XCOM 2 Analysis: Hacking Objectives and Security Towers

I've touched on Hacking in some detail a few times, but never really gotten into the specifics in a clear, consolidated way. This is part one of covering all that, starting with covering 'general' Hacking: objective Hacks, which anyone can do, and security tower Hacks, which can only be done by Specialists and SPARKs but have no skill requirements or the like acting as a further hurdle.

At a baseline level, all Hacks use the same basic format, though with two sub-divisions: mandatory Hacks vs optional Hacks. In both cases you will be presented with two options to choose between, with a third 'card' on the left that is fixed: in the case of mandatory Hacks, the 'card' on the left is a representation of a guaranteed outcome for performing the Hack. In the case of optional Hacks, this 'card' instead is showing you what will happen if you fail the Hack. Either way, success at the Hack will additionally grant you whichever Hack option you selected, while failing the Hack will not provide your selected reward. Also regardless, the reward you didn't pick will never occur.

Success itself is a test of the Hacker's... Hack... rating, against the target's Tech Defense rating. I've yet to run down the details of the formula, but broadly speaking the Hacker having a higher Hack rating raises their odds of success, while the target having higher Tech Defense lowers odds of success, with 100% chance of success being valid. (I've never seen less than a 1% chance of success, conversely) Normally, one of your Hack options will be designated the harder option and have much worse odds of success, though this isn't guaranteed. Furthermore, the game does a surprising amount of weird randomization to this, where different soldiers will get different odds of success in a given mission even if they have the same Hack rating, and in the case of security towers the same soldier will have different odds of success against different security towers even though they all have the same Tech Defense -this includes that it's possible to see your odds of success at a Hack reward be 100% on one security tower and less than 100% on the other. It's all very strange and I'm curious what process lead to this model.

The Hack attempt itself gets visualized as a bar at the bottom that has a line slide up to somewhere on it and stop, where your chosen Hack has another line; if the moving line moves past your chosen reward's line, you've succeeded the Hack, while if it stops short, you failed. As far as I'm aware the only purpose this visualization serves is to cause anguish in players who picked the harder option and get to see that they rolled well enough to get the easier option but not well enough to get the harder option.

Overall, this is... well, it's a pretty boring system whose mechanics I don't like, where the nicest thing I have to say about it is that optional Hacks can in fact be ignored without really endangering your run. It's one of my main disappointments with XCOM 2, where I read a bit about the game before playing it myself, had visions of an interesting system that supported the stealth mechanics, opened up new forms of combat, and made robotic enemies more fundamentally distinctive from non-robots, and then reality came along and informed me that actually Hacking is borderline non-interactive.

As a bonus disappointment, it has much of the usual pop-culture nonsense surrounding hacking, where hacking is basically magic that can only be used on electronic devices. Any electronic device, no matter how improbable it is to be susceptible.

I'm also not a fan of how the way the random element is handled, in that Hack score rising over the course of a run can end up drowned out by luck, especially for a player who likes to shoot for the better rewards. That is, if you just keep rolling high on early Hacking attempts and low on Hacking attempts occurring late in the run, it can end up being the case that your run has its Hack success concentrated early, when your Hack score is low, rather than late when it's high. This is always a risk with any kind of system based on improvement being a tilting of the odds of success, but Hacking gets hit hard by it, partly because you just won't make very many Hacking attempts per run (Thus it's easy to have a run have results skew heavily away from 'expected' results, because it doesn't take that many low-odds events to dominate your total), partly because individual Hack stat improvements are mostly pretty small (The jump from Rookie to Specialist being the primary exception), and partly because Hack rewards themselves are very uneven in significance; making one Hack early on that succeeds in getting a really good Hack reward is a lot more significant than your Colonel Specialist repeatedly succeeding at getting the assorted Hack rewards that basically don't matter. I'd really have preferred a system where Hack score had been a resource you spent for reliable outcomes, or some such, so that rising Hack score was felt properly.

All this being honestly a big factor in me having put off covering it for so long; in some sense it's important to the game, but it's not good or interesting, and it has the dubious honor of being one of the pieces of XCOM 2 that War of the Chosen didn't really do anything to improve. It arguably gets downgraded by War of the Chosen, as I'll be getting into a bit later in this post. Though given how dull it is, the damage isn't really felt unless, I dunno, you personally love Specialists and love Hacking everything whenever you can.

In any event, specifics, starting from...

Objective Hacks

These are just the cards telling you what you'll accomplish when you perform whatever mission objective Hack you're doing. The primary implication is that failing these Hacks just means you miss out on a bonus reward; you'll still get the necessary thing done.

Unlock Door

Unlocks and immediately opens the Hacked door.

This shows up in missions where you rescue a VIP from a cell or vehicle. It's a surprisingly uncommon Hack. Apparently ADVENT isn't big on locking their doors; you might intuitively expect compounds and whatnot to have multiple locked doors, but nope.

This icon is also used in Lost Towers for the Hack that activates the elevator, though its name is at least different there -'Activate Elevator', naturally enough. In some conceptual sense it even is the same type of Hack, opening up a path so you can get on with mission completion, even if it's visually pretty strange to use a door-unlock-icon for activating a cargo lift.

It's worth emphasizing that a locked door being opened as part of this Hack occurs even with Remote Hacking, even though Gremlins and BITs can't be directed to open doors on their own. I imagine some players assume their soldier Hacks the door and then opens it as a separate action (As a game might do as a convenience feature), but no, it's directly caused by the Hack. It's a bit weird, though mostly not terribly important.

Disarm Detonator

Opens the chest and retrieves the object inside. The Hacker carries the object, and cannot become Concealed so long as they carry it.

This is for Guerilla Ops that involve Hacking a chest or other container; in most such cases, the narrative justification is that the container has explosives that will go off and destroy the contents, with this being the justification for why the mission is timed.

Disarm Detonator also gets used for the tutorial's second exclusive mission. It doesn't fully fit, honestly, but it's not like it's terribly important so whatever; I suspect most players do the tutorial once, don't have enough context to notice the mismatch between the objective Hack's framework vs what it's been attached to, and never touch the tutorial again and so never notice. No need for a custom graphic and all for a one-off mission if nobody's going to notice the oddness in the first place.

Mind, this Hack is still pretty strange more generally, for reasons I've been over previously...

Once again, Remote Hacking does in fact grab the object, even in cases where the object's name makes that seem physically implausible.

Breach Network

Completes the mission objective.

This is for Guerilla Ops that involve Hacking a computer system, generally (But not always) an ADVENT computer system. The narrative justification for the mission timer in such cases is that ADVENT is going to 'lock down' the system and you won't be able to get at the info at that point.

This has no physical impact on the game world. I thus have nothing to say about it as a gameplay element.

Control Broadcast Array

Completes the mission objective.

This is used exclusively for the second-to-last mission, and is the Hack your objective demands you perform. It has the unusual quality of instantly ending the mission, no matter how many enemies are about and whatnot.

Not really anything to actually say about it, though. Unique graphic, unique name, but it doesn't meaningfully do anything other than win the mission.

Deactivate Beacon

Prevents reinforcements from being called in.

This is the UFO distress beacon. It thus has the unusual quality of being a mandatory-type Hack, while actually being entirely optional.

As I noted in the Supply Raid post, it's also possible to achieve this result by just blowing up the terminal, and the reinforcements aren't particularly threatening so if you want to let them through that's okay too. You should take a look at the possible rewards and your odds of getting them, but... if they're lackluster or you can't get good odds on what you want, feel free to not do the Hack.

You might've noticed that four of these five icons include a symbol of a triangle in a hexagon with three triangles outside the hexagon implying a larger triangle. This symbol is used almost exclusively for these images, though not quite. In any event, this symbol is wholly unexplained and I'm not sure what it's meant to be about; was this an ADVENT symbol at some point in development? Or a symbol for Gremlins at some point, such as if they had a different design initially? No idea.

General Hack Rewards

These are the rewards you actually select and metaphorically roll dice for.

Security towers generally have local-mission boosts, while objective Hacks generally have Geoscape-level effects. This division isn't absolute, though, with the Geoscape-level effects sometimes occurring on security towers. I'm unsure if it's meant to be an absolute division and its failure to be so is a bug or if it's intentional. In any event, I'm thus lumping them all together into one category.

Many of these Hack effects have a duration I list in a range. This range is an actual random range, but it's decided at mission generation and told to you explicitly when considering the Hack, so you can for example see that a given reward rolled its maximum duration and decide to grab it because of that, which is a nice touch and a bit surprising. Usually games prefer to have that kind of randomization occur such that you won't know the result until after you've already committed yourself.

Also note the duration ticks down when your turn ends. This is particularly important to keep in mind if a Hack effect rolled a duration of 1 turn; grabbing such an effect as the very last action of your turn will ensure you get zero benefit from it, since it immediately ticks down to 0.

Furthermore, many of these rewards are paired, where you'll normally find them together. In such cases, they're clear variations on each other, with one being the easier reward and only benefiting the Hacking soldier, while the other is harder and will instead benefit the entire squad. The reward duration in such cases is always consistent between the two: you won't be getting a 2-turn boost for the Hacker vs a 4-turn boost for the squad. They'll both have the same duration.

Bypass Door Lock

Opens the door without the alert level rising.

This is exclusive to the mission for rescuing a Captured soldier, specifically being attached to the Hack for the Captured soldier's cell door, and is... kind of pointless, because picking up the Captured soldier automatically maxes the alert level anyway, and it's trivial to Hack the door, grab the body, then escape on the next turn.

The rescue mission really needed more polish...

And yes, this means that in those missions you'll always get the door icon here twice at the Hack screen. It's a bit silly, and potentially a bit confusing given normally there's no overlap in possible images between the left 'card' slot and the other two slots.

Integrated Comms

Hacker gains Squadsight for 2-4 turns.

Here is where it really matters that in XCOM 2 maximum firing range on weapons isn't actually a quality specific to weapons: it's not that Sniper Rifles have a higher maximum range than Assault Rifles, it's that Sharpshooters (Who wield Sniper Rifles) have innate Squadsight and Specialists (Who wield Assault Rifles) do not.

Which is to say your Specialist -or SPARK!- will suddenly in fact be able to fire a screen away with their weapon.

I really like the experimentation of Integrated Comms, where XCOM 2 is playing around with Squadsight access and all. It's a cool thing, and I actually hope XCOM 3 is similarly willing to play around with previously-ironclad rules.

Unfortunately, in the here and now Integrated Comms is rarely worth the bother.

First of all, XCOM 2 pressures you to keep the squad pretty close at basically all times, and then enemy pods default to aggressively advancing. In conjunction with time pressure objectives and all, you're usually going to want your Specialist advancing toward the objective whenever possible, and generally this will naturally result in them getting in range of all active enemies, rendering Squadsight moot. You basically need a Reaper aggressively scouting for realistic play to result in a sensible Squadsight opportunity for your Specialist...

... which leads to the second issue: that you usually won't actually want to have your Specialist taking shots at far-off inactive pods, because you want the entire squad ready to pile onto the now-active enemies so you can kill them before they act, and the further the enemy is the more likely it is they'll end up out of your squad's reach but still close enough to advance and attack if you keep moving forward. (Which the time pressure objectives generally push you to do)

In conjunction with the limited duration of Integrated Comms, it's dubious to even grab it early in a mission on the idea that it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. It may well time out before it has an opportunity to come up, whereas grabbing it is definitely slowing your Hacker down since it requires an action point.

There are edge cases it can be useful in, mind. I've noted before that enemies that don't use Cover also don't use step-out mechanics and so can be rendered impossible to shoot by them standing behind a High Cover object; bizarrely, Squadsight will actually let a soldier shoot such a target anyway so long as someone else can see the enemy in question. This will even crop up semi-regularly via Andromedons, as they like to use High Cover and then when killed leave behind their Shell, which doesn't use Cover. As such, it's possible to end up in a situation where a Specialist can't get a line of fire on a target by moving but can shoot them if backed by Squadsight; if they happen to be in range of a security tower, and it happens to have Integrated Comms, there you go, that's the thing to do.

But this is very much an edge case thing.

Of course, it's normally going to be paired with...

Squad Integrated Comms
Squad gains Squadsight for 2-4 turns.

... the squadwide version.

Squad Integrated Comms is still clunky, but is actually a decent security tower reward. First of all, aggressively scouting with a fast Concealed scout (By which I mostly mean a Reaper) is actually possible to leverage well at that point, with (almost) the entire squad taking potshots at the pod from complete safety. Indeed, the AI copes sufficiently poorly with Squadsight harrying I'd consider this an abusive exploit if it weren't for the context limiting the abuse: the limited duration on Squad Integrated Comms, for one, but more importantly the part where you'll normally be in a mission with time pressure pushing you to keep advancing or else fail the mission. (Thus, you can't afford to stand back and shoot in safety while the AI wigs out)

Second, other classes having Squadsight abruptly gifted to them can find it meaningfully expands their options. A Salvo Grenadier or a SPARK (Via Overdrive) might actually find theirself in the position of wanting to not move (Because they want to spend action points on their Rocket Launcher followed by their primary weapon, for example), but also not quite in range of an enemy you'd like them to shoot; suddenly gifting them Squadsight resolves the problem and lets them do everything you want them to do. Specialists are just genuinely one of the classes that gets little out of Squadsight -among other points, Combat Protocol and Haywire Protocol both function at Squadsight ranges in the first place.

Third, in complex terrain it's a lot more likely that someone can't quite get a line of fire on a target without Squadsight but can do so with Squadsight, simply because everyone is affected and so it doesn't need to be specifically the person doing the Hacking. More metaphorical dice rolling means better odds of it actually happening.

Squad Integrated Comms is still not a great security tower reward, but it's an okay one. Grabbing it just in case it crops up -especially if its duration rolled high- can be a sensible thing to do if you either don't mind risking triggering the security tower's negative effect or have a good enough Hacker they're more or less guaranteed to succeed.

It helps that it has a bit more fun factor than a lot of these rewards, doing something interesting. 'It probably won't help, but would be interesting if it did' is more compelling than 'it probably won't help, and will be boring even if it does help'.

Video Feed

Raises soldier's vision by 2 tiles for 1-3 turns.

This can be a bit confusing in practice, as normally line of sight in XCOM 2 is symmetrical: if you can see an enemy, they can see you, with Concealment as the only qualifier. Video Feed raising line of sight can lead to cases where you spot a pod without activating it, which can be particularly disorienting in War of the Chosen with its target preview functionality -you may end up moving a soldier forward with intent to activate a pod spotted by eg your Reaper, only it doesn't happen because being able to barely see the pod means being out of the pod's vision, whoops!

It also has the hidden benefit of effectively raising the maximum range of your soldiers, as standard firing actions (And a number of special abilities aimed at a specific enemy, too) actually have their maximum range defined first and foremost by the personal sight range of units. Even Sniper Rifles benefit a little, as Video Feed pushes back the point at which Squadsight penalties kick in, and so Squadsight-shooting gets effectively a 4% boost to accuracy. (Not that this matters to this specific Hack reward, but it'll be relevant in a minute)

Unfortunately, Video Feed isn't very useful. XCOM 2's pressure for you to move aggressively, where your units should generally be having each action point of movement go out to just about its maximum distance toward the objective, means that Video Feed's small vision advantage is actually pretty difficult to reliably benefit from; this isn't a game where you can inch forward until you spot your enemies and get the drop on them that way, not in missions that have security towers. Video Feed is thus effectively a small chance to sometimes spot a pod without triggering it, and that's about it... especially since it has a short duration, potentially only lasting the turn the Specialist did the Hack.

Naturally, it's usually paired with...

Squad Video Feed
Raises squad vision by 2 tiles for 1-3 turns.

... the squad form.

Alas, Squad Video Feed still fundamentally suffers from the same issues as solo Video Feed; XCOM 2's mechanics are not friendly to such a small boost to sight ranges, the duration is short, etc. It's more likely to matter by simple dint of more soldiers being affected meaning more opportunities for the metaphorical dice-rolling to get lucky, but it's still pretty unlikely to do anything.

In practice both Video Feeds are some of the worst Hack bonuses, and you should basically always skip them unless your actual goal is to clear away a security tower's detection zone and it just happens to have Video Feed.

I really don't get why they provide such a small boost to vision range and have an unusually short duration on the benefit. (Most of these rewards last 2-4 turns, not the 1-3 of Video Feed) If they provided a larger boost, like 50% or especially 100%, I'd assume the shorter duration was to try to avoid the player just sniping every pod on the map trivially. As-is, you could make the duration unlimited within the mission and it would still be a lackluster effect that probably won't matter. It comes across like the devs thought even a small boost to line of sight would be powerful, which is odd.

Targeting

Raises Hacker's Aim by 15 and crit by 25 for 2-4 turns.

That's a big enough Aim boost it can be bigger than what you'd get from trying to advance, assuming advancing wouldn't let you get a flank. If it rolls the full 4 turns, it's also pretty likely to benefit you into the next fight.

It's boring, unfortunately, but it's okay enough.

Naturally, it normally gets paired with...

Squad Targeting

Raises squad's Aim by 15 and crit by 25 for 2-4 turns.

... the squad version.

Squad Targeting is one of the more straightforwardly worthwhile Hacks to grab, once again thanks heavily to benefiting the whole squad. Even if the Specialist would personally be better off advancing, flanking, pursuing high ground, etc, getting the whole squad noticeably more reliable at hitting and more prone to critting is liable to be worth an action point. This is more true against some enemies -enemies with Dodge and/or Defense, mostly- but it's pretty universal.

Squad makeup matters a little here, but it requires a pretty weird squad (Or playstyle) to actually make Squad Targeting unappealing. Like yeah a Templar often doesn't really care, but you can't have a squad of five Templar and one Specialist, and in fact normally you'll only have the one Templar. Similarly Rangers tend to be unimpressed if you're leaning hard on their melee ability, but most players aren't going to field 5 Rangers, 1 Specialist, and have the Rangers obsessively Slash everything. (And also such a group would still appreciate it when dealing with enemies with Defense, which is a lot of them in the late game)

The crit boosting also benefits, once again, from being spread around to the squad. 2-4 attacks with +25 to crit is pretty good odds it didn't actually do anything. 12-24 attacks at +25 to crit will only rarely have had no crits to credit to Squad Targeting. Mind, this also depends on how tough the stuff you're fighting is; it's usually not very helpful in the early game, and tends to be less helpful on lower difficulties, as if you were going to kill the target with any hit then a crit hasn't actually done anything helpful.

Regardless, Squad Targeting is reliably pretty solid, the kind of Hack reward actually worth checking security towers for.

Precision

Raises Hacker's crit by 33 for 2-4 turns.

Awful, absolutely atrocious, virtually never worth spending an action point on.

I'm honestly a bit baffled Precision exists at all given that Targeting is only a slightly smaller crit boost while providing a notable Aim boost as well. If this were, like, +80 to crit, okay sure why not, but why is this so clearly worse than Targeting?

Naturally, it's normally paired with...

Squad Precision

Raises squad's crit by 33 for 2-4 turns.

If you have really high Hack such that your odds are 80+% to get this, and it rolled high on its duration, then... you might as well, I guess?

I still don't get the Precision benefits.

Reflexes

Raises Hacker's Dodge by 33 for 2-4 turns.

Um, yay?

Somehow even worse than Precision, as even if you grab it in the middle of combat and your people get shot a bunch it's entirely possible it will still do literally nothing, whether by the Specialist not getting shot at or by them getting shot once or twice but getting no Grazes.

If you can grab it reliably and you're not worried about being slowed down, you might as well grab it... I guess... but seriously, yikes is this bad.

Normally gets paired with...

Squad Reflexes

Raises squad's Dodge by 33 for 2-4 turns.

... its squad-wide self, which is also quite bad.

Applying to the entire squad at least means the Dodge boost can't fail to matter by virtue of the wrong people being shot, but this is still bad. Many problematic things enemies do don't care about Dodge; if a Heavy Mec launches its Micromissiles into your squad while a Purifier chucks their Incendiary Grenade as the threat presented by a turn, Dodge has literally no chance of helping. It's also not very helpful to have a Stun Lancer or Berserker Graze their target if they trigger Unconsciousness; their victim is still out of action, after all. If you don't have Revival Protocol and/or Restoration, the reduced damage is only helpful by reducing their time spent recovering after the mission.

Then there's the fundamental issue that XCOM 2 is built around the expectation that the player largely doesn't let enemies have the chance to act. Boosting Dodge only helps if you let enemies act; effects that can be leveraged to prevent enemy action are more useful. Even if they gave +100 Dodge, Reflexes and Squad Reflexes would be unappealing right there.

Blitz

Hacker gains 1 charge of Run And Gun.

This is separate from the regular Run And Gun ability normally found on Rangers, up to and including that if your Specialist got Run And Gun as a bonus skill grabbing Blitz will give them two Run And Guns on their ability bar. These can be told apart by the Blitz one having an x1 on its icon, marking that it has one charge, while the regular Run And Gun will have no mark on it unless it's on cooldown. In such an event, you should of course endeavor to use the regular, cooldown-based Run And Gun before turning to the Blitz one, so you aren't unnecessarily cutting off access to a double Run And Gun later in the mission.

Blitz itself is one of the better security tower rewards; the Run And Gun charge lingers indefinitely, allowing you to grab it early and use it whenever it's useful instead of needing to perform the Hack immediately before you intend to take advantage of the effect, which is a big deal right there. It also is effectively pocketing an action point to pull out later, directly offsetting the issue that missions with security towers are normally missions with a relatively tight time pressure and Hacking a security tower risks the Specialist falling behind or forcing the entire squad to delay, either of which is a problem in such a context; if your Specialist does fall behind in a meaningfully problematic way, they can burn the Run And Gun to catch up.

That said, it's somewhat difficult to justify going for it given it's normally paired with...

Squad Blitz

Each squad member gains 1 charge of Run And Gun.

... the usual squad-wide version.

Burn one action point on one soldier to pocket an action point on every soldier? That's an obviously great deal. Your squad lineup is important here, mind; Rangers, Reapers, and less consistently Templar all have inherent difficulties in burning 3 action points efficiently within one turn. Salvo Grenadiers, Quickdraw Sharpshooters, Skirmishers, and SPARKs (Particularly in War of the Chosen, where they can have more ammo on their weapon) are all able to turn an action point injection into an additional attack immediately. Specialists can spend action points on activities like Aid Protocol and Medical Protocol, but can't convert action points directly into attacks, putting them into a middle ground. As such, a team that's a couple Rangers, a couple Specialists, a Grenadier who doesn't have Salvo, and a Sharpshooter that doesn't have Quickdraw won't have nearly so dramatic a payoff from Squad Blitz as compared to a squad with a SPARK, a couple Salvo Grenadiers, a Skirmisher, a Quickdraw Sharpshooter, and the Specialist that almost certainly did the Hacking.

Regardless, this is one of those generally great Hack rewards, and can be grabbed anytime you can spare an action point if you aren't worried about failing the Hack (Either because its negative result isn't concerning or because your Specialist is just that good a Hacker) as opposed to needing to grab it in the middle of combat to maximize its benefits the way a lot of these Hacks demand, making it really easy to justify going for it. A charge of Run And Gun is also just very flexible; I focused on converting action points into damage output when talking squad composition, but passing out Run And Gun can let a soldier Dash for the Hack objective and grab it if time is running low, Dash to flank a target, a Sharpshooter can walk to a better position and fire their Sniper Rifle, etc, where Run And Gun can save the day in a variety of situations.

Indeed, this is probably the primary flaw with Squad Blitz: the charge-based nature of it makes it easy to fall into the trap of holding off on using a charge just in case you really need it later. If instead you're cavalier about aggressively using the Run And Gun charges, it's easy to end up having gotten low value out of them and regret it because you end up in a situation Run And Gun would be extremely helpful for but whoops you used the charge already. Either way, it's a bit awkward.

An interesting wrinkle here is there's a non-obvious way this is very complementary to soldiers who have Run And Gun as a proper skill; they can use their cooldown-based version more cavalierly, confident that if they need to Run And Gun against in a turn or two, they can fall back on burning the charge instead. This can create a kind of 'ghost' benefit, where you never actually use the Run And Gun charge but the fact that you had it still resulted in better outcomes because you used regular Run And Gun at merely very good opportunities, rather than waiting for really great opportunities. (That possibly never arrive) This is obviously influenced by playstyle and experience, but it's still an interesting quality of Squad Blitz -I wish more of the Hack rewards had interesting outcomes like this.

Disguised Signals

Hacker immediately becomes Concealed.

I sort of like the idea of this, but it's held back pretty badly by the fact that the primary utility of Concealment is scouting for pods without prematurely activating them and then you're spending an action point on acquiring it, leading to your Concealed unit... falling behind the squad. And time pressure being the norm means it's undesirable to hold up the squad to let your newly-Concealed unit pull ahead.

That said, it can also be used to negate Dodge if that's a concern (eg you want your Specialist to take a 77% shot at a Codex, the shot will kill if it hits, but you're worried about a Graze leading to a clone), as you can trigger Disguised Signals and fire from Concealment to ignore their Dodge stat. It can also be used as a way to protect the Hacker in a pinch -if they're low on health and you're worried they might die during the enemy turn, you can have them grab Disguised Signals and just not break Concealment to avoid them being targeted.

It's still limited, but there's some potential.

Naturally, it normally gets paired with...

Squad Disguised Signals
Squad immediately becomes Concealed.

This is mildly interesting on the level that it is the only way to acquire squad Concealment mid-mission; every member becoming individually Concealed (Such as by having an all-Ranger squad where everyone has the Conceal skill and you have them all use it) doesn't spontaneously transform into squad Concealment.

Unfortunately, this also limits its usefulness a bit, especially if you're not fond of Phantom. Overwatch ambushes are, as I've been over before, increasingly a bad idea to try to use as a run advances (And thus the more likely you are to expect to manage this Hack the more likely it is that an Overwatch ambush isn't appealing), and the Concealment being the squad form means you can't, say, stomp a weak pod with four soldiers and then scout with the other two soldiers still Concealed unless you have Phantom on them.

In practice I think it's generally better to just grab regular Disguised Signals and try to scout with your now-Concealed Specialist, or not bother at all. I like the idea of it, but Concealment -particularly squad Concealment- would've needed different mechanics, or the game a more fundamentally different design, for Hacking up Concealment to be all that great an effect.

Override

The Hacker will not be directly affected by the next two attacks that would otherwise have affected them.

This is basically Untouchable, except it never times out and triggers twice before running out.

Override really sounds like it should be amazing, but you have limited ability to direct enemy fire at a particular target, and XCOM 2 is not a game where it's a given that everybody is going to be taking hits in most every combat; It's entirely possible to grab Override and then have it not matter at all, either because you played well and nobody got attacked or because the squad came under fire but the Specialist did not.

This reward is also the most egregious example of SPARKs being atrocious Hackers, as they'd actually be a pretty good beneficiary of Override; they tend to draw fire in general, and Sacrifice directly lets them redirect fire to themselves! Alas, their Hack score is abysmal, so having a SPARK go for Override is very much a long-odds thing, not an actual strategy to opportunistically hop on when allowed. Just one more thing contributing to Sacrifice being an underwhelming ability, unfortunately.

Graphically, Override is our first example of a non-paired Hack reward. Unlike all these paired rewards, Override fails to come in a squad variant -well, sort of, since there's the Network Tower bonus that's a squad version- and can get randomly paired up with other rewards that are also not part of a set, with it being random which one gets the left slot and which one the right slot -and thus random which will be the harder Hack. In the majority of these cases, they actually do internally have data for two tiers like the paired Hack rewards do, including that they have two graphics, but in the final implementation the only capacity this shows through is that which of the graphics you'll see depends on which slot the Hack reward got plugged into. Specifically, the green-up-arrows version will be used if the Hack reward gets plugged into the right slot, while the version lacking those arrows will be used if the Hack reward gets plugged into the left slot.

I suspect in most cases what happened is they came up with two tiers of reward and then cut one of them as being overpowered or underpowered. In Override's case, it's really easy to see how a squad-wide version would be absurdly powerful, even if it was only one 'charge' per soldier.

As a contrast point...

Distraction
Immediately resets the entire squad's action point total to their base value, potentially allowing soldiers to act a second time.

... Distraction likely had a version that only affected the Hacker and got cut because that would be absolutely atrocious: risk your second action point to maybe get to (meaningfully) spend 3 action points in the turn? Yikes, that would've been worthless.

Anyway, focusing on Distraction's gameplay and all, it's easily the most powerful and worthwhile tactical Hack reward in the entire game. Getting an entire extra turn out of nowhere for essentially free is ludicrously good and exactly the kind of thing that can let you turn a bad situation into a complete stomp in your favor, no matter your squad composition and almost no matter how bad the situation is.

Notably, not only does the Hacker benefit from Distraction, themselves, but Distraction is treated as a free action for the purposes of Ruler Reactions, which is to say a successful Distraction Hack doesn't trigger Ruler Reactions. Thus, grabbing Distraction doesn't put you in the hole against an Alien Ruler, and in fact will give you more time to work on driving off the Alien Ruler before the enemy's turn comes about; that's an incredible help when regular enemies are also active, making it much more likely you'll both drive off (Or kill) the Alien Ruler and manage to prevent the regular enemies from doing harm.

Even aside Alien Rulers in particular, though, it's an incredible Hack reward that is absolutely worth gambling on in a bad situation.

It's actually so absurdly good it's a bit difficult to say anything of substance. I guess I could note that it's wasteful to grab it if the squad is still Concealed? But mostly it's just absurdly generally good, and only innate Hack risk/reward mechanics give any depth to the question of whether to grab it or not.

An interesting edge case is Overdrive: if you have a SPARK Overdrive and expend all its action points, then use Distraction, the SPARK will retain its Overdrive status and thus be able to shoot or fire their Heavy Weapon or whatever without ending their turn. Note that it will not reset them to 3 action points, though -in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Distraction would actually take away action points over 2, though I've not tested that exact possibility.

Hypnography

Lowers all enemy Will by 50% for the rest of the mission.

Another Hack reward I like the idea of but feel doesn't work out so well in practice, Hypnography suffers badly from the fact that the player has very few tools that actually care about enemy Will, and especially that they're all concentrated on Psi Operatives, ie the non-standard class you have to spend a lot of time and resources on unlocking and which doesn't actually benefit from combat experience, reducing the incentives to have them out on missions security towers occur in.

If you are using a Psi Operative in a mission and happen to successfully grab Hypnography, it's nice enough, making Insanity, Void Rift, and Domination all more reliable, with the impact being larger on higher-Will enemies, but honestly I suspect the overwhelming majority of players have never been in a position for Hypnography to have a chance of mattering. It probably should've been cut...

... or Psi Operatives made a core class, as I've harped on often enough.

Naturally, this is another reward that has only the one variant.

Disorient

Disorients all enemies for 2 turns.

This sounds incredible, and it absolutely can be pretty good, but first of all it doesn't affect robots, the Chosen, or anything else immune to Disorientation, and second some abilities work through Disorientation and don't care about its stat penalties; ADVENT Shieldbearers are going to put up their shield regardless, for example. It's really easy to get excited about it and then have it do nothing of actual use. It's further hampered by the fact that the player can, in fact, just use a Flashbang, which is a cheap Item you can build right away and which is pretty useful in its own right; if you're of the opinion Disorientation is great, you're going to be bringing Flashbangs, not relying on the possibility of security towers offering Disorient.

That said, it's good to grab it if you're not confident in your ability to finish a pod that is susceptible, and Codices in particular are made much easier to deal with by Disorienting them, since it shuts off Clone, Teleport, and Psionic Bomb.

As Disorientation also impairs Mobility, it does also slow inactive pod patrols a bit. I'm having trouble thinking of a way that's useful, but hey.

Deception

Takes control of a random non-robotic enemy for 2 turns.

This won't actually immediately activate the pod whose member got converted, if you grabbed somebody in an inactive pod. They will trigger once either the pod moves or the unit you took control of acts, though.

Deception is a Hack reward that sounds incredible, and has some potential to be decent, but unfortunately primarily functions as a bit of a trap, where a player activates a pod when they're not in a position to take them out, resulting in the player creating unnecessary risks for their squad.

It's also hampered a bit by the fact that it's restricted to targeting non-robot enemies, as the game trends toward those being the weaker enemies. Grabbing a Trooper following around a Sectopod is not ideal, and if it results in the Sectopod activating when you're not ready it's a really bad deal, probably just resulting in the Trooper dying to little effect while your squad now has to deal with the possibility of a Sectopod lurching out of the shadows and murdering someone. It can grab a Gatekeeper or Andromedon, so it's not like this is an absolute rule, but it's the trend until you're very late in the game, where it's still a concern.

It also doesn't work on anything immune to Mind Control, like the Chosen and ADVENT Generals, so don't be getting excited by the idea of having the Hunter kill people for you for a couple turns.

Particularly horrifying is that Deception does work on hostile VIPs! At least you can potentially walk them away from their car? But yikes, this shouldn't have been allowed to happen.

This probably should've been cut, to be honest. Or had its mechanics significantly reworked, though that would probably require Hacking be approached differently pretty fundamentally to have such an  overhaul truly helpful.

Central Command

Takes control of a random robotic enemy for 2 turns.

It's Deception, but for robots.

This makes it on average slightly better for most of a run since robots are stacked toward being nastier than average. It also benefits from it being more plausible that you can predict the target, since robots are a minority; Location Scout, as the simple and extreme example, may allow you to see that there's literally just the one robot on the map, so you can then plan around Central Command grabbing that robot. Among other points, this is actually one of the better ways to get control over a Sectopod, as the odds of success will be better than Haywire Protocol aimed directly at the Sectopod.

That said, one risk of Central Command is that Turrets aren't announced by the Shadow Chamber and maps allowing Turrets overlaps heavily with maps having security towers. It's entirely possible to have the Shadow Chamber announce that Sectopods are the only robot in the mission, get excited when it turns out Central Command generated, grab it, and discover to your dismay a random Superheavy Turret is now uselessly under your control. Surprise!

Overall, like Deception this fits the final game pretty poorly, alas.

Enemy Protocol

Permanently increases the Hacker's Hack rating by 20 points.

Enemy Protocol is an interesting idea whose execution I'm a lot more ambivalent on.

First of all, it suffers hugely in the transition to War of the Chosen: Hacking opportunities are much less consistent in War of the Chosen, as VIP-related missions in the base game always take place on security tower maps, and 40% of them additionally provided an Objective Hack. That's 1-2 guaranteed opportunities per month for the game to roll the Hack reward dice, and Enemy Protocol can show up on both security towers and objective Hacks. In War of the Chosen, your very first VIP-related mission never has any Hacking to do, and even past that point War of the Chosen has added 3 VIP-related mission types, none of which ever allows Hacking to crop up: if I assume every VIP mission type has equal odds of occurring, that still means VIP missions in War of the Chosen only provide a Hacking opportunity 37~% of the time! (That's not really how mission generation works, but the pool system deliberately avoiding repetition doesn't really help; in fact, it means you can't get lucky and roll an extremely long streak of security tower missions!)

That's just VIP missions: Guerilla Ops also notably tilt things away, in that in the base game every Guerrilla Op always took place in the Slum plot type or the Small Town plot type, both of which allow security towers to occur, albeit less consistently than City Centers. War of the Chosen has made it so that 4 out of 9 of the existing Guerrilla Op variants have access to 3 new plot types, none of which  allows security towers, and furthermore adds 2 new Guerrilla Op types that also have 3 out of 5 plot types forbid security towers! And neither of these new mission types has a Hack objective, bringing you from 7 out of 9 Guerrilla Op providing 1-2 Hacks and the remaining 2 still potentially providing 1 Hack to only 7 out of 11 Guerrilla Ops providing a guaranteed Hack, with only 5 guaranteed to be able to provide 2 Hack opportunities.

Taken altogether, the base game gives you a pretty steady rate of 2-3 Hacks per month; if you take 8 months, you'll get 16-24-ish opportunities to fish for Hack rewards and by extension for Enemy Protocol to generate: it's not wildly improbable for a given run to have one of their Specialists grab Enemy Protocol 2 or even 3 times, which can easily make it much more feasible to go for normally-risky rewards, including controlling enemy robots -even Sectopods. In War of the Chosen, a run that took 8 months could theoretically get something close to 24 Hack opportunities, but much more likely is that it'll be somewhere below 8. Basically the only reason you have any guaranteed Hacks is because Neutralize VIP missions are forced in late in a run.

"But what about mission types other than Guerrilla Ops and VIP-related missions?" you might be wondering.

Well, the short and technically-wrong answer is that they don't matter. The longer answer is that most Supply Raids never have any Hackables, Retaliation missions never have Hackables, the first three plot missions also don't have any Hackables, Avenger Defenses never have Hackables, Avatar Project Facilities (rather bizarrely) never have any Hackables, and the remaining non-standard missions mostly don't have Hackables. There's only three exceptions: Landed UFOs will have a Hack objective, missions for rescuing Kidnapped soldiers will have a Hack objective, and the second-to-last mission of the game will have a Hack objective. Reminder that Landed UFOs can't spawn until after you've done a regular Avenger Defense at least once, and rescue missions can't occur unless someone gets Kidnapped, which is not terribly difficult to avoid.

Okay, and technically the Lost Towers mission in Shen's Last Gift has a Hackable, but it has fixed reward possibilities, and neither of them is Enemy Protocol.

So yeah, Guerrilla Ops and VIP-related missions are where the vast majority of your Hack opportunities are located, and War of the Chosen significantly reduced the rate at which those provide Hack opportunities, especially from the early-game perspective.

On top of all that, the Fatigue system means that even if your run happens to generate two or even three Enemy Protocol opportunities, you probably didn't bring the same Specialist into every such mission. In fact, you might fail to bring Specialists into any of them!

The reduced opportunities for Hacks also feeds back on itself: not only is Enemy Protocol much rarer to see in War of the Chosen, but a Specialist (Or SPARK, if you take a gamble and get lucky) who successfully gets Enemy Protocol will have fewer opportunities to then leverage their boosted Hack stat, to the point I often don't even bother to try to get it when the opportunity comes up because it's so difficult to care.

In conjunction with War of the Chosen introducing Hack boosts from Covert Ops, I honestly kind of wish Enemy Protocol had been disabled by War of the Chosen.

As for the base game, where Enemy Protocol has pretty good odds of being relevant, I... still am not a fan of the execution.

First of all, I'm not a fan of the artificial incentive to try to have Specialists handle Hacking objectives. Specialists are the overall preferred choice for Hacking objectives thanks to Remote Hacking and their superior Hack score, yes, but Rangers are often the best class at reaching Hack objectives that are positioned so that Remote Hacking isn't very relevant, and 'wasting' an Enemy Protocol roll on a Ranger is unpleasant. SPARKs make things even worse, since they have Remote Hacking but an absolutely atrocious Hack score, where once again it's unfun to feel forced to 'waste' Enemy Protocol rolls on them. As SPARKs pick up Mobility boosts as you tech up, have inherent access to Overdrive, can pick up a move-and-melee attack, and can upgrade Overdrive to let them walk right through walls, SPARKs can easily end up being the unit best-positioned to Hack the objective when you're running low on time and can't wait for the Specialist to get into position. So this is very relevant of an issue!

It doesn't help that, without mods, you won't see what the possible outcomes are until you've already started the Hack, and the Hack-starting animations are all fairly time-consuming: I'm often reluctant to back out and switch to having the Specialist handle things even when it would be more optimal play simply because it wastes so much of my real-life time.

Second, Enemy Protocol inherently leads to jank with Hacking mechanics, in that for Enemy Protocol to be a real reward, the game has to default to Specialists being pretty bad at succeeding at Hacks, a point exacerbated by the decision to have Hack partially tied to level and Gremlin tier and Skullmining: if a Squaddie Specialist is already reliable at Hacking, how is leveling, upgrading their Gremlin, and grabbing Skullmining supposed to be an improvement at Hacking things?

Right away there's something of an anti-teaching moment going on: a still-learning player is liable to try out Specialist Hacking on security towers a few times, get discouraged by how the odds are always dubious or give up when they get too many Hack fails, and by the time their Specialists have enough Hack to be very reliable at grabbing basic security tower rewards, a given player has very possibly long since stopped bothering with security towers. Objective Hacks existing and being very common in the base game helps offset this some by forcing the player to be reminded that the Hack stat is going up, but I suspect there's quite a few players who still more or less completely ignore security towers -especially since it's really easy to overlook they exist if you're not currently Concealed, and the risks involved in Hacking them are much higher if you are Concealed.

But even aside the anti-teaching element, my point is that Enemy Protocol's very existence pressures the design to make Specialists frustratingly bad at actually Hacking things by default, so that stacking three Enemy Protocols onto one Specialist will meaningfully make them better at Hacking tasks. It'd be healthier for the design if Enemy Protocol didn't exist and Hacking was tuned so Specialists were better at it in the first place, such as setting it up so Specialists are more or less guaranteed to get the lesser reward on most Hacks down at Squaddie and leveling and upgrading their Gremlin was primarily about improving their odds of getting the harder Hack reward.

Though to be honest, I feel Hack shouldn't have been based on random pass/fail mechanics in the first place. Among other points, Hacking's design in XCOM 2 has something of a 'winners winning harder' element to it, in that the better you're doing in a mission the easier it is to justify throwing those Hack dice in hopes of getting a benefit; after all, if you're doing great, you can probably readily cope with whatever the fallout for a failed security tower Hack is, whereas if you're already struggling a failed Hack may take things from 'bad, but limping through' to 'total squad wipe'.

Indeed, I consider 'winners win harder' dynamics to be bad design as something of a default. They're useful for purposes like preventing a competitive game's matches from lasting long past the point the outcome is essentially already decided (A classic RTS problem is that often the point at which a player cannot plausibly win occurs several minutes before the game actually declares them defeated, and that's even though the archetypical RTS resource dynamic is fundamentally a winners-win-harder model), but in most contexts they lend themselves to binary difficulty states: either the player hits the ground running and the game is perpetually easy -and thus boring- or the player has a hard time to start and things are perpetually far harder, with no middle road where the game is an interesting challenge, neither too easy nor too difficult. Enemy Protocol itself is an example of such, in that getting lucky with that first Enemy Protocol makes it notably more likely the Hacker will get any later Enemy Protocols you point them at!

... so yeah. I don't like Enemy Protocol, and if XCOM 3 brings back Hacking in a remotely recognizable form, I hope Enemy Protocol is not brought back.

Small Supply Cache

You will gain some Supplies after succeeding in the mission.

This isn't actually carried by the Hacker. I guess the idea is the Hacker discovers the location of a cache that's picked up outside the mission itself? In any event, this is true of all resource rewards you can get at random from Hacking. Which is unintuitive given objective Hacks actually do assign the thing you're grabbing to the Hacker even if it's data or the like.

In any event, Small Supply Cache is okay unless you're up on Legendary. A small boost to your Supplies can easily be meaningfully felt until pretty late in a run. It does suffer some from the fact that the better your odds of getting it are the more likely it is you're at the stage where further Supplies are low-value or outright worthless, but not overly-so. The fact that it only rarely shows up on security towers also helps; getting it as a bonus on an objective Hack doesn't suffer from the 'why bother?' problem security tower Hacks often run into.

Up on Legendary, it's a lot harder to care. You frequently will be sitting on unspent Supplies for long stretches from quite early in the game; adding some more Supplies to the pile probably doesn't matter.

Of course, it's normally paired with...

Large Supply Cache

You will gain a large amount of Supplies after succeeding in the mission.

... the larger version of itself.

Unfortunately, this gets hit a lot harder by the issue of Hack tuning. Early in a run, Large Supply Cache can be very appreciated of an injection, but if you go for it you're extremely likely to fail; it's honestly better to just go for the smaller but more probable amount. By the time you actually have a high-level Specialist with a tier 3 Gremlin and possibly some other Hack boosts under their belt where you actually expect to succeed in getting Large Supply Cache, you're in the phase of the game where Supplies are rapidly diminishing in value.

Legendary of course makes this even worse, with Supplies being more plentiful overall, it taking longer for your troops to level up, and it taking longer to get a hold of the corpses that provide better Gremlins. (No, the Blacksite having an early Mec and the Forge having an early Sectopod doesn't help; you don't loot bodies in those missions)

I basically never bother.

Small Alloy Cache

You will gain some Alien Alloys after succeeding at the mission.

This has more potential to be interesting than Small Supply Cache. First of all, while it's rare, it is possible to get Small Alloy Cache before your first Supply Raid triggers, and thus either get some magnetic weaponry online early or get Plated Armor started researching early. Second, in general you get Alien Alloys at a more controlled pace by default, where it's quite plausible you'll get the Hack, return to the Avenger, and immediately build something you were unable to grab purely due to its Alloy cost, and where you probably would've had to wait several more missions to get otherwise.

It unfortunately does suffer some from the same issues as the Supply cache Hacks, though, where the more likely you are to get it the more likely it is you won't care. Still, if it shows up early and you get lucky, or even if it shows up in the midgame and you get (less noticeably) lucky, it's generally got a noticeable and interesting impact on your run.

Naturally, it's usually paired with...

Large Alloy Cache

You will gain a larger amount of Alien Alloys after succeeding at the mission.

... its larger self.

Like Large Supply Cache, this suffers badly from the combination of normally being paired with its smaller equivalent and having your initial odds of success very poor. If you care about an injection of Alien Alloys, gambling on the larger amount doesn't really bring anything to the table; it's unlikely you'll be able to say 'getting the smaller amount wouldn't help immediately anyway, let's gamble on the bigger one', especially since the game itself offers zero information on the ranges, and you probably don't remember off the top of your head what Alien Alloy expenses are waiting back at the Avenger.

Similarly, by the time you've got good odds of succeeding at getting Large Alloy Cache, you're probably in the phase of the game where you tend to run out of Elerium Crystals and then sit on unused Alien Alloy piles until you get your next Elerium injection. Notably, there is not an Elerium Crystal Cache, and multiple sources of Elerium Crystals throw in Alien Alloys for 'free', such as one set of Rumors that spawns in the later portion of a run. As such, you basically have to be willing to buy Elerium Crystals at the Black Market fairly aggressively for it to be likely that you're specifically eyeballing Alien Alloys as an important resource in the late game.

The Caches are one case where I think the lesser/greater paired rewards mechanic really doesn't work...

Insight

Current Research has its remaining time halved.

I sort of like the idea here, but I think it suffers a lot from the uncontrolled swing; if you start one of the slower Research projects like Powered Armor and through blind chance almost immediately launch a mission, get an opportunity at Insight, and successfully make the Hack, the effect will be pretty profound, potentially shaving off something like two weeks of research time.

On the other hand, if you get to day 23 out of 25 on a Research and then happen to get Insight, it saves you one day. Yay?

If Insight gave you a little control over its application, like providing an Insight charge you could manually spend at the lab, it would be a mostly-reliable decent little payoff, and there'd be some strategic management questions as far as deciding what's best to spend it on and so on, especially if the mechanics were tweaked so it wasn't so clearly optimal to dump it on the longest Researches. As-is, it's one of the more annoying bits of swingy RNG in the game. The main good news in that regard is, somewhat awkwardly, that it's too rare to be likely to matter; you can go a run of the base game and simply fail to see it at all, and a run of War of the Chosen has even better odds of it simply not showing up.

And yes, this is another case of an unpaired reward with only the one 'tier' but two graphics. This is true of the next four, as well.

Resistance Broadcast

Boosts income by 25 Supplies per month permanently.

Another Hack reward I sort of like the idea of but don't feel works out so well in practice; 25 Supplies is a small value, and a run just doesn't do that many months. It's not as egregious a tuning issue as with the Covert Ops, but it does mean you only somewhat notice Resistance Broadcast's impact if you happen to get it in the first or maybe second month, with it becoming increasingly irrelevant the later it generates.

Like yeah sure you might as well have your highest Hack rating soldier go for the Hack in hopes of getting the bonus, but usually you'd rather pick whatever the alternative is.

Satellite Data

Halves scanning times for the next 4 weeks.

In addition to Rumors, this affects Supply Drops and making contact with new regions, though the actual execution is very janky.

First of all, the game insists on only displaying scan time needed in units of whole days, and rounds down this displayed number. A Supply Drop will be displayed as taking 1 day, for example, even though it will actually take a day and a half. As such, it's easy to think you have more spare time than you actually have. This is relatively minor, but still worth mentioning.

Second of all, its effect on Rumors is to halve all current timers on Rumors you haven't scanned at all, and cause new Rumors to generate with half the usual time needed. That is, if you just barely started scanning a Rumor, then a mission happens and you get Satellite Data, the Rumor you started scanning will not be affected by Satellite Data, and conversely a Rumor that generated just before Satellite Data timed out will remain halved forever, even if you don't start scanning it until after Satellite Data timed out.

Third, when considering contacting a new region, it won't modify the predicted time needed to account for Satellite Data, simply telling you whatever the base value for your difficulty is. (Or saying 'instant' if you have Resistance Network active, though of course that will actually be true)

This is particularly frustrating in conjunction with the fourth point: that there's absolutely nothing in the UI to track Satellite Data's benefits. As such, when considering contacting a new region, you won't know how long it will actually take until you actually commit to the contact. Surprisingly, as far as I can tell no mod has been made to correct this, either!

In spite of all the aggravating missteps, this is one of the best Hack rewards, well worth pursuing. Nearly doubling (Remember: travel time is a thing) the amount of work done by the Avenger in terms of scans is very generally great, reducing the pressure from the Avatar Project, bringing in additional resources, making it easier to justify squeezing in a Rumor you'd like to have but might otherwise feel you can't spare the time for, etc. As the Avenger is normally going to be spending the majority of its time scanning, this is all but guaranteed to pay off.

I'm not quite willing to say it is guaranteed; if you get it very late in a run, where Rumors aren't really generating anymore and you're done contacting new regions, it can actually end up doing nothing. (It doesn't affect scanning at an HQ, which is the only scan option that never goes away) That particular scenario is a bit unrealistic, basically requiring you to stall finishing a run, but it can still end up being the case you get it late enough in a run that it technically puts in work but where the work doesn't really matter -you get Supplies from a Rumor faster, but you're sitting on a few hundred Supplies with nothing you're interested in buying as is. That kind of thing.

But mostly, this is incredible. Possibly too incredible, honestly; the other strategically-focused Hack rewards are almost always lackluster by comparison.

Watch List

The next Contact you initiate will cost 50% less Intel.

As Watch List is a percentage effect, you're actually encouraged to burn it on making a more distant Contact to maximize the Intel savings. As a concrete example, let's say you're in the middle of contacting a region, and your current plan is to build a Radio Relay and then contact another region, followed by contacting a third region. (To reach the Psi Gate, the Forge, or a generic Avatar Project Facility, most likely) By default that plan will, on Commander, cost 40 Intel, then 80 Intel, and if you get Watch List and then carry on with it unchanged it will cost 20 Intel and then 80 Intel, saving you 20 Intel.

If instead you skip building the Radio Relay in the region you're currently contacting, instead contacting the new region and building a Radio Relay in it followed by contacting that third region, Watch List will cause you to spend 40 Intel followed by 40 more Intel, saving 40 Intel in the process. ie clearly superior results.

It's not an essential bit of optimization in most cases, but it's something to keep in mind if you do get Watch List.

Also note that the game won't explicitly tell you that Watch List is active when you're at the Geoscape. If you've got Intel costs for contacting regions memorized, you'll be able to tell because it correctly informs you of what you'll pay right now if you initiate contact, but if you're not paying attention it's easy to overlook that you're paying 40 Intel contacting 2 regions out via Watch List, not paying 40 Intel by contacting 1 region out under normal conditions. Fortunately, any such mistake is liable to be to your benefit.

On non-gameplay notes, Watch List is possibly the strangest of the Hack rewards. The name is a bit opaque, requiring some thinking to arrive at a reasonable conclusion (I'm pretty sure the thought here is that you're grabbing an ADVENT watch list, which is to say a list of people that ADVENT suspects are dissidents or the like, with the reduced Intel cost then representing you having an easier time getting in contact with people friendly to your cause... but I had to look stuff up and think about it, it wasn't just obvious on the face of it), and more to the point about oddness its graphic doesn't mesh with its effects; it uses the same S-looking graphic some bits of the game use to represent Supplies/cash, when Watch List has nothing to do with Supplies/cash.

Did contacting new regions used to cost Supplies instead of Intel, and this graphic not fitting get missed? Did it originally do something else that was/is Supply-related, like reducing the cost of your next Radio Relay? Was it actually a graphic made for an entirely different effect that got cut, and then got reused here even though it's a bit off for this? It's weird.

In any event, Watch List is always good to get. It takes a very long time for Intel to stop being something you can always use more of, and Watch List is affecting your one mandatory Intel expense, so unless you get it really late in a run, where you're done contacting new regions, it's guaranteed to pay off.

Priority Data

Delays currently queued Dark Events by two weeks.

You have no idea how far off a given Dark Event is in the first place and it's absolutely possible to spend months not having Dark Events go through. As such, Priority Data is annoyingly murky as to whether it benefited you at all, and there's no real ability to plan around it; you can't get the Hack and unequivocally decide that it's okay to put off a problematic Dark Event in pursuit of a better reward/less worrying Sitrep/whatever because you got Priority Data. 

It's disappointing, because I actually kind of like the idea of a Hack reward giving you more breathing room, but the implementation doesn't really work.

It's an okay thing to go for when convenient, but not anything to get excited about, and a dubious thing to outright gamble on.

And that's the last of the regular Hack rewards. So time to move on to...

Hack Fail Outcomes

This is the stuff that can happen when failing a security tower Hack. More specifically, if a mission has security towers, the game will randomly pick one of the following three 'cards' to be what will happen on failing a security tower Hack. They will appear all the way on the left where an objective Hack would have 'disarm detonator' or the like, so you can see what consequence you're risking with your Hack, which is pretty important given the three consequences are very different in impact.

The prior icon is just a generic 'feedback' icon, where 'feedback' is the game's term for a Hack failure. I'm not sure why it's the term; it sort of makes sense with Skullmining and with Haywire Protocol, but for security tower Hacks it's a bit confusing of a term.

And yes, there's only three forms of feedback for security towers. It's a bit unfortunate, contributing to the shallowness of the Hack system.

Map Alert

Enemies are alerted to your general position, and will attempt to advance toward your squad in the Yellow Alert state.

This is the easiest failure state to ignore, as it doesn't really impact anything meaningful. The game normally tries to have a pod patrolling toward you anyway (And the missions that break from this rule don't have security towers), so it's not like you can sneak through maps in the first place, and the game doesn't attach any mechanics to make it more threatening; the pods won't get to take a shot immediately after activation or anything of the sort. I'm pretty sure the 'downthrottling' behavior that tries to prevent enemies from dogpiling you also overrules it.

As such, if you've already broken squad Concealment, and you check the security towers and see this is the feedback for the mission, you might as well try the Hack if you can spare the action point and all. Even if the only Remote Hacker you have on hand is a SPARK, the fact that they're very likely to fail isn't a disincentive. Indeed, Map Alert can be a benefit, making it easier to get enemies to walk into your squad on their turn and get hit by Overwatch, where they might otherwise inconveniently stand still or patrol away from your squad.

It's a bit unfortunate of a dynamic; this particular form of feedback probably shouldn't have been included in the game.

I do wonder if at some point the mechanics worked such that this was more inherently a meaningful punishment...

Reinforcements

A pod of reinforcements will arrive at the start of the enemy turn, somewhere fairly close to your squad.

The signal flare almost always lands somewhere your squad can currently see. It's not guaranteed, but it's what'll usually happen. If it does land outside current squad vision, it'll still usually land close enough that if you don't deliberately run away from the flare the reinforcements will end up in your squad's sight after their post-activation move. Occasionally the reinforcements won't naturally end up in sight, but this is generally either because a windowless building is involved, or because the flare landed in a low ground area that happened to lack any adequately nearby climb points or ramps, not by virtue of the flare picking a location too far away in a raw distance sense.

In the base game, Reinforcements isn't much of a punishment; it's easy to get the jump on the pod with Overwatch and/or Bladestorm such that the reinforcements get no turn at all, at which point they're free experience and a chance of more loot. Indeed, SPARKs having awful Hack is actually somewhat useful in the base game, as you can point them at the harder reward of a security tower and be basically guaranteed to fail the Hack, netting you the reinforcements that are very possibly more useful than whatever the security tower's intended rewards are. I often actively try to fail such Hacks in the base game.

In War of the Chosen, it works better as a punishment: Bladestorm is unsafe (Unless you get lucky with the rare combo of Bladestorm+Fortress on a Templar... and happen to have them on the mission) due to Purifiers being added to the reinforcement pool, the Fatigue system means triggering reinforcements risks making people Tired who wouldn't have been (Or Shaken, if they were already going to be Tired), and the value of fishing for timed loot is a bit lower overall due to a collage of changes. (eg boosting PCS effectiveness isn't a guaranteed upgrade, making PCSes a little less valuable, your pool of soldiers is wider, making PCSes less consistent a spike in squad performance, Weapon Attachments lose a lot of value as you start looting Chosen weaponry...) For the later game of higher difficulties, there's also the point that some Elite-tier ADVENT units got an HP spike, making it less trivial to stomp the reinforcements before they can act.

That said, even in the base game you shouldn't just mindlessly trigger it the instant you can. Adding a pod when you're already fighting another pod can rapidly go horribly wrong, and security tower missions always means some form of time pressure is involved. With Guerrilla Ops you'll ideally at least get the objective handled first, so you don't end up failing the objective by being slowed by the fighting. If you have Alien Hunters, there's also the risk of triggering Reinforcements and then an Alien Ruler patrols into sight, which is liable to go badly for your squad unless either the Alien Ruler is already nearly dead or you brought a Psi Operative with Stasis; you may wish to skip triggering Reinforcements if you're unsure whether an Alien Ruler can show up in your current mission.

Jammed

+20 Defense and +3 Mobility for all enemies on the map, permanently.

Jammed is by far the most consistently concerning security tower feedback effect. +20 Defense is a fairly large boost, and crucially it breaks a lot of 'magic numbers'. For example, a Colonel Ranger with Blademaster is normally assured a melee hit on the vast majority of enemies, as they arrive at 110 Aim and few enemies have more than 10 Defense. Jammed suddenly knocks your Ranger to an 80% chance to hit against targets with 10 innate Defense, which is not exactly ideal. By a similar token, a Colonel Ranger taking a shot at point-blank with a Shotgun will have a base accuracy of 120, once again assuring a hit on the majority of enemies, but with Jammed you'll end up with only a 90% chance to hit enemies who have a base Defense of 10.

There's a lot of examples like this, where Jammed will turn a guaranteed hit into a risky shot, and of course enemies with Dodge exacerbate this where even if you land the hit you may do less damage than you need thanks to having a miss chance at all. The Mobility boost is less obvious of an issue in the middle of play, as for one thing several melee enemies normally don't show up in missions with security towers and one of the exceptions is generally already fast enough to hit whoever they want (Stun Lancers), but it still means you're more likely to get flanked, makes it harder to retreat far enough if that's a thing you want to do (Such as deciding to just bail in a VIP mission that's gone wrong), and just generally catch you off guard if you've played a lot and have a good sense of where enemies can and can't move and whoops Jammed has changed that on you.

Jammed is in fact problematic enough I personally am reluctant to risk triggering it at all unless it's in circumstances I'm confident it won't matter in. (eg there's only one enemy left, which I can finish with accuracy-skipping tools after the Hack) This is particularly stark in the base game, where Reinforcements tends to be a pinata I actually want and so Jammed is the only security tower feedback effect I treat as A Bad Thing to have happen.

Mind, this is partly commentary on how Hack rewards are mostly lackluster; it's not just that Jammed is dangerous, it's that it's unlikely to be attached to something that's actually worth making that gamble. I'm very much not fond of gambling strategies personally, but even if you're more comfortable with such why bother risking Jammed in pursuit of Squad Reflexes?

Note that Jammed will apply to units generated after you trigger it. (eg regular reinforcements, Chosen summons, Psi Zombies...) Furthermore, it actually applies to the Lost! Including of course that it applies to Lost that spawn in after you trigger it. This can be an unpleasant surprise if you get The Horde on a mission and assume Jammed is harmless because surely Lost don't benefit and whoops they actually do benefit!

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Distortion

Unused

This is a Hack reward with a name and graphics unique to it that isn't actually used. I'm curious what it was supposed to be, and why it got cut. It's probably nothing to be missed particularly given the Hack rewards trend toward being lackluster in practice, but to a certain extent that's why I'm curious; they were perfectly happy to leave in stuff like Hypnography that barely matters. What might this have been that it didn't meet those low standards?

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Next time, we wrap up Hacking by covering the stuff for Hacking enemy units, whether with the Skulljack or with Haywire Protocol.

See you then.