Chimera Squad Analysis: Progeny Acolyte

HP: 5/5/6/6 (+0/+2)

Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 2-3 (+1/+2. Crit adds +1)
Will: 80 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 70

Psi: 75 (Possibly only relevant because of Resonants)

As this is the first enemy I'm covering in Chimera Squad, a few things worth explaining.

Firstly, relative to XCOM 2 I've removed crit chance, Shred, Armor, Defense, and Dodge from the 'standard' stat block, because most enemies in Chimera Squad have 0 in all of those across all difficulties no matter how many Investigations you are into a run. In cases where an enemy has non-zero values in the stats in question I do in fact list them, to be clear, but if I do not list a given such stat it's because it's always zero on that enemy type. These were all stats that weren't 'default' in XCOM 2 but they were each reasonably common; Chimera Squad almost never uses them.

Second; the numbers in parentheses. These are Act-based bonuses, which is to say they're the stats going up in later Investigations. So for example if you hit the Progeny as your first or second Investigation and are playing on Impossible, you'll be fighting Acolytes with 6 HP, whereas if you save the Progeny for last on your Impossible run instead the Acolytes will have 8 HP.

A couple wrinkles that deserve clarification; firstly, third-Act bonuses overwrite second-Act bonuses. That is, an Acolyte on Impossible can have 80 Aim, 82 Aim, or 85 Aim based on Act, not 80/82/87 Aim. Secondly, the endgame missions that occur once all Investigations are completed use third-Act stats; you might expect them to apply a still larger boost to stats, but no.

Also, 'crit adds +number' is as in 'a crit will add exactly this much damage', just as crits worked in XCOM 2, just in XCOM 2 I wasn't using parentheticals for other numbers to muddy the issue.

The only new stat worth noting here is Initiative; I don't know what the exact formula involved might be (Among other points, I'm unsure what, if any, randomization might be getting applied to it), but broadly this is the stat that determines how enemy turns are initially organized after the Breach Phase ends. Higher Initiative means getting placed earlier in the turn order. For reference, regular enemies never go above 100 Initiative or below 25 Initiative; an Acolyte is 'fast' and will typically be one of the earlier enemies to act, but it's not shocking for some other enemy to be placed before them.

An additional note: the highest difficulty raises the crit chance bonus from a flank from +33% to +45%, while the lowest difficulty lowers it to +20% chance. I might've overlooked an exception, but as far as I've determined this is universal to all enemies -even enemies that can't make flanking attacks get their flank crit chance modified! As crit damage is so minor in Chimera Squad this is pretty ignorable, but it does mean enemies flanking your agents is on average a little more of a threat on Impossible. (And a little less in Story)

On to a new thing, though; Alert actions.

Alert Actions: Move to a different position, Hunker Down.

If an enemy in the Breach Phase decides to be Alert (as opposed to Surprised or Aggressive) and then remains able to act once the Breach Phase is over with, they randomly pick from a list of possible actions. While this list doesn't have much variety, it is defined per-enemy, and in fact a number of enemies are able to perform actions unique to them when Alert.

Acolytes are not such an enemy, though, having only the two most standard actions.

Moving to a different position is available to all Cover-using enemies (And one non-Cover-using enemy, oddly), and if an enemy decides to perform it they specifically attempt to move to a location that is in Cover relative to your squad's final positions. Notably, enemies tend to prefer falling back, making it harder to flank them, than they do to move forward for a flank. As far as I'm aware this isn't really meaningfully different from regular Cover-seeking movement behavior, though.

Hunker Down is slightly more interesting. In mechanical terms it's really just XCOM 2's Hunker Down action, granting +30 Defense and +50 Dodge until the unit's next turn (and it still clears Burn, just like in War of the Chosen), including the weird wrinkle that it can't be activated if the unit isn't in Cover but provides its protection even against flanks, but for the player Hunker Down has been replaced by Preparation. It's an unexpected reversal from what happened with the transition from Enemy Unknown/Within to XCOM 2, where Hunker Down went from a standard action available to anything that used Cover to being player-exclusive.

Hunker Down is also more interesting for what I've touched on before of intersecting with the overhaul to Overwatch; that in Chimera Squad it can legitimately make sense to lay Overwatch on a target that's Hunkered Down instead of just taking a shot, because the Overwatch shot will in fact be more accurate and not risk a Graze.

And now on to the Acolyte's remaining qualities of note.

AI Pistol

Passive: Primary weapon is buggy and has an inconsistent response to ammo drain effects.

I've already alluded to this before, but I'll be including this tidbit in every Pistol-using enemy's post just in case someone finds a given such post in isolation.

Acolytes are one of the enemies least impacted by this bugginess since they don't like using their Pistol and honestly shouldn't use their Pistol in most situations, but it can still be an unpleasant surprise to throw a Cease Fire Grenade at an Acolyte and then they flank and shoot someone anyway.

Soulfire

Turn-ending action: Unavoidably does 2-4 (+1/+2) damage to a single target the Acolyte can see, ignoring Armor.

Note that, unlike Shelter's version of Soulfire, this does not delay the target's turn. It's just straight damage.

Also, the numbers in parentheses are, just as with the stat block, Act-based modifiers, meaning if you hit the Progeny as your second Investigation an Acolyte's Soulfire will do 3-5 damage while if the Progeny are your third Investigation their Soulfire will do 4-6 damage.

Soulfire itself can be a rude surprise for a learning player who was expecting that standing behind High Cover while Safeguarded by Terminal would be strongly protective of an agent who's ended up low on HP, but overall is less impactful than you might expect. There is of course the point that good play minimizes enemy opportunities to act, but it's also the case that enemy Aim is actually largely noticeably higher than in XCOM 2; in XCOM 2, even by the end of the game it was very rare for an enemy to rise above 75 Aim, and multiple early game enemies started from as low as 65 Aim even on the highest difficulty. Meanwhile in Chimera Squad literally no enemy in the entire game has less than 70 base Aim, with 75 being the new 'baseline' Aim that only a few enemies drop below, and only if they're both fought early in a run and while playing on a lower difficulty. If you're playing on one of the upper two difficulties, literally no enemy goes below 75 Aim! And third-Act bonuses are pretty uniformly +5 Aim, so by the end of a run the expectation is 80 Aim is what you see on the most inaccurate of enemies; the enemies who are good shots will do better.

As these games use a subtractive approach to Aim and Defense, the average impact of Defense goes up as Aim goes down; being in Low Cover and getting 20 Defense shaves off nearly a third of the attacker's chance to hit if they have 65 Aim, but only 25% of their chance to hit if they have 80 Aim.

As such, in Chimera Squad enemies are noticeably more prone to landing shots even through Cover than in XCOM 2, and so guaranteed-hit effects are, on average, simply not the kind of jump in danger they presented in XCOM 2.

The fact that Soulfire ignores Armor and Dodge is worth keeping in mind, though. All your agents will have a point of Armor by endgame, multiple agents can get additional Armor through skills or Training, and Torque specializes in Dodge and you can eg have Verge lean into Dodge if you like. It's easy to get used to having set up a fairly tanky squad and end up overestimating your agents' ability to shrug off damage from Acolytes. After all, they're a basic low-end enemy, so they're not a threat like the elites, right?

This is particularly relevant if you took Torque and Axiom together, of course, but if the Progeny are your third Investigation in general you may wish to prioritize Acolytes slightly higher than you might expect.

That said, Acolytes actually aren't terribly aggressive about using Soulfire. No, they much prefer to use...

Psionic Suplex

Turn-ending action: Lifts a single target into the air, denying them the Defense and Armor of their Cover. This effect lasts until the target's next turn, or until the Acolyte takes damage or is disrupted by another effect. If it ends by the target's turn arriving, the target is attacked for free before its turn starts, taking 2-3 (+2/+3) damage that ignores Armor. 2 turn cooldown, 3 turn global cooldown.

Note that Acolytes are supposed to refuse to target your next two agents that will act, ensuring you have some opportunity to respond to the Psionic Suplex if no other factors are interfering with turns. I'm not sure how stringently this effect is held to in practice -I've personally never had them target the immediately next agent, but I have had them target the agent after that, which would be violating what the config files lay out.

On a more helpful note, Psionic Suplex can be interrupted by eg Stunning them, or inflicting Berserk: while taking them out is the most universal option, some Agents have other tools that may be even more reliable, or you may have Items, either way. Verge, for example, has both a Stun and a Berserk inflictor, so he can pretty casually interrupt a Psionic Suplex.

Psionic Suplex itself is basically Verge's Levitation, including that you can compare the damage at the end to Slam, aside that Levitation is a Breach Phase action and Psionic Suplex is not. (Okay, and that Acolytes don't have a Neural Network mechanic) This includes the odd wrinkle that units attacking the victim won't get the crit chance bonus for attacking a target in the open, making follow-up attacks on a Psionic Suplex victim slightly less dangerous than you might expect.

Psionic Suplex is also our first example of something Chimera Squad is fond of using the Timeline system for; dangerous actions that are reliable but which give the player a chance to respond. That is, if an Acolyte shoots an agent, they either hit or don't hit, and while there's some stuff you can do ahead of time to minimize the odds of hitting, once the Acolyte's turn arrives you can't respond to them taking a shot to try to prevent its damage. Whereas Psionic Suplex will, if you simply ignore the Acolyte performing it, automatically and unavoidably do some damage to the target, but you have a window of time in which other agents can act to prevent its damage from going off.

Also, do note that using Team Up to move a Psionic Suplex victim's turn forward will in fact cause them to take damage earlier in the Round; it really is that it triggers on the victim's next turn. This can make sense to do anyway when trying to untangle a tricky situation, but if you're careless it can instead be a way to cause an agent to start Bleeding Out completely gratuitously.

On a design note, Psionic Suplex is interesting in part because it's more clearly a deliberate formalization of a dynamic I commented about in regards to Sectoids in XCOM 2 -that a Sectoid raising a Psi Zombie or performing a Mindspin tended to be a mercy action because it did nothing immediately and the player could negate the potential threat essentially for free. I didn't really like the dynamic of this in XCOM 2 because it felt like another example of the game trying to go easy on the player without looking like it was doing so (ala the assorted ways XCOM 2 invisibly cheats on accuracy checks to make things more favorable to the player than what the stated numbers indicate), but in Chimera Squad it comes across more like a mixture of playing with the mechanics of the new turn system and trying to give more room for counterplay.

And Psionic Suplex isn't the only example of this type of dynamic in Chimera Squad. These types of abilities are less common than I was expecting when I was first playing Chimera Squad, but there's a decent array of them.

These mechanics don't work out as well as I'd prefer in practice, but I like the attempt, and I do wonder if XCOM 3 will try to refine the concept.

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Narratively, the Acolyte is pretty typical of Chimera Squad's approach to your enemies; there's a sketch of a concept visible to the player via the name and general visual presentation, but the game itself doesn't really explicate much, among other points leaving it a bit unclear player-side whether there actually is a coherent concept underlying what you're seeing.

So for example the Acolyte's name and visual presentation, particularly in conjunction with the Sorcerer unit that is the Progeny's overall most elite unit, suggests that Acolytes are inexperienced and low-ranking members of the Progeny who are still developing their powers and aspire to someday reach the heights of Sorcerers. The two even have a similar look in terms of their outfits, suggesting the hood-and-eye-covering-and-so-on look may be something like a uniform for the Progeny. (Contrasting with how a player's first guess when looking at an Acolyte might be that this is meant to be just a Teen Criminal In The Future sort of look, something a teenager throws together to obscure their identity using household goods)

But the game doesn't address this stuff explicitly anywhere that I can tell, so the final result is pretty ambiguous, and indeed lots of elements are, as far as I'm aware, 100% ambiguous in general. For example; what's the starting point of psionic powers in the Progeny? Are the Progeny primarily or exclusively made of people who already manifested psychic powers before joining the group, and the Progeny are just helping them to master these abilities? Or are the Progeny helping 'unlock' psychic powers in the first place, where a typical Acolyte couldn't do anything psychic prior to joining up?

Similarly ambiguous is the aforementioned head-and-eye-covering aspect. I commented a bit in Shelter's post about being disappointed that Chimera Squad didn't stick to the 'unlocking your psychic powers visibly marks you permanently' approach of XCOM 2, but the fact that Acolytes and Sorcerers hide their eyes and hair in-game may be in part the game being actually undecided on that topic. Shelter doesn't have the white hair and glowing purple eyes, nor does the Progeny's leader, but if XCOM 3 decides to say that those effects are in fact typical and gives one or more reasons why a given individual can be an exception to this rule, such an explanation only needs to cover Shelter and the Progeny's boss; XCOM 3 is free to declare that most or all the Progeny Acolytes and Sorcerers do in fact have white hair and glowing purple eyes under the hood and goggles. (Well, Sorcerers aren't wearing goggles per se, but close enough)

So there's going to be a recurring thing in these posts of me hedging a fair amount, because it's very difficult to be sure whether a given reasonable-looking interpretation of what we're seeing is actually the intended one, or if the devs intended something else, didn't explicitly communicate it, and would be surprised to hear of the reasonable-looking interpretation.

I'm actually somewhat curious if this ambiguity was at all intentional, though. I suspect it isn't, honestly, but just as the eyes-and-hair thing with Acolytes and Sorcerers I raised a second ago can be played either way by future games, so too do many other elements of Chimera Squad's narrative being handled murkily open up wiggle room for later games to potentially frame them rather differently from whatever the Chimera Squad devs were thinking without this automatically being a clear (and problematic) retcon. I kind of wish games did this more as a default, honestly; so many series are frustrating to try to follow the larger arc of their story precisely because each individual entry wants everything to be as explicit and specific as possible, often with no regard for whether this is going to create trouble for later entries down the line.

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Next time, we move on to the other basic Progeny unit; the Thrall.

See you then.