XCOM 2 Analysis: Avenger Facilities

I probably should've done this before Breakthroughs, but eh. I honestly hadn't originally intended to cover Facilities in detail, though obviously I've since changed my mind.

Anyway, starting with the basics; the Avenger's room setup is that it has exactly 12 rooms, which are always in a 3x4 grid, three wide and four tall. Past that point is where randomization starts kicking in.

First of all, most rooms will need to be Excavated before a Facility can be built in them. This is done by assigning at least 1 Engineer to the room: each given room filled with junk will have a limit of 1, 2, or 3 Engineers. The maximum number of Engineers you can assign to a room is correlated to its base dig duration and reward payout, with some qualifiers. With one exception I'll be getting to a bit later, the maximum Excavation is always 10 days: that is, a room that accepts 1 Engineer will take 10 days, while a room that accepts 3 Engineers will also take 10 days to Excavate... if you assigned 3 Engineers to it. If you assign fewer, such rooms will take longer: a 2-Engineer room will take twice as long (20 days) to Excavate if only 1 Engineer is assigned, while a 3-Engineer room will take three times as long (30 days), while assigning 2 Engineers to a 3-Engineer room will put you at the midway point. (ie 15 days)

Unless you're on Legendary, in which case triple all these numbers!

Anyway, there are three types of filled room: Alien Debris, Alien Machinery, and Exposed Power Coils. In-game, you'll usually encounter them in roughly that order, but I'm going to cover them in reverse order, because the level of complexity in describing them actually goes down, oddly enough.

Exposed Power Coils are special. Every run has exactly two Exposed Power Coils, which are randomly distributed in the lower two rows. I think the game prefers to have one per horizontal row, but if so it's not any kind of hard rule: I've had runs that put both in the bottom row, and also runs that put both in the row above that. In any event, Exposed Power Coils always have a maximum Engineer count of 3, and have the appropriate Excavation duration. (ie 30 days with 1 Engineer, 15 days with 2 Engineers, and 10 days with 3 Engineers) Once fully Excavated, you get an immediate injection of 20~ Elerium Crystals. (Except on Legendary, where it rises to 30~ Elerium Crystals) Additionally, Exposed Power Coils remain special even once dug up, in that a Facility built in their slot will not use Power, except Power Relays which will instead generate 5 more Power than usual, for free.

This is basically Steam Vents from Enemy Unknown, but much better-designed. It's really nice, and I hope XCOM 3 sticks to this as a foundation if the base-building end of things is at all recognizable.

Alien Machinery is one of your two 'normal' room types. Their random distribution can't put them in the top row, and my experience is that they are more common in lower rows, but they can show up anywhere that isn't the top row. They also always accept either 2 Engineers or 3 Engineers, with Alien Machinery that spawns in the bottom row always taking up to 3 Engineers. Indeed, in general 2 Engineers as the limit is uncommon with Alien Machinery -it's not surprising for a run to have no such cases at all, all Alien Machinery rooms that generated requiring 3 Engineers for best speed.

Upon Excavation being completed, Alien Machinery provides an immediate injection of Supplies and Alien Alloys. The amount is defined by both the number of Engineers the room could accept and also the depth of the room: Excavations that accept more Engineers give more, and Excavations performed in deeper rooms also give more. The exact amount is randomized, but these axioms are reasonably consistent -including that Legendary difficulty raises the payouts, so even a Commander-to-Legendary comparison finds that the 'more time=bigger rewards' axiom remains roughly true.

Once Excavated, the room itself retains no special qualities from having been filled with Alien Machinery previously, unlike Exposed Power Coils.

Lastly, Alien Debris is the 'normal' filled room type, but by far the most complex to talk about.

First of all, in every run the top row will have one empty room, and two rooms filled with Alien Debris, though which room is empty is randomized. This top row of filled rooms is special, and each one always only accepts 1 Engineer -and is actually dug out extra-fast, taking half the usual time below Legendary and a third the usual time on Legendary. (ie 5 days below Legendary, and 10 days on Legendary)

Even below the top row, Alien Debris can potentially generate as accepting a maximum of 1 Engineer -but only on the second row. The bottom two rows will always take a minimum of 2 Engineers. Furthermore, on the rare occasion you get an Alien Debris room on the bottom-most row, it will usually be a 3-Engineer room. (Though it can be 2 -it's just rare to actually see)

Otherwise, the primary difference from Alien Machinery rooms is a lack of Alien Alloys in the payout. You get Supplies once these rooms are fully Excavated, the Supplies are greater the deeper you go, and also greater the more Engineers could be assigned, etc. Do note that Alien Machinery actually tends to give more Supplies; strictly speaking, the only times it's actually advantageous to get an Alien Debris room are if it's a 1-Engineer spot that spawns in the second row, or if it's a 2-Engineer spot that spawns in the bottom row -and honestly, I'd generally say that latter scenario is still largely disadvantageous, due to the reduction in payout. You don't care as much about speed by the time you've dug that deep.

Also, it should be noted that you can only actually check the payouts, Engineer limits, and Excavation times of rooms that are orthogonally adjacent to a room that's already cleared. (Which is to say you can only see these elements for rooms you're currently able to Excavate: you can only Excavate rooms adjacent to already-cleared rooms) You thus can't perfectly pre-plan your run's Excavation and Facility stuff.

Taken altogether, this is a system that is attempting to create two basic strategies: dig deep for big rewards, but take longer to open up rooms, or dig broad to open up more rooms quickly while getting less of a payoff.

I say 'attempting' because in practice I'm firmly of the opinion that 'dig deep' is far superior by default. It usually isn't meaningfully faster to dig broad than it is to beeline to the nearest Exposed Power Coil thanks to the exact tuning of dig rates and room generation preferences, and you really just plain need Exposed Power Coils to handle your Power demands, especially in War of the Chosen where the Resistance Ring got added and the Advanced Warfare Center got split into the Infirmary and Training Center, eating 2 more room slots for critical functionality and raising your minimum Power demands. (War of the Chosen does give you extra Power to start, but not by enough to completely offset your new needs)

In theory, you can build Power Relays in 'shallow' parts to cover additional rooms early, but Power Relays are awful at generating Power if they're not placed on an Exposed Power Coil. They only generate 3 Power by default, when most Facilities cost 3 Power at base, and demand more Power to upgrade if they have upgrades. (Only Power Relays themselves don't have their upgrades eating additional Power) They can be upgraded, but the base upgrade only adds 2 more Power -so one Power Relay would cover a single Facility with room to upgrade it, maybe- and the Elerium Conduit upgrade can't be performed until fairly late in a run, making it irrelevant to your initial Facility construction plans. You can assign Engineers to Power Relays to add 5 Power per Engineer, and at that point a Power Relay can generate 14 Power, which is pretty good... 

... but that's two Engineers not Excavating, so this plan centered around digging out rooms and building in them early instead of digging straight to an Exposed Power Coil is just slowing your overall progress down. It's also a plan that replaces generating resources (By Excavating deep to reach the better payouts) with spending resources (By building Facilities and staffing them with Engineers who won't be Excavating), which further hamstrings this strategy.

On the plus side, War of the Chosen seems to have understood this, as its re-tuned starting Power situation more consistently presents you with a mildly difficult early choice: do you dig up the top row entirely, to get your first three Facilities up as fast as possible? Or do you focus on digging straight down, and accept that your second Facility will be mildly delayed and your third Facility heavily delayed?

In any event, you do start with 1 room empty and more than enough Supplies to build a Facility. In the base game, you should just immediately build the Guerrilla Tactics School. The game knows it, too, putting the GTS to the top of the list and marking it with an exclamation point. In War of the Chosen, the Resistance Ring is your obvious first build instead (Covert Ops are important), including the game shoving it to the top of the list and marking it with an exclamation point, displacing the GTS in this capacity. (Aside the janky bit of weirdness that having Lost And Abandoned on won't let you build it until after you've completed the Lost And Abandoned mission)

Also, it's worth pointing out that Legendary difficulty's modifications to Excavation duration make it a lot more worth considering digging out the entire top row first so you can build Facilities, particularly in War of the Chosen where you start with enough Power to build three Facilities. Below Legendary, especially in the base game, it's often better to either only dig one top room out or simply dig straight down toward Exposed Power Coils.

On the topic of Power varying between the base game and War of the Chosen... In the base game, you have 12 initial Power as your listed maximum, with 6 of that credited to running processes you can't turn off or otherwise interact with. So actually you start with 6, because that other 6 potential Power doesn't matter to the actual gameplay at all. (There are no mechanics that, say, raise your Power generation by a percentage of your stated maximum Power, or anything like that) War of the Chosen raises your maximum starting Power by +3 -just enough to fit a Resistance Ring in on top of whatever else you preferred to do in the base game. (It was the GTS and something else. The GTS makes zero sense to put off unless you're going for the 'no squad expansion upgrades' Achievement... and you'll still want it up for its other upgrades, especially in the base game, not to mention to unlock PCS access)

Note that most Facilities have a hard cap of 1. Power Relays and Resistance Comms are the only exceptions, and have no hard cap per se. (Though obviously you can only have up to 12 copies in a given run due to there being only 12 rooms, and also why would you even build that many?) Also note that listed build times can always be halved by assigning an Engineer to the Facility while it's under construction.

Also note that while I list the Legendary costs in parentheses for upgrades too, my own experience is that upgrades in particular don't actually have their cost changed by Legendary difficulty. As Legendary costs are prone to being applied inconsistently in general with no rhyme or reason I've been able to determine... they may or may not matter, so still worth listing.

Also, I don't list build times for upgrades. This is because upgrades are, rather strangely, always completed instantly. So don't worry about time when it comes to upgrades.

Oddly, while the game will let you tear down Facilities you've completed, you can't cancel a Facility that's under construction. This usually isn't important, but if you start one thing, then change your mind about what you'd like to be building there... whoops, no take-backs until it's done! This can be disastrous on Legendary, given the widely increased build times, so don't get careless about throwing down Facility construction. Be sure you'll be okay with being committed to your choice before you make it.

Or load an earlier save, if you can. That works too.

Anyway, on to specific Facilities, starting with...

Guerilla Tactics School

Cost: 85 Supplies. (100 Supplies)

Maintenance: 25 Supplies.

Build Time: 14 days. (28 days)

Power: -3.

No upgrades.

You can purchase assorted squad upgrades for Supplies, gated by soldier rank. Also, you can't slot PCSes into soldiers unless this Facility is up.

Can be staffed by 1 Rookie, training them into a selected core class over 5 days. (10 on Legendary)

One of your most essential Facilities whether you're talking the base game or War of the Chosen, though of course the exact implications vary. I've previously covered the GTS in detail, so I won't be covering stuff like the exact upgrades you can buy in this post.

In the base game, this is straightforward: build it first. The only thing resembling a choice is whether you should have your first Engineer hurry it along, or just let it build itself and focus on Excavating. On Legendary, this is even actually a legitimate question; certainly, if you get an Engineer from an early Rumor, it's a possibility you should seriously consider. Personally, I usually just let it build itself -the one time I hurried it along, it got built so fast I couldn't actually buy any of its upgrades!- but hurrying it isn't unavoidably worthless.

In War of the Chosen, GTS construction is slightly more nuanced. Like yes, broadly you should be building it second, and it's actually even harder to justify rushing its construction given Fatigue means you'll be hitting rank checkpoints slower and you don't even care about any ranks except Sergeant and Captain, unlike the base game, but there's the question of whether you rushed the Resistance Ring or not, War of the Chosen isn't so aggressive about scaling up enemies in expectation you built the GTS (You can get away with building it third if you just dig out the top row as your first priority), and the utility of promoting Rookies for free can actually be handled by just sending Rookies on Covert Ops if you're not trying to produce a lopsided soldier makeup.

I mostly just mindlessly build it second, mind, and that's never a bad plan, but if you want to experiment with alternate build orders in War of the Chosen it's not actually blatantly sub-optimal to do so! So that's nice of War of the Chosen; more replay value.


Resistance Ring

Cost: 80 Supplies. (100 Supplies)

Maintenance: 10 Supplies.

Build Time: 12 days. (24 days)

Power: -3

Upgrade 1: Digital Network. Requires you are in contact with 2 Resistance Factions. Adds 1 'Wildcard' Resistance Order slot. Costs 100 Supplies and 2 Power, as well as adding a 10 Supply maintenance cost per month. (125 Supplies)

Upgrade 2: Holo Planner. Requires you are in contact with all 3 Resistance Factions. Adds 1 'Wildcard' Resistance Order slot. Costs 125 Supplies and 2 Power, as well as adding a 40 Supply maintenance cost per month. (200 Supplies)

Allows initiating a Covert Op anytime no Covert Op is underway, rather than only once at the beginning of each month.

Can be staffed by 1 Engineer, reducing Covert Op durations by 33%.

The Resistance Ring's utility has, of course, been covered in extensive detail in the Covert Op and Resistance Order posts. So I'm not covering those pieces here.

The Resistance Ring would actually be one of the better Facilities to slot into an Exposed Power Coil, long-term, ultimately consuming a whopping 7 Power... but it really ought to be the very first Facility you build, as Covert Ops are simply too important to have on a better-than-monthly pace. I could buy that some people build it second instead for some reason, but the idea of putting it off until you can slot it into an Exposed Power Coil is just ridiculous, even with Lost And Abandoned delaying your ability to construct it. So this notion is a pointless hypothetical, alas.

It's interesting to note that the Resistance Ring only has visual slots for up to 3 Resistance faction icons to be on display, considering each icon gets displayed on both sides. This would make sense if there were intended to be three Resistance factions per run, but randomized which ones a given run got, much like I've theorized with the Chosen.

Also neat is that the banners that go up representing the Resistance factions actually use the icons rolled for your particular run, not the default icon used for their 'country flag'.

The Resistance Ring's upgrades are unusual in a couple different ways. First of all, as I've noted before you can't build Digital Network until you're in contact with two Resistance factions, nor the Holo Planner until you're in contact with all three. Second, as the only effect of upgrading the Resistance Ring is to provide more Wildcard slots for Resistance Orders, which you can only interact with when the month rolls over, you should generally not upgrade the Resistance Ring until you're close to the end of the month and strongly confident you'll appreciate the Wildcard slot. (Such as because you grab a new Resistance Order via Covert Op, and you don't really want to displace any of your existing Resistance Orders but do want to slot in the Resistance Order) With other Facilities, it's better to upgrade shortly after the month has rolled over, not before, to avoid being unnecessarily hit with the increased maintenance early.

Overall, though, not a lot to say here, given how much of its mechanics I've covered in prior posts.

Power Relay

Cost: 80 Supplies (100 Supplies)

Maintenance: 10 Supplies.

Build Time: 12 days. (24 days)

Power: +3 Power. +5 more Power if built on an Exposed Power Coil, for a total of +8.

Upgrade 1: Power Conduit. Adds +2 Power, and a second staffing slot. Costs 80 Supplies and adds 10 Supplies of maintenance per month. (80 Supplies)

Upgrade 2: Elerium Conduit. Adds +6 Power. Costs 150 Supplies and 20 Elerium Crystals, and adds 20 Supplies of maintenance per month. (300 Supplies and 35 Elerium Crystals)
Can be staffed by 1 Engineer to add +5 Power.

In the base game, there's a decent argument for building an early Power Relay, especially if your initial room is in a corner and the Exposed Power Coils are as far from your initial room as possible. In such a case, the fastest Excavation  route will involve having five rooms open before you have an Exposed Power Coil dug up, of which your initial Power can only use two; building a Power Relay will let you build a Resistance Comms or the Proving Ground or the like, and if you can spare the Engineer then manning the Power Relay will let you use that final room, and getting a Resistance Comms and/or the Proving Ground and/or the Shadow Chamber up early is pretty important to not suffer a game over.

If instead the closest Exposed Power Coil is two rooms below your initial empty room, or Excavating left or right will have an Exposed Power Coil two rooms down from that spot, an early Power Relay is noticeably more dubious. Regardless of how exactly you intend to use Exposed Power Coils, they're a priority to dig open, and with one that close you've got no 'spare' rooms or just the one -and a Power Relay isn't helpful unless you're going to build or upgrade a Facility. Building a Facility of course requires another empty room, and upgrading is dubious given that most of your essential early Facilities can't be upgraded at all. (Or in the case of the Shadow Chamber, can't be upgraded until much later in a run, making it irrelevant to the question of whether to build an early Power Relay or not)

Still, even with an Exposed Power Coil that close, it is faster to dig out the top row, build a Power Relay in the 'spare' room that results while digging up a room on the way to the Exposed Power Coil, and then build a Facility while digging out the Exposed Power Coil. So it's an option to keep in mind.

In War of the Chosen, building an early Power Relay is a lot more dubious of an idea. You have three Facility's worth of Power to start, still only have two Facilities that are immediate priorities (Though the details have changed), while the Avenger's layout hasn't fundamentally changed. The arrangement I laid out earlier where you end up digging out five rooms before starting to Excavate your first Exposed Power Coil is the only arrangement in which you'll end up with enough surplus empty rooms that building a Power Relay results in being able to build an additional Facility with less waiting -and it'll only be the one Facility by default, rather than potentially two of them.

Furthermore, War of the Chosen usually puts less pressure on you to optimize your strategic planning in the first place. Sabotage-the-Covert-Op and Sabotage-the-Resistance-Order both provide ways to knock back the Avatar Project bar without needing to build the Shadow Chamber or increase your Contacts. You can generate Contacts from Resistance Orders and Covert Ops, instead of Contacts being increased only by Resistance Comms and the occasional Rumor. Rapid Excavation, Heavy Machinery, and to a lesser extent Modular Construction can all result in improved Avenger internal timetables. Resistance Network also reduces the pressure to optimize, since you have more wiggle room to jump to where you need to be once you do have Contacts available. And so on.

You can't count on any given such factor to for-sure appear in any given run, but most War of the Chosen runs end up with at least one of these in play, often multiple. As such, it's not so crucial to have a solid build order for the Avenger's internals to avert a game over; what's dangerously slow to get Contacts or the Shadow Chamber online in the base game is quite likely to be ahead of the curve in War of the Chosen. So the majority of the time, you might as well optimize long-term placement, Power usage, etc, instead of making sacrifices in such realms because you're scared of the Avatar Project.

Anyway, it should be pointed out that upgrading an existing Power Relay with the Power Conduit upgrade is actually strictly inferior to building a new Power Relay if you have space and time to spare, costing the same Supplies but providing one less Power. As such, if you can arrange it, it's generally better to build a second Power Relay before upgrading the first one. You shouldn't forget about the possibility of upgrading early, of course; if you need Power urgently, such as because the Avatar Project bar hit max and you need more Power so you can upgrade a Resistance Comms so you can start contacting a region, then no you can't wait six (or more) days for a Power Relay to complete. But it shouldn't be a mindless default to upgrade.

Crucially, many Facilities require precisely 3 Power to build. Building a second Power Relay can let you build a Resistance Comms, or the Laboratory, or the Infirmary, or the Training Center... if your Power consumption is at max, upgrading a Power Relay will only let you build the Defense Matrix or make a few specific upgrades. (Resistance Ring upgrades, Defense Matrix upgrade, Workshop upgrade, and Infirmary upgrade -two of these only exist in War of the Chosen, too) Unless you're intending to immediately slot in an Engineer of course; for a run with an incredible number of early Engineers, it can be easy to justify upgrading and manning your first Power Relay as a way to get a good chunk more Power on demand. But don't just thoughtlessly make the upgrade in the expectation you'll be able to build a new Facility as a result.

As for the Elerium Conduit upgrade... it's frustratingly bad.

Its first issue is that it requires the Elerium Research be finished to unlock it. As such, you simply can't make the upgrade until you're already pretty far in a run, and that late access is really killer to it. If you could have it unlocked early, when you're still in a hurry to Excavate the Avenger and your small team of Engineers has too many things to do, it would be a way to squeeze more Power out without requiring an empty room or pulling an Engineer from another task, and that would be valuable enough to potentially justify sacrificing a good chunk of Supplies and some Elerium Crystals.

By the time you can get Elerium Conduit, though, it's entirely possible you have multiple rooms sitting empty and more than enough Engineers to get everything actually important done, with the surplus finishing Excavation, not because you need it done, but because they might as well do that instead of idling. In such a context, assigning Engineers to Power Relays is simply far superior to purchasing Elerium Conduit; an Engineer manning a slot provides only 1 less Power than an Elerium Conduit, while not costing a big chunk of Supplies or eating precious Elerium Crystals or raising maintenance costs.

This is especially true in War of the Chosen, where the Elerium Research is gated behind the ADVENT Mec Autopsy, you tend to get more Engineers thanks to Covert Ops, and Rapid Excavation and Heavy Machinery can both significantly shorten the time it takes to reach that late-game state of space crunch being gone and your Engineer total being more than you really need. The only good news for Elerium Conduit is that a Breakthrough exists to halve its costs... but while that's something, it's not remotely enough to make up for its fundamental issues or offset how much worse off it is from War of the Chosen's other changes.

It's also worth pointing out that Elerium Conduit requiring the Elerium Research directly contributes to its Elerium Crystal cost being a problem, as most of your Elerium Crystal expenses are from beam weapons and advanced armors, ie the stuff the Elerium Research leads directly into. As a contrast point, the Psi Lab also requires Elerium Crystals, but if you prioritize psionics it will come online in the phase of the game where you have limited ability to spend Elerium Crystals; in the midgame, it's very normal to run out of Alien Alloys and end up sitting on 20 or more Elerium Crystals, unable to use them because most things that use Elerium Crystals also use Alien Alloys, more Alien Alloys than Elerium Crystals at that, and a bunch of purchases require just Alien Alloys. (And Supplies) So the Psi Lab's Elerium Crystal costs tend to only matter in the sense that, much later in the run, you'll be a bit slower to fully make the transition to beam-tier weapons and advanced armors, whereas the Elerium Conduit upgrade's Elerium Crystal costs are a more immediate problem.

One of the most confusing elements of the Elerium Conduit being bad is that its benefits are flat -that is, what I'd intuitively expect would be for Elerium Conduit to improve the Power provided from each sub-component of Power generation. (ie base generation, the Power gained from Power Conduit, the Power generated by assigning Engineers to the staffing slots, and the Power gained by building on an Exposed Power Coil)

To give an example; a Power Relay in a regular room slot that you don't man, don't upgrade with Power Conduit, but do upgrade with Elerium Conduit will be tripling its Power generation, going from +3 to +9. Imagine if Elerium Conduit had relied on a multiplier to arrive at that number, so that it tripled all other Power generation -a Power Relay on an Exposed Power Coil that built an Elerium Conduit would jump from 8 Power to 24. Power Conduit would suddenly be worth +6 Power. Engineers manning a slot would be adding +15 Power. That would be amazing -probably too amazing, honestly, but even just doubling overall Power production would be a lot more worth considering, allowing you to be more space and Engineer efficient at the cost of some Elerium Crystals (And also Supplies, but at that point it would actually be ahead on Supplies) since you'd straight-up drop building the second Power Relay.

As-is, though, Elerium Conduit's benefits are flat, and tuned so it pretty consistently loses in comparisons. Why buy Elerium Conduit on your first Power Relay when building a second Power Relay will cost less and generate more Power if you assign an Engineer to it?

I really wish Elerium Conduit had been possible to upgrade in from the beginning of the game. That would've much better supported a strategy of broad-but-shallow digging, where a player could choose to commit a non-trivial chunk of Supplies and a bunch of Elerium Crystals to getting their Power situation going faster without sacrificing Engineers to the Power altar. As-is, the Elerium Conduit upgrade is largely a trap choice, something for learning players to unknowingly damage their runs by thinking it must surely be worth buying, else why would it exist?

I don't so much mind War of the Chosen not shunting Elerium Conduits down to basic-ness. I'm fairly confident War of the Chosen was consciously embracing 'always beeline for Exposed Power Coils' as the backbone of Facility tuning, and making Elerium Power Conduit a more basic upgrade would almost certainly have ended up at odds with this. War of the Chosen is also pretty light on direct re-tunings of existing content if it isn't tied directly into new content, as apparently something of a philosophical preference of the team, which is not unreasonable.

But still, I don't get why the base game tuned Elerum Power Conduit this way.

Workshop

Cost: 250 Supplies. (300 Supplies)

Maintenance: 35 Supplies.

Build Time: 20 days. (40 days)

Power: -3.

Upgrade: Adds a second staffing slot. Costs 150 Supplies and 2 Power, and adds 40 Supplies of maintenance per month. (175 Supplies)

Can be staffed by 1 Engineer, which creates two 'Workshop Gremlins'. These are effectively Engineers, except they can only be assigned to the tiles orthogonally adjacent to the Workshop itself.

I like the idea of the Workshop, but it's suuuuch junk in execution.

On paper, it seems like a sensible enough idea: Engineers are a valuable resource parceled out by the game only fairly slowly, with limited input from the player, and building and then upgrading the Workshop is like buying a couple of Engineers 100%-reliably, instead of hoping extras are offered by Rumors, at the HQ, from Guerilla Ops, or from Covert Ops. The ability to reliably cash in Supplies for pseudo-Engineers sounds pretty good, right?

Unfortunately, a cavalcade of design decisions conspire against it.

First of all is the issue that in the base game you have precisely enough Power to build two Facilities without building Power Relays or digging up Exposed Power Coils, and the GTS and AWC are both extremely important to get online as fast as possible. Slipping the Workshop in early is not a realistic plan unless you luck into Hidden Reserves as your initial Continent Bonus (And aren't in Asia, so you can access it off your initial Contacts) or Power from an early Rumor.

Second is the issue that the Workshop is bizarrely expensive in just raw Supplies. It's literally cheaper to buy an Engineer from HQ, when buying an Engineer won't use up Power, doesn't eat a room slot, doesn't include a maintenance cost, and the resulting Engineer can be freely assigned anywhere, unlike Workshop Gremlins. If the Workshop had been, say, 80 Supplies, it would still be very difficult to justify building it, but it would be a lot easier for stuff to happen like a run get no early Engineer Rumors but do get an early Power Rumor, and the player go 'okay, I'll build the Workshop since I have the Power and really need more Engineers'. As-is, only a Legendary run might be sitting on enough unused Supplies to be able to justify the cost, and even there I'm skeptical.

Third is the intersection of the physical layout of the Avenger and the consideration of Engineer-to-Facility assignment rates; only Power Relays, Resistance Comms, and the Workshop itself allow more than 1 Engineer to be assigned, and only two rooms on the Avenger have four rooms orthogonally adjacent to them. The GTS, Shadow Chamber, and Laboratory -as well as the Training Center in War of the Chosen- don't accept Engineers at all. Taken altogether, it's surprisingly difficult to place the Workshop so you can actually use every Workshop Gremlin from an upgraded Workshop -and given how its costs are front-loaded, you really ought to be planning around the idea of maximizing its upgraded form.

Fourth, in the base game you have Facility priorities that provide little room to fit in a Workshop: you'll build the GTS first, then the AWC, and then as soon as you can you'll build the Shadow Chamber or Proving Ground; getting Power from Hidden Reserves or Rumors won't lead to you fitting in the Workshop, it'll just lead to the Proving Grounds or Shadow Chamber getting built sooner. In conjunction with the prior, it's also very likely that by the time your busy schedule can fit in a Workshop, your Facility placement has already sabotaged the ability to squeeze out maximum value from it!

Fifth, actual Engineers are inherently more flexible than Workshop Gremlins. If circumstances change and you realize you need one or more Engineers for tasks you hadn't planned for, you can just shuffle them around to wherever you need them. (With the qualifier of 'you can't remove Engineers if this would take you below your needed Power or Contact count') Workshop Gremlins are more likely to be out of position for such, where you on paper have enough Engineer-slot-fillers to meet all your needs, but in practice you don't now that your needs have changed.

Sixth, the idea of building it early to accelerate Excavation has the key flaw that time spent waiting for it to build isn't really an acceleration. If you assign an Engineer to man it during construction, it will still take 10 days to build; a single Excavation can be finished in 10 days! Indeed, a room that accepts two Engineers will be dug out in 20 days if you just assign the one Engineer to it; thus, building the Workshop and assigning an Engineer to its construction, followed by assigning both Gremlins to the room, will take exactly as long as if you just had the Engineer handle the Excavation directly! If the room instead accepts three Engineers, assigning the lone Engineer directly will take 30 days, while having the Engineer accelerate the Workshop and then the Gremlins handle the Excavation will take... 25 days total. 5 days saved is something, but that's surprisingly underwhelming, and is just the time element, ignoring that the Workshop is expensive and you could by definition have built some other Facility while the Engineer went on to the Excavation. Put another way, building the Workshop to accelerate Excavation is by definition delaying construction of other, more concretely useful Facilities, like Resistance Comms or the Shadow Chamber.

Seventh, Workshop Gremlins don't count as Engineers for meeting Engineer requirements on buildable gear, nor can they be used to fill an Engineer slot in Covert Ops. This isn't huge, but it is yet another reason why the Workshop isn't as good as it looks on paper.

Eighth, Engineers are pretty consistently worth pursuing when offered by Rumors, Covert Ops, or Guerrilla Op rewards; it's difficult for alternate options to compete, particularly when it comes to Rumors. And in the base game, they're one of the better HQ purchases, returning to the issue of a Workshop outright costing more than an Engineer to purchase. As such, it's very rare for a run to have a serious drought on Engineer offers, especially in War of the Chosen, such that a Workshop might be viably worth turning to out of desperation.

Ninth, in the long haul you'll inevitably achieve Engineer saturation. (Unless you just keep getting them killed in VIP missions and not getting Engineers elsewhere, I guess, but if you're struggling that much you're probably worrying about a game over, not whether you should build a Workshop) The Workshop essentially has an expiration date, where the longer you take to build it the less value you'll pull out of it. By the time you have Supplies in abundance, you're running out of reasons to care about the Workshop! You can at least tear it down once it's worthless, where you can't get rid of excess Engineers, but that's a small consolation.

Tenth is somewhat the converse of the above; that your earliest Engineer gains are much more dramatic boosts in utility than your later ones, long before you've hit saturation per se. Your first Engineer is essential for starting Excavation at all. Your second Engineer lets you Excavate multiple rooms at once, or Excavate individual rooms at double speed, or halve a Facility construction time without entirely stopping Excavation, and so on. Your third Engineer speeds up the slowest Excavations by 50% if you're willing to commit everyone, or can be used elsewhere if you'd rather double the Proving Ground's production rate or the like. Your fourth is only speeding up Excavation by letting you dig up an additional room simultaneously, and probably only slowly, and it's probably better to assign them to the Resistance Ring or Proving Ground. Your fifth Engineer is in the same basic boat. And so on.

As the Workshop is horribly expensive, difficult to justify burning Power on early, and hampered by all the layout issues making it hard to optimize it, it's very unlikely you'll build it before you have at least two Engineers, very possibly three or even four, even if you do something unorthodox like build an early Power Relay or decide to put off weapon upgrades in favor of the Workshop being your final initial Facility. ('Final initial' in the sense of it being the Facility that puts you at your initial Power limit)  Which is to say you're already hitting notable diminishing returns, where the ability to fill one or two more Engineer slots is nice, but not really dramatic in its benefits.

As such, below Legendary it's an extremely questionable investment I personally classify as a trap choice, depressingly likely to lead to learning players getting into trouble because it's not obvious they shouldn't build this hunk of junk.

On Legendary, it holds up a bit better. Its price goes up, but only a little, and while it takes twice as long to build Excavation now takes three times as long; building, rushing out, and then manning the Workshop to fully man Excavating a room that accepts two Engineers gives you a final Excavation time of 50 days, vs the 60 days you'd take if you assigned that one Engineer directly; you actually pull ahead by 10 days! With rooms that take three Engineers, you end up with no-Workshop is 90 days, while rush-then-man-Workshop is 65 days; that's almost a month faster!

Furthermore, on Legendary Supplies tend to be in surplus from quite early in a run, and the Supply payouts from Excavation are much larger too; you're a lot more likely to have the Supplies to actually afford a Workshop early in the run, and if you endeavor to set up the Workshop to be able to Excavate three rooms it may well recoup its initial Supply cost outright.

I don't build it myself on Legendary runs, but in War of the Chosen I wouldn't try to argue that's objectively optimal. It subtly helps that the Resistance Ring is a priority to build and to staff; this makes it that bit more likely you'll be able to build the Workshop in a spot where you can maximize the value of its Gremlins immediately and in the long haul.

... it's probably still junk in base game Legendary runs, though, unfortunately. Still, it's impressive War of the Chosen made it more viable, given it made no direct change to it and the Workshop Breakthrough only helps with the expense issue, and quite unreliably at that.

Laboratory

Cost: 150 Supplies. (175 Supplies)

Maintenance: 35 Supplies.

Build Time: 20 days. (40 days)

Power: -3 Power.

Accelerates Research speed by 20%. In War of the Chosen, also causes Breakthroughs to be offered more regularly.

Upgrade: Adds a second staffing slot. Costs 125 Supplies and 3 Power, as well as adding 40 Supplies of maintenance per month. (175 Supplies)

Can be staffed by 1 Scientist, adding one more Scientist worth of research speed improvement.

The Laboratory doesn't actually have any requirements, but is rarely worth bothering to build early anyway.

Part of this is that you initially don't have Scientists at all to slap into it, and that its intrinsic Research boost is only really notable once you've got enough Scientists additional Scientists barely affect research speed. Most of it, though, is that XCOM 2 is unusual for a game with a research mechanic in that research boosting isn't actually super-significant. Typically in such games, research bonuses are the 'god stat', such as how often in 4X games factional research boosts overshadow most other possible bonuses; whatever you actually want, research bonuses will probably cover that and a bunch of other stuff too.

In XCOM 2, though, the vast majority of researches have no benefits beyond unlocking purchases and maybe other researches. That is, researching Magnetic Weapons provides zero benefit until you actually buy one of the weapons it unlocked. The exceptions to this rule don't really help; the fact that you need to complete a research to be able to slot in Weapon Attachments is close to a technicality, as Modular Weapons is placed at the very beginning of the game and takes nearly no time at all. You're not going to build a Laboratory to hurry it up; it'll already be done by the time the Laboratory finishes! Similarly, not only are Breakthroughs exclusive to War of the Chosen, but they're also normally unaffected by research boosting, making them irrelevant in that regard. The fact that it makes Breakthroughs appear more regularly is also a bit dubious given how they're rarely worth burning lab time on.

Anyway, the big thing here is a matter of tuning: it's not just that research primarily unlocks purchases, it's that XCOM 2 is designed so that you generally don't have the resources to fully benefit from research. That is, if you prioritize unlocking Predator Armor and all your magnetic weaponry, you'll spend a long time sitting on having several purchases sitting in Engineering, waiting for you to accumulate enough Supplies and/or Alien Alloys to actually be able to buy them all.

This is all without building the Laboratory, keep in mind. Building the Laboratory early will increase the period of time in which you're sitting on purchases you can't actually make, which is not exactly helpful.

It also doesn't help that so much research is Instant-able Autopsies, especially in the base game where a lot of them will hit the Instant threshold in no time flat. The Laboratory doesn't help with that at all, after all. This is less of an issue in War of the Chosen, where you don't casually hit Instant on Autopsies so widely and consistently, but it can still crop up readily through stuff like Sitreps that constrict enemy composition showing up very early.

The one bit that actually helps the Laboratory in a meaningful way is that Shadow Projects do, in fact, benefit from the Laboratory, including staffing it. The Laboratory is thus a good idea to get online when you intend to start working on Shadow Projects in earnest, and generally ought to be built before you get started on the last batch of Shadow Projects at minimum so you spend less time on waiting to be able to launch the endgame.

It's worth noting that the Laboratory is one of the Facilities where building it on an Exposed Power Coil is effectively more Power generation than building a Power Relay there... once upgraded. It's not a particularly great option for doing so, but hey, something to keep in mind.

Resistance Comms

Cost: 110 Supplies (160 Supplies)

Maintenance: 25 Supplies.

Build Time: 16 days. (32 days)

Power: -3.

Upgrade: Adds +1 Contact, and a second staffing slot. Costs 125 Supplies and 4 Power, as well as adding 35 Supply of Maintenance per month. (190 Supplies)

Provides +1 Contact base.

Can be staffed by 1 Engineer to add +2 Contacts. The second staffing slot is worth +4 Contacts, instead.

The Resistance Comms Facility is unlocked by the Resistance Communications Research, which is pretty obvious in play. Less obvious is that the upgrade is also locked by research, specifically the Resistance Radio Research. I suspect most players have no idea of this latter point, given you have to unlock Resistance Comms, and then finish a Resistance Comms before you unlock the upgrade or else the game won't actually announce the upgrade, when it's generally best to grab both contact-oriented Researches close together so you can see Continent Bonuses to plan appropriately. I spent more than 1100 hours of play before events happened to line up to see the upgrade announcement!

Anyway, the Resistance Comms is one of the Facilities most heavily impacted by the transition from the base game to War of the Chosen, in spite of War of the Chosen not directly changing it.

In the base game, it's an extremely high priority Facility in most runs, up there with the Shadow Chamber for importance due entirely to the Avatar Project bar: killing your first Codex and hitting the Blacksite both knock back the bar and have little or no special requirements, but past that you'll need more Contacts, or to build the Shadow Chamber and perform Shadow Projects, or get lucky and get a Facility Lead. Of these three, getting Contacts up is overall the best thing to pursue: Avatar Project Facilities accelerate the bar's growth just by existing, you'll need additional Contacts to reach the Forge and Psi Gate regardless, and while it's possible to loot Facility Leads or get Contacts from Rumors, these are both sufficiently uncommon you shouldn't plan around them. (And Leads can't unlock the Forge or Psi Gate missions...)

As such, in the base game Resistance Comms should be one of the first Facilities you build once your Power is expanded -in fact, there's a decent argument for putting off the Advanced Warfare Center in favor of an early Resistance Comms, if your run hasn't lucked into early Power or Contacts from Rumors or the Hidden Reserves Continent Bonus. You need to keep the pressure on the Avatar Project bar to not game over, after all.

Furthermore, a second Resistance Comms can end up necessary, depending on where the Forge and Psi Gate generate, and your general luck with Avatar Project Facility placement. You usually don't need to upgrade both -one fully upgraded and manned Resistance Comms already puts you at 11 Contacts in conjunction with your base 3 Contacts. 12 Contacts may be necessary, but unless you really want all the Continent Bonuses, much more than that is probably a waste.

In War of the Chosen, building and especially upgrading a Resistance Comms is a lot less of a priority. Most runs should build one at some point, but in War of the Chosen you've got a much wider variety of tools relevant to this point, and more reliably get a hold of at least one of these tools: a run that gets Resistance Rising I and/or II doesn't need to rush out a Resistance Comms to get to where it needs to go. A run that gets an early Sabotage Covert Op and uses it has more time to work with. A run that picks up Contacts from Covert Ops can, again, put off building a Resistance Comms. A run with Resistance Network can put off upgrading the Resistance Comms until literally right before the point an additional Contact is actually needed. (And possibly end up never making said upgrade due to acquiring Contacts some other way, or knocking back the Avatar Project some other way)

And a run that gets a hold of none of the new tools can still pick up Contacts from Rumors or luck into an early Facility Lead and decide it's worth cracking open, just like in the base game.

Indeed, as I noted back in the Breakthroughs post, I've had runs that never built a Resistance Comms at all! More typical is only building and upgrading the one Resistance Comms... but I've also had runs that built the Resistance Comms and never got around to upgrading it.

As such, while you shouldn't assume your War of the Chosen run will get to build just the one, you conversely shouldn't particularly assume you'll need a second one, where in the base game you usually will need a second one, to the point you should plan from the beginning around the idea you'll need a second one.

All that said, the Resistance Comms is a Facility you should be getting up sooner rather than later, particularly in the base game. You need Contacts to be able to knock back the Avatar Project more than a handful of times, and it not only takes time to build a Resistance Comms but also time to make contact, as well as to build Radio Relays if you're traveling longer distances -which you will be. Starting Resistance Comms when you've got no spare Contacts, the Avatar Project bar is 2 away from full, and the nearest region providing an option for knocking back the bar is two or more Contacts away is a recipe for a game over. Less so in War of the Chosen, where you might have Resistance Network and/or a Sabotage Covert Op able to swoop to the rescue, but this comes with the qualifier that the Fatigue system means it's still better to have contact with places sooner so you can fit missions into your schedule comfortably, rather than having the game force you to send Tired and/or under-leveled soldiers because all your best soldiers are Tired or Shaken or recovering from injuries and you have to do the mission right now.

As an aside, the Resistance Comms is another Facility that, once upgraded, is more Power gain from putting on an Exposed Power Coil than a Power Relay. So one idea is to simply build your first Resistance Comms on the first Exposed Power Coil you dig up. Again, this isn't a great idea, particularly in War of the Chosen, but it's an option to keep in mind.

Advanced Warfare Center

Cost: 115 Supplies (175 Supplies)

Maintenance: 35 Supplies.

Build Time: 21 days.

Power: -3.

No upgrades.

Accelerates soldier healing by 50%, and allows soldiers to gain bonus skills.

Can be staffed by 1 Engineer, doubling the rate at which non-SPARK soldiers heal. (Relative to having the unmanned AWC up)

Can also be staffed by 1 soldier to retrain them, resetting their skill selections at the end of the training.

This, of course, only exists in the base game, as War of the Chosen splits it off into the Infirmary and Training Center. I've also covered the main of its utility previously, and so have little to say here.

Note that the Advanced Warfare Center first requires you complete the Alien Biotech Research (ie studying the chip in the Commander's head) to unlock it. I'm... not entirely sure why, honestly, but it does mean you can't build it as literally your first Facility? But it's not like you'd want to when the GTS is so much more urgently important...

As the AWC's bonus skills aren't awarded retroactively without using retraining, you'll ideally get this up early. Base XCOM 2 also really expects you to use basically one squad's worth of soldiers continuously, so injuries are very disruptive, and minimizing time spent injured is very helpful unless you're improbably reliable about preventing soldiers from being injured. (Improbable in part due to the base game having several dubious and/or glitchy mechanics that can and will get people shot when you made no apparent mistake) This is especially true if you have Alien Hunters, since Ruler Reactions make it extremely difficult to completely avoid damage when fighting them.

As such, while you can put off the AWC until later and just use Retraining, it's generally better to get it up early. If you want to play the strategic game safer, though, there's an argument for putting it off in favor of the Proving Ground, or the Shadow Chamber, or your first Resistance Comms, so you can get started on knocking back the Avatar Project sooner. Commander difficulty in particular has a sufficiently hostile and RNG-swingy Avatar Project situation that not rushing for tools to knock it back legitimately has potential for you to game over without an opportunity to do anything about it. It's unlikely -among other points, there's ways the RNG can offset such bad luck, like providing an early Facility Lead or Contacts or Power from Rumors- but not so unlikely I'm willing to declare it an ignorable outside chance.

I've never bothered and never gotten a game over as a result, myself, but still. If you're concerned, the AWC being up early isn't so essential you're severely handicapping yourself. (Unlike the Guerilla Tactics School, which is possible to do without -there's an Achievement for beating the game with no squad size expansions purchased, in fact- but the game very much expects you to pick up its benefits ASAP, and you will suffer for the lack)

Training Center

Cost: 125 Supplies. (175 Supplies)

Maintenance: 30 Supplies.

Build Time: 12 days. (24 days)

Power: -3.

No upgrades.

Allows spending Ability Points on core class soldiers, and by extension unlocks access to bonus skills on them.

Can be staffed by 2 Bondmates (Eating 1 slot, with only 1 slot available) to level up their Bond.

Can also be staffed by 1 soldier to retrain them, resetting their skill selections at the end of the training, using a different slot.

I have, of course, covered the main of the Training Center's utility before, in the Training Center and Bonds posts, and so have relatively little to say here.

Unlike the AWC, the Training Center has no requirements: if you feel like it, it can be literally your first Facility in a run. You shouldn't do that, as both things it provides take a bit to really become meaningfully relevant, but it is possible.

Bonds-wise, you don't actually need the Training Center for the first Bond tier, and it tends to take a bit to get anyone to the second tier such that you need the Training Center for further Bond improvements, especially if you're even slightly picky about Bondmates, or are quick to get a SPARK online and aggressive about deploying it so that there's slightly fewer opportunities for Bonds to get going. So no rush here, even with the second Bondmate tier being the biggest payoff.

Skill purchases are more likely to actually be possible to perform with an early Training Center construction, but early in a run you'll have barely any X-COM Ability Points, and your soldiers won't have enough levels under their belt to readily purchase skills entirely internally. The 25-point skills won't be possible to purchase at all so early -even a Savant Sergeant you're willing to dump all your X-COM AP into usually won't be able to- which immediately means some of the highest-value skills like Rapid Fire are not, in fact, going to be accessed amazingly early through the Training Center. There's non-bonus skill purchasing too, of course, but XCOM 2 is pretty decent about the higher ranks tending to be where you find the better skills to buy; it's not remotely perfect at this (Why are Steady Hands and Aim a level above Faceoff, game?), but it's still the case that high-value purchases are largely not found at the lower levels in the first place. It's not until the Lieutenant or Captain ranks that you're really hitting the 'I want both skills at this rank' moments -and on Specialists, it's only really Major and Colonel that provide pairs of skills you'd prefer to not have to pick between.

As such, it actually takes a fair chunk of time to reach the point the Training Center is particularly likely to provide access to skills you'll both want to purchase and be able to purchase.

I started out building the Training Center as my third Facility, but nowadays I usually don't get to it until sometime after my first Exposed Power Coil is dug up; that's roughly around the point it starts really paying off anyway! This frees up the third Facility to be the Proving Ground, which is a lot more consistent about paying off if built early.

Infirmary

Cost: 115 Supplies. (175 Supplies)

Maintenance: 35 Supplies.

Build Time: 21 days. (42 days)

Power: -3.

Upgrade: Hyper-Vital Module. Allows you to send an injured or Tired soldier out in mint condition, once per game for each given soldier. This state of good health is only for the duration of the mission. Costs 80 Supplies and 2 Power, and adds 25 Supplies of maintenance per month. (150 Supplies)

Accelerates non-SPARK healing by 50%. Additionally, soldiers will automatically recover from Phobias upon participating in 3-5 missions without suffering an injury.

Can be staffed by 1 Engineer, doubling the rate at which non-SPARKs heal. (Relative to having the unmanned Infirmary up)

Can also be staffed by 1 soldier with a Phobia to remove all their Phobias. This takes 5 days to complete. (10 on Legendary)

The Infirmary inherits the AWC's unlock requirement: completing the Alien Biotech Research. This is a bit unsurprising given it's literally the AWC, visually; that's not me accidentally copying graphics without noticing, that's how it is in-game. Which is efficient, but still a little surprising.

Unlike the AWC, the Infirmary isn't hugely important to get up quickly unless you pick up a lot of Phobias distressingly early. War of the Chosen starts you with more soldiers and forces you to rotate them via the Fatigue system, making injury times much less punishing; improving turnaround on injuries is nice, but not particularly important until you're later in a run.

The Phobia end of things is a bit more complicated, depending in part on skill level, difficulty, and raw luck. As your skill rises, Phobias tend to occur less often, as you go up in difficulty they tend to occur more often, and how important it is to clear Phobias is down heavily to what the RNG elects to even throw at you; if you're just getting the fairly harmless Phobias, the Infirmary isn't important. If some of your best soldiers all pick up seriously problematic Phobias, you're gonna want the Infirmary up ASAP!

Typically, though, the Infirmary is best to put off until later in your run. Its benefits are almost never important early on, and there's too many other Facilities you'll want up early for it to be terribly likely to get fit in by just getting some bonus Power.

A pleasant surprise is that the Infirmary does, in fact, cause Engineers and Scientists to recover from injuries faster, exactly as per soldiers. This isn't a huge thing -Scientists and Engineers can only be injured by Chosen Sabotage- but I'm honestly surprised they weren't overlooked.

Proving Ground
Cost: 100 Supplies. (125 Supplies)

Maintenance: 25 Supplies.

Build Time: 14 days. (28 days)

Power: -3.

No upgrades.

Performs assorted Projects. Only one advances at a time, though you can queue more than one.

Can be staffed by 1 Engineer to halve production time on Projects.

To unlock the Proving Ground, you have to perform the ADVENT Officer Autopsy, as Shen insists the Skulljack can't be made with just your existing tools.

I've always wondered why the need for the Skulljack was the excuse for unlocking the Proving Ground. Just tutorial-logic of keeping your options limited to start? Because it feels very arbitrary from an in-universe standpoint.

Anyway, I've been over most of the Proving Ground's details in prior posts, so this'll be a relatively brief bit. Again.

First of all, a couple bits that are easy to intuit but the game never properly tutorials you on: you can  freely manipulate and cancel work orders prior to completion. The work orders show up in the lower-right of the screen when looking at the Proving Ground, and they'll have an X in a box with arrows pointing up and down above and below the X-in-boxes; clicking the X cancels the order, while clicking the arrows will move the order one slot in that direction. The order is top-to-bottom for first-to-last, so the up arrow is for getting an order built sooner, while the down arrow is for pushing it 'til later.

Notably, canceling an order completely refunds its costs. This is true no matter how far along the order was; a SPARK that's less than 1 day from completion will still refund its full price in materials if you cancel it, even though logically it shouldn't be possible for a disassembly to perfectly recycle everything. As such, there's really no reason to not queue up orders ahead of time; if you change your mind, you can just cancel them.

By a similar token, moving orders about retains their current level of completion. That is, if you start an Experimental Ammo and queue up an Experimental Grenade, then wait until there's one day left on the Experimental Ammo and shove it behind the Experimental Grenade, the Experimental Grenade will require its full number of days to complete while the Experimental Ammo will then complete one day afterward. (Contrasting with how, say, multiple 4X games will reassign all stockpiled construction to whatever you switch to, even if they have a queue system and you just shuffled the queue around)

As such, while the game adds newly-queued work orders to the back of the queue, you can shove them up front. This is nice to know, given there are a few high-priority Projects you can unlock unexpectedly, such as Plasma Grenade; being able to immediately shuffle them to the front -or just behind what's in front if it's nearly done anyway- is very nice to be able to do.

Anyway, the Proving Ground is one of the structures you must construct to be able to complete the game, as the Skulljack is necessary and you can't get a Skulljack any other way. In War of the Chosen, I've drifted to usually building it as my third Facility so I can get started on the Shadow Chamber reasonably quickly without needing to hit the Blacksite, as well as getting to start on Experimental Projects early. In the base game, it's generally my first Facility after I have additional Power one way or another.

The fact that Experimental Ammo and Experimental Grenades are both close to free boosts is a pretty big contributing factor here, too...

Shadow Chamber

Cost: 125 Supplies. (200 Supplies)

Maintenance: 30 Supplies.

Build Time: 14 days. (30 days)

Power: -5.

Upgrade: Psionic Gate. Necessary to complete the Psionic Gate Analysis Shadow Project. Costs 200 Supplies, 4 Power, and adds 50 Supplies of maintenance per month. (300 Supplies)

Performs Shadow Projects, which are necessary to complete the game, and for most missions informs you of how many enemies are in the mission as well as what types they include.

No staffing possible.

The Shadow Chamber is unique, in that it can actually be unlocked two different ways: you can either perform the ADVENT Blacksite mission successfully, or you can Skulljack an ADVENT Officer and kill the resulting Codex. (And any clones) Either of these will result in the Alien Encryption Research becoming available, which unlocks the Shadow Chamber.

It's worth pointing out that 5 Power is exactly what a Power Relay with a Power Conduit upgrade provides, so a Power Relay placed in a regular room can be built to let you build the Shadow Chamber, if eg your Exposed Power Coil placements are particularly awful and you're concerned about the Avatar Project. (eg the second Avatar Project Facility spawned with 2 blocks and at the maximum distance)

Also useful to keep in mind is that 5 Power is exactly what an Engineer adds when assigned to a Power Relay. As such, once you have a Power Relay up, you can add the Power you need on a moment's notice -assuming you aren't already staffing it to your current capacity, admittedly.

Also, the Shadow Chamber is one of the best Facilities to build on an Exposed Power Coil. Its base Power requirement is exactly equal to what a Power Relay gets out of such placement, and it then has a mandatory upgrade to ultimately take you noticeably past that. If you're unlocking it right around the time you're done digging out your first Exposed Power Coil, it's worth considering plugging it in, especially if you're currently concerned about the Avatar Project's progress.

Overall, though, the Shadow Chamber is straightforward enough. I do appreciate that the enemy preview mechanic is attached to it; a new player won't be overwhelmed by lots of barely-understood info too early (Or annoyed by ENEMY UNKNOWN-filled 'informational' screens), but you're pressured to build the Shadow Chamber fairly quickly and have to build it eventually, allowing the game to design itself under the assumption you have the preview mechanic. It doesn't lean hard into this, but later enemies feel to me like they do have an expectation that you're forewarned of their existence and can plan appropriately built into their tuning. (eg bringing better Shred or Armor-piercing ability when it's time to deal with Andromedons, Sectopods, or Gatekeepers)

Interestingly, the Psionic Gate upgrade's internal name is 'Celestial Gate'. There's actually a recurring trend of plot-related stuff having mildly poetic descriptions -everything necessary for completing the game is actually internally referred to as 'the golden path', for example. I'm a bit curious as to why; is it a sign plot stuff was defined in very loose terms initially, as far as the narrative end of things, but more strongly defined in terms of gameplay? That is, like they decided there'd be three plot missions prior to the endgame, but filled in details of what the plot missions were about later, or something.

It's interesting, in any event, as the player-facing portion of the game is much more straightforward, and I'm much more used to the opposite; games having fanciful lore-filled terms for what the player sees, vs internal names being 'swordguy1'.

Psi Lab

Cost: 175 Supplies, 10 Elerium Crystals. (250 Supplies, 20 Elerium Crystals)

Maintenance: 55 Supplies.

Build Time: 21 days.

Power: -5.

Upgrade: Second Cell. Adds a second soldier staffing slot. Costs 225 Supplies, 15 Elerium Crystals, and 5 Power. (300 Supplies, 25 Elerium Crystals)

Can be staffed by 1 Rookie or Psi Operative, training new Psi Operative skills.

Can also be staffed by 1 Engineer, halving the Psi Operative training time.

I already largely covered the mechanics here in the Psi Operative post, and so once again have less to say than I otherwise might; there's a reason I'd originally not intended to cover Facilities in paricular!

This of course requires you perform the Psionics Research, which itself requires performing the Sectoid Autopsy first.

It's worth pointing out here that realistically you're not getting started on Psi Operatives until late in the second month; both the Psionic research and construction (And upgrading) of the Psi Lab require Elerium Crystals, and the default expectation is that you won't get any Elerium Crystals prior to the first Supply Raid that occurs late in the second month. It's possible to get Elerium Crystals earlier, such as through Hack rewards, but you shouldn't be expecting to do so; the decisions you're making in the initial weeks should be premised on the expectation you won't have a Psi Lab up until sometime in the third month.

It's also worth pointing out that the Psi Lab is one of the best Facilities to socket into an Exposed Power Coil, arguably the best, as even unupgraded it eats 5 Power and ideally you'll upgrade it as soon as you can; an upgraded Psi Lab being placed into an Exposed Power Coil is twice the Power advantage a Power Relay gives. If you're going to prioritize getting the Psi Lab up early, it's probably best to plan on your first Exposed Power Coil being used for it, not for a Power Relay, unless more urgent considerations are relevant.

You might think you could dig up an Exposed Power Coil to get a jump-start on Psionics (Since Exposed Power Coils provide Elerium Crystals when Excavated), but usually it will take so long to dig one up the Supply Raid will happen first. This is particularly so in the base game; in War of the Chosen, you could get a Rapid Excavation Breakthrough -or two of them- to get an exposed Power Coil dug up really early, as the most drastic change War of the Chosen makes that opens up the possibility of quicker digging. In the base game, you can... get early Engineer-providing Rumors to accelerate your timetable compared to baseline, and have moderately favorable Avenger layouts, and that's it.

By a similar token, if you do get early Elerium Crystals, while that can let you perform the Psionics research earlier you'll probably still want to wait for the Exposed Power Coil to be dug up. 5 Power is simply too much of a Power burden, let alone 10. Even if you do get Hidden Reserves early and/or free Power from early Rumors so that it's possible to do without actively delaying/cutting core Facility construction, it's still so much more efficient to drop the Psi Lab on the Exposed Power Coil.

This is a bit unfortunate, as it means that even though theoretically a run could be set apart by an unusually early unlock of Psi Operatives, leading in the long haul to unusually many fully-trained Psi Operatives, in practice this isn't a real possibility. You can certainly keep in mind the possibility of researching Psionics early to get a modest head start -completing it just as your first Exposed Power Coil gets dug up, instead of 10 days after- but the final result is pretty minor. It's one of the things that makes it really easy to just end up ignoring psionics, particularly in War of the Chosen where they're no longer uniquely helpful in the final mission.

This is a bit of a recurring frustration with XCOM 2, particularly in the base game, in that the design tends to stack on so many limitations onto getting to a given state that runs are very resistant to RNG producing real variation. You can't build a Psi Lab early because its Power demands are intense, and it requires Elerium, and you need a Scientist to be able to Autopsy a Sectoid to unlock Psionics, and Psionics itself requires Elerium, and then researching Psionics takes time and building the Psi Lab takes time. Taken altogether, it's more or less impossible for a run to get all of early Power boosts, an early Scientist, and early Elerium Crystals to get a Psi Lab built substantially earlier than typical, especially since that doesn't touch on the need to Excavate the Avenger and get enough Engineers to do Excavation and construction quickly.

And this crops up in a number of realms in XCOM 2's design; the Psi Lab is representative, not anomalous, and while War of the Chosen reduces how true this is it also makes it easier to organically notice the limits. For example, I've had runs that got high-roll Inspiration chains such that Magnetic Weapons got completed exceptionally early, got excited about the idea of getting a big jump start on that transition, only to ram head-first into not having Alien Alloys to purchase any of the upgrades, not to mention not having enough Engineers to purchase the Shotgun upgrade, and so still ended up having to wait until the first Supply Raid, exactly as per usual. Notably, Alien Alloys and Elerium Crystals are some of the only things you can't get out of Covert Ops.

Similarly, the Black Market simply doesn't spawn initially. Even if you were willing to burn a ton of Intel on super-early purchases of Alien Alloys, or a Scientist, or whatever, it's just not an option until after the point it would be most amazing.

Broadly speaking I understand what drove this -the prior game clearly struggled with Plasma weaponry being accessible really early if a player knew what they were doing, and XCOM 2 is clearly trying to avoid creating similar design issues- but it still feels very much like a missed opportunity.

By a similar token, I really wish Psi Operatives had been more properly made a core class. Psi Operatives are pretty unambiguously the best class in the game, but can be difficult to justify pursuing simply due to how unlocking access to them eats Research time, a Facility slot, lots of Power, and a bunch of Supplies and a non-trivial amount of Elerium Crystals. I actually only rarely pursue psionics in War of the Chosen, because it's such a big commitment, and War of the Chosen has made a lot of what Psi Operatives do less unique and/or less essential. Even in the base game, I tend to put it off until I've unlocked Predator Armor and all the magnetic weaponry, due to the prohibitive demands and the fact that Psi Operatives are very much starting out behind your core class soldiers, and take a fair amount of training before they'll really pull their weight. They'd fit into the overall design a lot better with even so small a change as attaching psionic training to the Guerilla Training School instead of having to unlock and build the Psi Lab.

Alas.

Defense Matrix

Cost: 75 Supplies. (150 Supplies)

Maintenance: 10 Supplies.

Build Time: 14 days.

Power: -2.

Upgrade: Adds 2 more Turrets. Costs 75 Supplies and 2 Power, and adds 10 Supplies of maintenance per month. (125 Supplies)

Provides a pair of friendly Turrets in Avenger Defenses. In War of the Chosen, this extends to Chosen assaults on the Avenger, and furthermore the Defense Matrix passively penalizes Chosen Sabotage success rates.

Can be staffed by 1 Engineer, boosting the stats of the Turrets. In War of the Chosen, this also gives the Turrets Squadsight.

I've been over this before, but in the base game this is pretty much worthless, and indeed can be actually worthless if you're playing below Commander difficulty since only one Avenger Defense can occur below Commander difficulty in a given run. In War of the Chosen, though, you should basically always build it if you unlock it before you're more or less done with the Chosen and have already fended off a UFO attack. You don't need to rush for it -it won't be useful until a Chosen has enough Knowledge to be able to perform Sabotage- but once you're past the early crunch period it's easy to slip in and very worth it.

This, of course, requires the ADVENT Turret Breakdown be completed, and is indeed the only reward for doing so. I've been over how that requirement can be a hurdle in War of the Chosen...

Anyway, 'XCOM Heavy Turrets' actually have their own statline instead of just borrowing ADVENT Turret stats: when the Defense Matrix is manned they have 8 HP, 2 Armor, 85 base Aim, 8-10 base damage with crits providing +1 damage. That's actually more damage than any tier of ADVENT Turret gets, not to mention much more Aim (Even considering your Turrets usually won't get high ground advantage, it's still better accuracy than ADVENT Turrets expect to have), and the HP+Armor combination is an atypical value: Legendary Heavy ADVENT Turrets are the only enemy Turret to have exactly 8 HP, and they have 4 Armor, not 2.

Overall, this Facility is straightforward enough: skip it in the base game, build it if you can in War of the Chosen. And man it in War of the Chosen! Squadsight on the Turrets does a lot to make them more useful in the base-game Avenger Defense mission type.

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Let's have some Power numbers.

First, keep in mind that when I talk about maximum Power usage and generation, I'm not counting the Power the game considers used up by elements of the Avenger you can't interact with Power-wise. That is, you start the game listed as at 6/12 Power in the base game and 6/15 Power in War of the Chosen, but I'd just list those as 0/6 and 0/9, since the 6 Power initially tied up doesn't matter at all.

Maximum Power needs in War of the Chosen: 68. (Premised under the dubious assumption of building and upgrading two Resistance Comms, and the even more dubious assumption of building and upgrading all one-copy-only Facilities, and also ignoring Exposed Power Coils complicating things)

Base game: 55. (Same assumptions as previous; you need 13 less Power because the Resistance Ring doesn't exist to eat 8, and the AWC hasn't been split yet while requiring only as much Power as the Training Center or an unupgraded Infirmary)

So let's review reliable Power generation;

3 per relay, 2 for Power Conduit upgrade, 5 per Engineer, 5 for being on an Exposed Power Coil, 6 for an Elerium Conduit. This totals to 15 Power if upgrading with an Elerium Conduit or constructing on an Exposed Power Coil, 21 or 20 for leveraging those, respectively, and of course 26 total.

Put another way, if you do the fairly mindless thing of just building Power Relays on Exposed Power Coils and ignore Elerium Conduit, you'll end up at +50 Power. In conjunction with your 6 starting Power, that's enough to cover your maximum Power needs in the base game -this is part of why Elerium Conduits are so dubious.

Crucially, there's really no reason to actually hit these maximum Power needs, as the Workshop is a terrible investment outside maybe Legendary, the Defense Matrix is extremely dubious in the base game, you almost never need to actually upgrade both Resistance Comms, and honestly the Laboratory is very skippable in the base game. I'm also leaving out the part where if you're going to build a Psi Lab at all it's by far the best candidate for placing on an Exposed Power Coil, trading away a +5 for -10 to your needs, and similarly leaving out all the other candidates for reducing your Power needs, like the Shadow Chamber. I'm also ignoring that you can get additional Power from Hidden Reserves and/or out of Rumors.

As such, a more realistic Power situation would be something like dropping the Shadow Chamber and Psi Lab on your Exposed Power Coils, skipping the Workshop, building two Resistance Comms but only upgrading one, and ending up needing 27 Power for your total needs. 6 of that is covered by your initial Power situation; you'll still need a couple of Power Relays, but they won't need to be fully manned, and you still won't need Elerium Conduits. One fully manned Power Relay will be +15 Power, putting you at 21, and then a second Power Relay manned by 1 Engineer will take you to 29, 2 more than you actually need.

War of the Chosen raises your peak Power needs, but this is misleading; as I noted earlier it's pretty common to get additional Contacts from Rumors, Resistance Orders, or Covert Ops, and the more such Contacts you have the less Power needs to go into Resistance Comms. The Psi Lab is also a lot less essential, and if you skip it that's a lot of Power you're not burning on it. It's not particularly surprising for a War of the Chosen run to end up with lesser Power needs in practice, even with the Laboratory and Defense Matrix being a lot more useful/important.

You'll still usually have higher Power needs in War of the Chosen, but it'll often be less than the 13 more my prior assumptions arrive at.

This is particularly striking when you consider that War of the Chosen hasn't actually improved your ability to raise Power; Covert Ops can't provide Power, and Resistance Order-derived Power is just a base-game Continent Bonus split up. Nonetheless, between the higher starting Power and reduced need to burn Power on Contacts and all, Power crunch actually tends to be less of an issue in War of the Chosen -contributing to the death of Elerium Power Conduit viability, for one.

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I've alluded to this a few times, but the Avenger itself is one of the more confused, and confusing elements of XCOM 2 when looking at it purely from a narrative perspective.

Much like Heavy Weapons, I'm largely willing to forgive it because it's so obvious what happened is that gameplay got prioritized; the primary purpose of the Avenger is to make the Geoscape layer more engaging without completely throwing out the base-building of the prior game. It's here to justify why you can only respond to one Guerilla Op at a time -you've only got the one Avenger/Skyranger, they can't be everywhere at once- and why you have to choose between scanning a given Rumor, contacting a new region, or building a Radio Relay, all while allowing you to have an underground base you dig out and then slot Facilities into the rooms you're opening up. This is genuinely a huge improvement to the Geoscape -you don't just pass time, waiting for things to happen- and even removes jank like 'why can't I respond to multiple Abductions at once?' The final result that X-COM has a ludicrously huge flying base to operate out of is intensely bizarre, but it or something similarly strange is basically the inevitable result of trying to achieve those goals with something actually acknowledged by the narrative instead of simply abstracting everything out and screaming GAMEPLAY!!! when a player wants to know why things work the way they do.

Unlike Heavy Weapons, I'm... still pretty puzzled by specific decisions tied to this whole thing.

Probably the most baffling tidbit is the Avenger's external aesthetic. The narrative explanation for the Avenger is that it's a Supply Barge X-COM somehow got a hold of after their base was assaulted, which fits fine to details like the massive cargo hold filled with alien junk, but the Avenger's external aesthetic is clearly drawing influence from...

... the prior game's Skyranger.

The Avenger is very much a big, ungainly version of that; it uses the same VTOL units as the Skyranger, just four of them and they glow blue instead of glowing orange while spitting out smoke. Its surface is the same steel-grey default coloration that no UFO in Enemy Unknown or XCOM 2 uses. The Avenger's general shape is suggestive of a plane's profile, with a distinct 'nose', two large 'wings' and toward the back a smaller set of 'wings'. (Though the Avenger has giant VTOL widgets instead of, you know, wings) And so on.

I'm willing to gloss over the part where the Avenger doesn't actually resemble a Supply Barge from the previous game, as so much of the alien aesthetics have been ambiguously retconned, and the one XCOM 2 UFO design we see, while it's clearly drawing inspiration from Small Scouts and/or Large Scouts, is nonetheless radically different in so many ways. If XCOM 2 had kept UFO fighting and brought back the same UFO concepts, I suspect a hypothetical XCOM 2 Supply Barge would've looked quite different from an Enemy Unknown Supply Barge, making that particular point silly to pick at.

But why does a repurposed UFO look so much like it's X-COM-original tech?

It's strange in part because the game is otherwise extremely consistent about sticking to the stolen Supply Barge backstory. Before I played the game, stuff I'd read about XCOM 2 made it sound like the Avenger was, essentially, the Avenger from classic X-COM, in the sense of being an original human construction, and so I spent a while expecting to find evidence of a shift in concept, like originally the Avenger was supposed to have been made by X-COM before their HQ fell. But no, it really is just the external visuals that have this issue.

And I keep emphasizing the external visuals, because in the 'ant farm' view you can see that the inside of the ship is much more in line with XCOM 2's UFO visuals in the cases where X-COM hasn't clearly installed their own stuff. (That is, the holo globe is clearly meant to be 'we installed our holo globe from HQ', and the Commander's Quarters has been personalized, and Facility rooms don't look like UFO tech, and so on) The exit ramp is the primary exception, and it's not unreasonable to point out that it's part of the externals. (And is another example of the 'Avenger as scaled-up Skyranger' bizarreness; the Skyranger also has a rear-pointing exit ramp)

Another bit of strangeness is the consideration of the Avenger's sneakiness. ADVENT has control of the globe, control of the skies, and is consistently indicated to have widespread monitoring of various sorts, while the Avenger is a ludicrously massive flying object using stolen technology X-COM barely understands; realistically, the idea of the Avenger flying about without being noticed is pretty difficult to buy, and the game calls attention to this strangeness by having a UFO get sent to hunt down the Avenger partway through a campaign.

I actually initially glossed over this, since the Avenger being a flying base is clearly growing out of trying to justify the actually-good strategic gameplay, but...

... with digging around in the files, I discovered that the satellite dish-looking objects that show up a lot in small town maps and Retaliation maps are actually intended to be some kind of 'jammer'. So while this is never communicated to players, the devs clearly did think about the idea that there needs to be ways to hide from the omnipresent police state's metaphorical eyes when they're watching from the skies and came up with some kind of solution existing in-universe...

... but the Avenger has no such 'jammer' on it. Nor any other suggestion it has a stealth system.

So that's a confusing set of decisions.

There's assorted other minor bits I don't really get, some of which I've brought up before, like how utterly nonsensical it is to have Shen complaining they don't understand the alien language and can't get a hold of a linguist readily simultaneous to the alien language being omnipresently used throughout Earth -especially not when it's an unavoidable part of gameplay that you'll recruit Engineers and Scientists who worked in ADVENT and thus must be at least moderately literate in the more technical portion of the alien language(s).

But mostly it's the Avenger's aesthetic and the exact way the Avenger's stealthiness that stand out, as they're both honestly baffling. What happened in development that we got these specific outcomes, when they make so little sense to the final product?

It's not like the Avenger is running off blatant Rule Of Cool for its design...

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Next time, we move on to talking about missions, starting with map generation stuff.

See you then.