Chosen do? While we're on that topic, it's also worth pointing out the Rulers all having access to psionic gates makes a lot of sense in the scenario of them being elite units personally favored by the Ethereals, and would fit nicely into such a battlefield capture mechanic in the exact same way as Chosen having battlefield teleportation ties into their mechanics, whereas what we got of Vahlen inexplicably cramming psi gate capability into a bunch of experiments she didn't want escaping is baffling. After all, battlefield teleportation from psi gates is already shown to be something Ethereals can make happen; the plot forces the player to see it twice, after all, and both times have to do very specifically with the player drawing Ethereal attention.

It's too bad that Alien Hunters ended up so obviously cut short of its ambitions, because what the DLC seems to have been going for seems really, really interesting.

Alas.

To be entirely fair, I do appreciate how Alien Hunters walks back a fair amount of the Vahlen-related narrative problems by reframing her into a mad scientist who tries to do good but can't see the metaphorical line in the sand of ethics, requiring external perspectives to avoid blithely walking right into evil-and-stupid territory. Alien Hunters walking back Vahlen is, all by itself, one of the biggest reasons why I'm not as hard on XCOM 2's narrative as its predecessor. It's depressingly rare for sequels to games like this to take a long, hard look at narrative problems of this sort and go 'wow, yeah, that is pretty awful, let's not keep treating that as fine'. It's a breath of fresh air to see such, and a good sign for the series' ability to improve as it goes along, narratively, instead of diving ever deeper into a rabbit's hole of horrific insanity the way a number of video game series have done over the years.

On a much more trivial note, I actually quite like the aspect of the Viper King where he's a snake-man with 'ice powers'. Pop culture usually uses superpowers to exaggerate qualities that already exist, or are stereotyped as existing: actual reptiles rely heavily on external warmth, so more fantastical reptilian beings are liable to have their susceptibility to cold emphasized, and certainly won't have ice magic or ice-themed weapons tech, or icy psychic powers, or whatever. (Yes, I know, 'ice dragons' are a stock concept, but dragons are very much treated as their own class of being by a lot of pop culture. The pop culture that does treat them as Giant Lizards tends to cleave to the stuff I just laid out) Never mind that most superpower concepts have no logical reason to emphasize existing qualities, and indeed quite often are set up so I'd expect the opposite to be true.

It's a little unfortunate how bizarre the chosen way of explaining the Viper King's ice powers is, but still. I do legitimately like 'reptile man has ice superpowers, in contravention of the usual pop culture norms that themselves don't make much sense'. It's a nice thing to see, regardless of the flaws in execution... especially since the evidence is a lot of the flaws in Alien Hunters' execution were caused by rushing. It makes me wonder if a less rushed version would've come up with a better explanation.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Next time, we cover the Berserker Queen.

See you then.