Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Shrike Trooper

HP: 4/4/5/5 (+1/+3)

Armor: 1
Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: Complicated; see below
Will: 50 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 50

Alert actions: Move to a better position, Hunker Down.

In a superficial sense, Shrike Troopers are the most basic, boring enemy of the game, with not a single non-standard capability to their name. Behind the scenes, they're a bit more interesting.

Firstly, they're our final variable-loadout enemy, with a given Trooper being randomly equipped with an SMG, Assault Rifle, or Shotgun.

Secondly, they have the unique distinction of having three Act stat bonus tiers. I haven't modified my formatting above because they only actually use this effect for their weapons, oddly. As for why they have this odd quality, it's because Shrike Troopers are the one and only enemy type in the Tutorial, and they have an extra set of Act bonuses so they can have even lower damage in the Tutorial; Tutorial Troopers always do exactly 2 damage with all three possible weapon types.

As for what they do in Acts 1/2/3...

SMG: 1-3/1-4/2-5

Assault Rifle: 1-3/2-4/3-5

Shotgun: 2-3/3-4/4-5

In broad terms, you can simply sort this as a hierarchy, exactly as I ordered it above: the SMG is the weakest, the Shotgun is the strongest, while the Assault Rifle is in the middle. So that's kind of boring. (As these variable-loadout enemies all are in this regard, unfortunately)

The under-the-hood implementation of this is abstractly interesting, though, in that they each use a different combination of the engine's damage rules: the Shotgun uses the PlusOne damage mechanic, the Assault Rifle uses the Spread mechanic, while the SMG uses both mechanics.

Also interesting is the SMG and Assault Rifle can actually do less damage in your first Investigation than in the Tutorial. The SMG in particular outright has lower base damage! The SMG in Act 1 is also the return of a weird edge case behavior from the first Firaxis game, where spread behavior being applied to a really low damage number produces non-standard damage ranges because if the output should be 0 (or less) the game 'clamps' it, dragging it back up to 1. This is why the Laser Pistol had higher maximum damage than the Conventional Pistol but still the same minimum damage: a base damage of 1 with a spread of 1 is 0-2 damage, but the minimum of 1 damage resulted in the Conventional Pistol doing 1-2 damage in reality. By the same token, an Act 1 SMG isn't 'base 2 damage with 1 spread' (Which is the usual reason to see 1-3 damage), but instead is 'base 1 damage with 1 spread and a 50% chance of PlusOne adding 1 more damage'. This is why an Act 2 SMG only gains 1 to maximum damage; it's the Pistol-to-Laser-Pistol thing all over again.

Anyway, the third behind-the-scenes point of interest about Troopers is their name; for the overwhelming majority of enemies in Chimera Squad, their in-game name is the same designation they get in the config files. Troopers are an exception to this rule, where their internal name is 'liquidator' -if you're not familiar, pop culture occasionally uses this legal term in a euphemistic manner, where instead of 'liquidating' a company they're 'liquidating' people. So it seems that at some point Troopers were being conceptualized less as 'basic grunts of a paramilitary organization' and more as 'contract killers who are hired to take out a specific person', or something not far off from that. In conjunction with how Shrike is internally labeled by the game -well. I'll be coming back to this in the last Shrike post, but I suspect the starting point for Shrike's concept was very different from the final presentation.

Aesthetically, the Trooper is very representative of Shrike's overall look. All Shrike units have a minimum of uncovered skin, including that they all hide their faces, and that they mostly default to a very armored look. They're arguably more an inheritor of the ADVENT aesthetic than Sacred Coil is!

Troopers deviate in one semi-significant manner, in that their hood-and-mask approach to covering/concealing their head is unique among Shrike forces. Every other Shrike unit has some kind of full-head mask/helmet... thing. Otherwise, though, Troopers are a very solid intro on what to expect other Shrike units to look like -if only the game was quicker and clearer to communicate that Shrike units are a distinct set of enemies!

Narratively, Troopers per se are never directly addressed, but it's pretty obvious we're meant to take them as basic, low-ranking members of Shrike. This works out fine enough overall. There's questions in that regard I kind of wish we got answers to, but I'll come back to this later, in a post they're more relevant to.

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Next time, we move on to the other most basic Shrike unit, the Hitman.

See you then