Chimera Squad Analysis: Misc

There were several elements of Chimera Squad I'd had plans to cover in detail, but which didn't end up happening. Partly this was the meatspace drama I've previously covered coming to a head; if that stuff hadn't happened, I might've bulled through and got this stuff done to the level of detail I wanted, but as-is my capacity to work heavily on the site declined enormously before I got properly started on these things, and as of this writing I don't even have a computer capable of installing Chimera Squad, let alone actually running it, and have no idea when I'll be able to get such a computer given my current situation.

That said, the other two components were that the game is designed so these pieces would've been an especially large amount of work to get done properly, and then they're ultimately just... not that important or interesting in practice. Obsessive completionist that I am, I don't like not covering these in heavy detail, but honestly, you're not missing out on much.

Let's start with Dark Events, since they're the clearest example.

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Chimera Squad's Dark Events are conceptually related to XCOM 2's Dark Events, but the actual details are radically different.

Each Investigation has a series of mandatory plot missions, culminating of course in Take Down (faction name). Completing one of these will result in Director Kelly phoning you up to dump a little bit more info about the faction in question on you, such as revealing the name (and portrait) of the faction's leader, and may prompt you with a choice between two options.

The two options in question are picked randomly from a pool, with each Investigation having its own pool of possible Dark Events; there is the potential to share Dark Events across Investigations, but as far as I'm aware only one Dark Event is shared at all, that being a Dark Event that claims you'll encounter more Shrike mercenaries on missions.

Anyway, your two choices will have two text components to them, one of them in red. The non-red portion is a narrative description of something your squad will be investigating, while the red portion is... an attempt at describing the mechanical impact of your choice, which will be made active for the entire duration of your current Investigation. In practice the red text tends to be extremely vague, a point often exacerbated by the game's general random elements further occluding things: if you have the More Shrike Dark Event active and you get a mission that's 100% Shrike units, it's tempting to assume the Dark Event did it... but I've had that happen even without that Dark Event in play.

A further element of confusion is that while all Dark Events have two components, they're not tied together the way you'd expect. The red text on a Dark Event is actually the consequence for ignoring the other Dark Event. For example, the Progeny have a Dark Event about them 'recruiting' Archons: if you pursue that, you can get a mission where you rescue an Archon from Progeny forces intending to steal it and use its cybernetic nature to make it work for them. If you take the other Dark Event, you'll have Archons generate more often, regardless of what that other Dark Event is.

This makes a kind of realistic sense -you got the extra Archons because you didn't stop the Progeny from stealing them- but the game doesn't communicate that this is how the pairs work, and the visual presentation makes it seem like the red text is fundamentally tied to the option you pick, not the one you ignore.

Oh, and Dark Events aren't actually reliable even once they're technically active. Instead, every mission behind the scenes rolls metaphorical dice to decide whether each currently-active Dark Event is applying to that mission; if it is, you'll get red text mentioning the Dark Event's effect when clicking into that mission and considering whether to do it, and if it isn't, you won't get that red text on that mission's summary.

Dark Events themselves 'accelerate' as your run progresses. (And maybe as you raise your difficulty? This system is very opaque in implementation, so I'm not sure) Your first Investigation will never start with a Dark Event active, and will wait a while before a plot mission being completed actually triggers a Dark Event prompt. Later Investigations can start with a Dark Event's red text portion active -or two, for your final Investigation!- and will have Dark Event prompts happen earlier and multiple times within the Investigation.

This is all very opaque and a huge pain to fully collate through natural play -for one thing, there's no way to be sure if you've actually seen all the Dark Events- and frustratingly Dark Events aren't made transparent in the game's config files, so that was reason number one why I haven't ended up making a proper Chimera Squad Dark Events post.

Reason number two is that Chimera Squad's Dark Events largely don't matter. For starters, there's the point I noted earlier that 'active' Dark Events can simply... not roll to apply. I don't know what the actual odds are, but they don't seem very high, and as far as I can tell they can't apply to various missions that are 'fixed' -Take Down (faction name) missions, for example. So it's entirely possible to have a Dark Event active from the start of an Investigation, and never have it matter because you never end up choosing a mission that rolled it being properly active.

But also, Dark Events tend to be low-impact when they do actually do anything clear. For example, another Progeny Dark Event increases Thrall HP -by 2 points. That's admittedly a good 50% of their base HP if you hit the Progeny first, but it doesn't scale with Act and even with Chimera Squad's depressed damage values 2 HP often doesn't actually do anything: say you have Blueblood shoot a Thrall, first for 3 damage, then for I-don't-care damage; an unboosted Act 1 Thrall drops to 1 HP and then goes down, while a boosted Act 1 Thrall drops to 3 HP and still goes down on the second shot. This kind of thing happens quite often, where a Thrall having 2 extra HP has no effect on how things play out in practice.

Basically every Dark Event is like this: it doesn't even technically apply to a mission very often, and even when it does it either has no true impact, or you can't tell whether it really did anything at all.

Maybe I'll do a proper analysis some day, but... you're not missing out on much.

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Second was mission types; I started out assuming I'd do a series of posts on mission types the way I did for XCOM 2.

In practice, though, Chimera Squad's mission system is very opaque, and as best as I can tell it's organized largely as 'fixed plot missions that generate with fixed timing and so on' and 'basically everything else'; the missions generated by Unrest reaching 5 in a District are the only distinct category I've ever been able to identify.

Individual mission types similarly come in a fairly wide array of types in terms of what's going on 'under the hood', but a lot of them tend to blur together into 'a series of Encounters that each end once every enemy is down, except that the last Encounter might involve another objective'. It's mostly VIP Escort I tend to feel functions as a distinct experience.

"Hold on a second", I hear some of you who have played the game yourself thinking. "I'm constantly doing other more interesting objectives, like saving hostages."

And you're correct!

But this ties into another opaque system the game never explains -random secondary objectives.

Basically, most randomly-generated missions have the potential to drop a secondary objective into one of the Encounters. (VIP Escort is one of the mission types this behavior can't trigger on) This is an objective you can fail without triggering a Game Over or the like, but if you succeed then the mission will have an additional payout at the end, specifically...

CapturedConspiratorIntelReward[0]=80 ; Easy

CapturedConspiratorIntelReward[1]=50 ; Normal

CapturedConspiratorIntelReward[2]=40 ; Hard

CapturedConspiratorIntelReward[3]=40 ; Impossible

RescueHostageCreditsReward[0]=100 ; Easy

RescueHostageCreditsReward[1]=70 ; Normal

RescueHostageCreditsReward[2]=65 ; Hard

RescueHostageCreditsReward[3]=65 ; Impossible

CollectEvidenceEleriumReward[0]=50 ; Easy

CollectEvidenceEleriumReward[1]=35 ; Normal

CollectEvidenceEleriumReward[2]=30 ; Hard

CollectEvidenceEleriumReward[3]=30 ; Impossible

... based in part on your difficulty: the above is taken right out of a config file, for reference.

Now, this is actually an interesting system I like in a general sense, but Chimera Squad does an amazingly bad job of communicating it.

First of all, when you get a secondary objective popping up, the game makes no effort to communicate what, if any, consequences there are for succeeding (or failing) this objective. I suspect a lot of players have no idea these secondary objectives do anything at all -I managed to think that for ten runs even though I was being particularly aggressive about trying to understand the game so I could make these posts as accurate as possible!

Second, the game does actually tell you at the mission summary screen that you got the reward -but it doesn't communicate it came from completing the secondary objective! It's just part of the list of goodies you're getting, rolled together with the 'natural' mission reward and whatever reward you might be getting from the District's Field Team! If you're making notes or recording yourself or something, you might notice that the final reward is greater than the promised reward and could potentially guess it was caused by completing the secondary objective, but I imagine most players don't even notice that the rewards they got are a little different from what they were promised.

Also not helping is that the hostage rescue reward and especially the 'collect evidence' reward don't intuitively match to their payoff; collecting 'evidence' from a box sounds exactly like XCOM 2's assorted objectives for collecting digital paperwork from boxes, not like you've found a pile of glowing green crystals and are taking them for your own use. (I can justify the hostage one as, say, the hostage giving monetary support in gratitude for you rescuing them, but... it's still not obvious)

It's particularly worth pointing out here how large the Elerium payoff is in context; I've talked on this site about not prioritizing Elerium from mission rewards, Situation rewards, and Field Teams, and for the longest time I actually wasn't sure why I was almost never struggling to cover my Elerium needs given how thoroughly I shunned Elerium rewards. The math didn't seem to add up, but somehow what I was doing was working anyway. Turns out it's because diligently completing secondary objectives will regularly result in a modest injection of Elerium into your coffers without you specifically having to invest strategic effort into getting Elerium, and the game just does a terrible job of communicating everything involved here.

I actually hope something like the secondary objectives returns in XCOM 3 (Or some other game in this series), but with the caveat that it needs to be much better-communicated than what Chimera Squad did.

Anyway, tangent over; the original point is that functional mission variety ends up feeling low in practice for several reasons, and there's not Interesting Strategic Mechanics for me to explain. In conjunction with it, once again, being a pain to accurately pin down what the exact array of mission types is... it didn't make the cut!

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Last is Breach entrance modifiers.

Breach entrance modifiers would actually be relatively simple to cover and I might do so properly once I have a computer that even can install Chimera Squad. They're actually fully exposed in the config files, which lists off which entrance types are allowed which modifiers, clearly lays out how certain negative modifiers cannot exist with certain positive modifiers (You can't get both the Aim boost and the Aim penalty on the same entrance, for example), and in the process lays out all the individual modifiers. The only 'hard work' part for me would be playing the game again enough to get screenshots for the icons.

But it's a very minor system that you largely engage with 'locally'; a lot of the time, you'll be doing things like picking an entrance because it's the only entrance that lacks a negative modifier, or assigning an agent to an entrance because its negative effect isn't harmful to them (eg Zephyr can't be Rooted), where it's okay as a micro-puzzle system in the moment but there's not a lot for me to add to the topic.

So for the moment, you get me commenting that I didn't get around to it and can't do it right now.

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Next time, we finish this entire Chimera Squad series with one last thing -the credits!

See you then.