Chimera Squad: Initial Settings

Chimera Squad doesn't bring back Second Wave, but it does have more in the way of initial campaign settings than just difficulty, which is mildly interesting.

Though first let's talk about that difficulty thing.

Difficulties;

Story

Normal

Expert

Impossible

Difficulty is noticeably less impactful on a run of Chimera Squad than a run of the prior games, but it does still matter. Story mode in particular, as I've covered across multiple posts, has several special-casing effects like making the Anarchy meter longer, giving a bunch of baseline stat boosts to your agents, etc.

Most of the impact of difficulty is, oddly enough, tied very specifically in the strategic end, affecting how much benefit certain Spec Ops provide, affecting how much Field Teams provide, influencing your odds of seeing an Epic Weapon at all, affecting how quickly Unrest rises at a given stage of the game... I suspect I'm still overlooking some of the strategic changes it makes, as there's quite a lot of them, and many of them are extremely easy to not register while playing or to notice but wave off as coincidental. eg I did notice, when I switched to Impossible, that I wasn't ending every run with every Epic Weapon on hand the way all my prior runs had, but initially waved it off as a coincidence until digging in the files showed that Epic Weapons do in fact generate quite a bit less often on the highest difficulty.

This design decision is quite the contrast with the prior two games, where the impact of difficulty was heavily focused on the tactical portion of gameplay. In XCOM 2, for example, there were a large number of Geoscape-layer details that were unaffected by difficulty unless you were specifically talking about Legendary difficulty, like the costs of producing Items, how long digging out rooms in the Avenger took, and so on. Meanwhile, the tactical layer of XCOM 2 was very obviously heavily impacted by difficulty, where a player could pretty readily notice things like that Basic ADVENT Troopers have 3 HP on the lower two difficulties and 4 HP on the higher two difficulties, or how mission timers were less lax on higher difficulties.

Chimera Squad's tactical layer, meanwhile, is not actually affected particularly strongly by difficulty. Things like how many enemies you expect to fight in a given Encounter don't change that I can tell, and individual enemy statlines are minimally impacted by difficulty; Aim generally only goes up 5 points when comparing the lowest difficulty to the highest for a given enemy, HP doesn't necessarily go up at all and tends to only go up by 1 point, and those are the only stats where it's actually standard for difficulty to affect it on a given enemy. Exactly one enemy in the entire game has its Armor affected by difficulty (Sacred Coil's Turrets), Defense going up is not a standard concept, damage going up is not a standard concept, Mobility going up is not a standard concept, Dodge going up is not a standard concept... all kinds of parameters that XCOM 2 was very willing to tune up as you climbed through difficulties are more or less untouched by Chimera Squad.

Notably, a lot of enemies actually only have two difficulty-based stat blocks: the one they use for the lower two difficulties, and the one they use for the higher two difficulties. As such, if you find Expert a little too easy and are hoping Impossible will renew the challenge of the tactical space... it might do so a little bit up through the midgame by virtue of slowing your ability to improve on the strategic layer, resulting in you getting stuff like weapon upgrades online a little slower, but to whatever extent you'll experience that it will be both mild and temporary, falling away in relevance as you approach an endgame state on your squad.

I do personally appreciate the impact Impossible has on the strategic layer, taking Unrest management from an interesting-seeming framework that's too trivial to be really interesting to an actually meaningful challenge that might genuinely cause you to game over if you're still expecting Unrest to be a joke, but I also feel the tactical layer could've used one more step up in difficulty. I'm a little surprised mods didn't step in to provide such an additional tier of tactical difficulty, honestly.

Overall, if you have concerns about your ability to cope with Chimera Squad's newfangled systems but aren't, like, completely unfamiliar with tactical games of any kind, Normal is probably the place to start. If you're an XCOM 2 veteran -which I suspect describes most people who gave Chimera Squad a try- Normal is liable to be boringly easy and I'd sooner recommend starting from Expert. And if you're someone who has always viewed these games as the kind of thing that should cause you to game over... well, I doubt Chimera Squad can ever be satisfying to such a player, but you might as well start right on Impossible to maximize the odds that your ignorance dooms your run.

In the aggregate, I kind of wish Chimera Squad had only done three difficulties, and made them a bit more strongly distinct from each other. I felt this way some about XCOM 2, honestly, but XCOM 2 is sufficiently demanding on multiple layers that while I personally have never touched Rookie I can believe there are people who genuinely needed it to ease them into the game. I'm much more skeptical that Story difficulty has a real place in Chimera Squad.

Ironman

No manual saving, relying solely on the game's auto-saving. If you have an agent finish bleeding out in a mission, you're forced to restart it, unless of course...

Hardcore

... you also have this on.

Hardcore is that failing a mission deletes the save instead of prompting you to try again. Perfect success, or lose all progress. Roguelike rules, basically.

Chimera Squad is sufficiently stable Ironman is actually pretty safe to turn on, and the game autosaves every time you have an agent do anything even without enabling Ironman, so you generally don't have to worry about losing half a battle to a crash or to something causing you to quit out the game abruptly.

Hardcore is kind of whatever. I don't find it terribly appealing, but the primary reason I'd recommend against it is that it's possible to play correctly and still have an agent die because some enemy happened to lob explosives and catch the tile they fell in when Bleeding Out, even if you Stabilized them. I'm pretty sure that's not actually intended behavior, and it certainly feels unfair. If you're cool with risking a run being wiped by a janky mechanics interaction, go ahead I guess -it's not like it's that hard to consistently avoid failure the majority of the time in Chimera Squad.

But I don't really feel the option adds anything to the game.

Extended City Anarchy

Adds five bars to the overall city Anarchy rating (Taking it from 13 to 18 above Story), thus making it take longer to get a game over through strategic mismanagement.

So it's basically the return of Lengthy Scheme in War of the Chosen, albeit less dramatic.

Anarchy is already very generous; only in my first Impossible run was I ever in a position of worrying I might get an Anarchy-induced game over, and that only happened because I ignored a District hitting max Unrest because I wanted the other mission's reward and was used to the lower difficulties being really lenient with Unrest. Extended City Anarchy is honestly overkill.

If you just can't stand that kind of strategic pressure on a psychological level, I guess it's your life, but I'm a bit puzzled why this option exists, honestly. Was Anarchy a bit harsher at an earlier point in development, or something?

Tutorial

Your very first run on launching Chimera Squad automatically enables the Tutorial setting with no option to turn it off. The game can be a bit weird about this when, for example, installing onto a new computer, where the game may decide your cloud saves of a dozen completed runs don't matter and still forcibly enable the Tutorial when you boot up a new run. Interestingly, if you mess around with debug mode stuff, that also forces the Tutorial to be enabled by default.

The Tutorial being on adjusts the very beginning of the game. With the Tutorial off, you get some cinema stuff, pick your initial agents, pick your first Investigation, and away you go into the normal Investigation loop. With the Tutorial on, you get a slightly adjusted initial set of cinematics, and launch straight into a special mission occurring entirely outside the normal Investigation progression, where you do a unique 2-Encounter mission on a unique map (It's a museum dedicated to X-COM), where of course the game proceeds to walk you through the basics of the game. Much like in XCOM 2, this is an on-rails tutorial where the game prompts you to take specific actions and this is an order you must obey rather than a suggestion of what good play might look like.

It should be noted that as far as practical effects goes, Chimera Squad's Tutorial is much less intrusive or distortive than XCOM 2's own Tutorial. The main lasting impact of substance is that it forces you into a fixed squad; Verge, Cherub, Godmother, and Terminal. But a non-Tutorial run that picks that exact squad isn't particularly different from a Tutorial run; among other points, I've commented on the fact that you always start with a Breaching Charge, and while it's probably because of the Tutorial, it's not tied to the Tutorial. I do mean you always start with it, not just in Tutorial runs.

Of course, unless you want to scrutinize the differences it causes yourself, or see the Tutorial plot bits once you have context from the rest of the game, there's not really much reason to enable this option past your first run. It is, first and foremost, teaching you the basics of the game, which you probably don't need a refresher for in later runs.

Heal Between Encounters

Your options here are 'no heal', 'half heal', and 'full heal', which are pretty much exactly what they sound like; 'no heal' means agent HP doesn't change when transitioning to a new Encounter. 'Half heal' means any agent below half their maximum HP rises to half their maximum HP when transitioning to a new Encounter. 'Full heal' means your agents always start every Encounter with max HP. Do note that agents ending up in Bleeding Out mode are not affected by this setting; they're still out of the mission, and an Android will sub in if possible, even if you have 'full heal' enabled.

I'd strongly recommend against ever playing with full heal enabled. It heavily distorts the gameplay, making Terminal's niche nearly worthless (And indeed making two of her skills outright worthless), screwing up certain skill choices (Regeneration on Axiom loses so much value, for example, making it close to a trap choice), makes the pre-Breach healing tools literally worthless, and sucks the depth out of multi-Encounter missions much more than it reduces the game's overall difficulty.

Half heal is okay for easing you into the game. It's still distortive, but healing tools remain useful, you actually get to have moderately bad play in one Encounter potentially catch up to you in a later Encounter, and every tool is relevant. (Well, every tool that's relevant without between-Encounter healing)

No heal is the 'correct' way to play the game, in the sense that the game is clearly designed around it as opposed to either of the other settings. I wouldn't necessarily recommend a first-time player jump in with it on their first run, but the game is at its best with this setting overall.

Personally, I kind of wish this setting choice didn't exist at all and the game just went with 'no heal' as the way the game works, no qualifiers; while there is an extent to which 'half heal' and 'full heal' do make the game a little more forgiving, it's surprisingly mild of an effect, whereas the negative impact on skill and Item choices and so on is actually quite large. It feels like a bad trade for the design, and it makes the initial settings screen that little bit more cluttered and unpleasant to work through for a first-time player. More options is generally good for a variety of reasons, but more options means more cognitive load, and putting it mandatorily right at the beginning where a new player is already having to learn a ton makes it particularly bad.

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

Next time, we head toward enemies, starting with a bit of an overview of The Progeny.

See you then.