Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Sovereign

Here be spoilers! Like... seriously, I'm going to be discussing a lot of central plot elements to Chimera Squad, where if you haven't beaten the game yourself you probably shouldn't be looking at this post at all.

Unless you don't mind spoilers for it, I guess.

Still here? Well, here we go...

HP: 12/15/15/15

Armor: 2
Aim: 90/90/95/95
Mobility: 10
Damage: 5-6
Crit Chance: 0/20/20/20
Will: 150
Initiative: 120

I'm not sure why Sovereign in particular has the rare privilege of an innate crit chance. (Except on the lowest difficulty, but whatever) Not that it matters much given crits remain weak in Chimera Squad, but it's still weird.

Alert Actions: None.

As is standard with boss enemies, Sovereign doesn't interact with the Breach Phase at all, doing nothing during it and being impossible for your squad to target in it. He's arguably the most conspicuous example of this, as he's pretty center-view of your squad after they crash into the room, and you'll have so many targets to choose between spread across such a wide area you're liable to notice your targeting just passing right over him as you consider your options.

Mental Fortress
Passive: Immune to Mind Control and Verge's Neural Network abilities.

Also standard with Chimera Squad bosses.

Sovereign is possibly the silliest example of this from a narrative standpoint, as he seems to be just... Some Regular Human Person. But in terms of the game design, it's absolutely for the best.

Sustain
Passive: The first time Sovereign should be reduced to 0 HP, he will instead be reduced to 1 HP and immediately enter Stasis for 1 turn.

Yyyyyep.

Sustain is pretty important to the final fight's design, as the mission ends the instant Sovereign goes down, and while he's pretty durable, he's not so durable you can't kill him nearly instantly with the right setup. Sustain forces you to engage with the larger battle at least a little, instead of skipping all that by sniping Sovereign before any enemies act.

To be honest, Sovereign is a bit of an anticlimax. The other Investigation bosses are imperfect, but they each hold up better as a Boss Fight than Sovereign does. There's a kind of narrative coherency here, as Sovereign isn't someone big on direct confrontations, but I personally suspect the reason he's so lackluster is something like Chimera Squad being pushed out the door before it was really ready; Sovereign is conspicuous for being the boss fight with the most boring setpiece, even though the Truly Final Boss is much more often where games go wild and weird in mechanics. I don't think Sovereign being boring was a deliberate choice.

It's too bad Chimera Squad got essentially no support. One patch, no DLC, and I'll be surprised if anything that could be called a sequel to it in particular ever comes along.

Disabling Shot

Turn-ending Action: Sovereign fires at a single target for 3-5 damage. On a successful hit, the target's primary weapon will be drained of all its ammo.

Yep, Sovereign is basically a Hitman.

Him landing Disabling Shot is unlikely to be decisive in any capacity; being the Truly Final Boss of the game, you've had literally the maximum possible time to prepare, and so it's virtually impossible for your team to be all that susceptible to somebody losing their ammo.

In the unlikely event you somehow do have your team set up that way and Sovereign shoots exactly the right person, the fact is you can just suicidally focus on Sovereign and probably win trivially even if your squad has multiple people go down in the process; mechanically, so long as no one actually Bleeds Out to trigger a Game Over, nothing matters so long as Sovereign goes down.

Trigger-happy

Passive: At the end of every turn, if not disabled, Sovereign automatically enters Overwatch, attacking the first hostile to pass within 3 tiles of himself.

Since Sustain ensures Sovereign will get at least one turn, Trigger-happy is guaranteed to get a chance to activate.

It's... pretty unlikely to actually matter, mind, as you can just ignore it and Subdue him to death after Sustain is triggered since the mission ends the second he goes down, but hey, at least he'll get to activate it!

Consistent with Sovereign's mechanics largely being a buffed Hitman, his graphic is basically just a Hitman. He does have a unique model with quite a few differences, but I imagine most players think he's literally just a generic Hitman. He's certainly less obviously different than Bellus Mar or Violet from their respective regular counterparts.

The odd thing is the 2D art version of him really looks like a Shrike Trooper, not a Hitman. The orange triangle mark on the forehead of the mask is shared between his 3D model and his 2D art, and the vest looks similar enough, but otherwise there's basically no overlap. I'm curious what happened here.

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Alright, time for a big talk about Shrike and the endgame!

After you complete all three Investigations in your campaign, the endgame automatically, unavoidably starts, with this being 2 final days in which you are forced into specific missions: no more choices, no more Situations. Note that all Assembly Projects unlocked by finishing an Investigation take a minimum of 2 days to complete even if you have two people assigned to the Assembly; as such, whichever Investigation target you hit last, you won't be able to unlock their gear in that run, because the game ends once you complete this second mission.

The first of these two missions is a 3-Encounter mission against predominately-Shrike forces, and also this is where I tell you 'I lied' when I said Shrike doesn't have a musical identity; this mission gives us one of Chimera Squad's best songs, which sets the stage for Shrike's musical style. It is of course driven  in its nature in part by the context of the mission's urgency, but the very final mission has three songs that continue the feel even though the urgency is no longer applicable; this is just plain Shrike Music.

Anyway, the first Encounter of this first mission is an open courtyard area with kind of poor Cover held by Shrike units, including multiple Cobras. This Encounter is a simple 'take down all enemies' Encounter with no other wrinkles, though the narrative elements might lead you to expect there to be an overall mission time limit or something of the sort. It's got quite a few enemies, but it's also one of the largest maps in the game, and the enemies are widely-spaced, so it's not unusual for some of the further enemies to end up spending their entire first turn on trying to get in range of your squad, especially if you play defensively.

The second Encounter mixes in Sacred Coil Guardians and Progeny Brutes, but is still heavy on Shrike troops. Again, it's a straightforward 'takedown all enemies' mission, even though the narrative elements continue to press the idea that you're in a hurry. It's a close-quarters environment, and the high enemy density alongside the cramped quarters can make the Guardians particularly problematic if they manage to get turns, since they can end up covering a lot of enemies in one go.

The third Encounter is where the urgency the narrative keeps playing up finally actually matters mechanically -the current mayor is barricaded in a room, and enemies will attempt to shoot the barricade, which you're supposed to prevent. (Now that I think about it, I forgot to test what actually happens if the barricade is destroyed; do you Game Over immediately, or does it just open the way for enemies to try to kill the mayor?) Aside that detail, though, it's another Shrike-focused room in which victory is achieved by taking down every enemy -you might think you need to Evac the mayor or something, but nope, you win once every enemy is down.

Note that the third Encounter has a Security Door Breach Entrance that places your squad on high ground and flanking multiple enemies, making it a very favorable entrance... albeit it has the flaw of having literally no Cover. If you're able to leverage action-gifting/turn-gifting to ensure none of your squad gets shot at while out of Cover, it can be a great entrance! But if you're low on or entirely without such tools, you might be better off skipping it -or at least only having one agent go through, with them placed to act first so they can get to Cover immediately.

Then along comes the final mission of the game, which for starters is, as I've alluded to repeatedly, the one and only mission in the game to exceed 3 Encounters, with a total of 4 Encounters -which, unfortunately, the display isn't actually made to account for this, so I imagine a lot of players got caught off guard by the fourth Encounter existing and burned through resources too fast such that the fourth Encounter was actually a bit difficult for them. It's also unusual in that it largely doesn't do Breach entrance choice: you can choose agent order still, of course, but aside technically the last Encounter everybody is always sharing the same entrance.

Anyway, the first Encounter dumps your squad into an awkwardly-designed room (It's a firing range, which cleaving to that results in an awkward distribution of Cover) with more Shrike troops supplemented by Sacred Coil Mecs. Aside the awkwardness of the layout, it's another straightforward 'win when all enemies are down' Encounter.

The second Encounter is actually unusual: you fight your way through a Sectoid-heavy force (Paladins, Necromancers, and Resonants all accounted for), pick up a keycard from one enemy in the back, then run your squad to an elevator and Evac them, with unlimited Android reinforcements harrying your squad as they make the run to the elevator.

The third Encounter starts off with a scattering of enemies on a roof, and once you get about halfway across the map the game queues up reinforcements from an elevator at the far end of the map. This is actually two batches of reinforcements, and they continue the species-focused trend: one batch is a bunch of Viper variants, and the other batch is an array of Muton variants. (Including Praetorians! This is one of their best opportunities to leverage their Warcry ability to dangerous effect, in fact) Aside the reinforcements, this is another straightforward 'take down everyone' map; once all the reinforcements have spawned and all the enemies are out of action, you win.

The fourth Encounter is of course where you at last come face-to-mask with Atlas/Sovereign. (Atlas is the codename for The Mysterious Backer Kelly Is Sure Exists, who turns out to exist and is Sovereign) Note that your squad rappels into this Encounter and so you won't be able to use Breach effects of any kind in this Encounter; don't bother to save Cease Fire Bombs or the like for this Encounter. As I said earlier, you win as soon as Sovereign goes down, and though his access to Sustain attempts to force you to deal with the other enemies, in this duty it's a bit unreliable; it's entirely possible with various squad makeups to take out Sovereign before he gets his first turn, at which point his high Initiative results in his Stasis ending almost immediately. So it's entirely possible to end the mission with only 2 enemies getting turns at all.

And honestly, that's what you should be shooting for: the room is packed with elite enemies from all the factions (Sorcerers, Ronin, Praetorians...), and more elite enemies will reinforce in at the end of every Round, with this lasting forever as far as I'm aware, so fighting 'fair' is a very uphill battle that can easily go very wrong very quickly.

Once Sovereign is down, you win, you get your endgame cinema with Director Kelly congratulating everyone, and you get a not-very-informative summary of your run's stats, followed by the credits rolling. Hooray!

But this is where I back up and talk about narrative elements, particularly about Shrike as a whole -I'd have liked to do that in their Intro post, but the player's understanding of Shrike changes substantially over the course of the game, this happening is in fact a major part of the central plot, and I didn't want heavy spoilers in the intro post.

The initial explanation of Shrike, given by Director Kelly early in the game, is that Shrike started life as a resistance group in the days of XCOM 2, and that when X-COM won and decided to make friends with the aliens, Shrike was overall unhappy with this decision, being apparently heavy on people who were of the opinion Earth should just kill all the aliens. This is the context for why the Tutorial mission involves fighting Shrike forces who are after Mayor Nightingale -because the mayor is a hybrid, and these Shrike guys therefore think she should be dead instead of in a position of influence.

We're also told Shrike operates as a series of separate cells with no overarching leadership. This is kind of important, because if a player figures out how the faction stuff is organized, then they'll notice Shrike as a faction doesn't actually fit to this 'anti-alien extremists' characterization: sure, half of their troops are human, but the other half covers all the Standard Animation Aliens, and in fact this makes Shrike the single most species-diverse faction in the game in spite of having the smallest number of distinct unit types! The cell structure stuff allows a player to reconcile this oddity by assuming that Shrike forces containing aliens just happen to be from Shrike cells that aren't into the anti-alien view.

Additionally, we're told that Shrike acted as ad hoc police when the Earth government was still getting its feet under it, and that they've since become mercenaries who hire their services out to basically anyone. This last point is of course the (apparent) justification for why Shrike forces can show up in support of any of the three factions.

Of course, by the end of the game, much of this info is thrown into serious doubt; Sovereign takes credit as overall head of Shrike, your team concludes that actually Shrike was behind everything with a goal to somehow parlay this into taking over City 31 (rather than Shrike being just hired guns helping the Investigation targets for pay), and then furthermore the final cinema bit involves a Mysterious Man and a Mysterious Woman complaining about Chimera Squad messing up whatever their plan was and talking about how they'll still get what they want some other way, implying Sovereign was himself some manner of puppet in service of these unknown individuals -possibly Shrike doesn't have an actual overall leader and Sovereign was just claiming he was such in service to this plan... but it's not like it's clear whether Sovereign knows about these other people.

Not helping the clarity point is that, oddly enough, the end of the game carries forward as if you killed Sovereign: there's no talk of interrogating him or anything. Which is weird given there's no attempt to enforce this; that is, the Gatekeeper is also assumed to have died, but the game mechanics are such that this is in fact guaranteed to happen in gameplay. Atlas doesn't pull a suicide vest ripcord if you KO him, or whatever. And wouldn't we want to take him in, so we can better figure out this conspiracy?

Sovereign's own claims about his plans are that, essentially, he expects the Ethereals to come back someday, the Earth needs to be maximally ready for that fight, X-COM is 'too soft' to make the decisions necessary to fight off this assumed Ethereal attack, and therefore his goal was to depose the current X-COM-derived government and run it himself to make an adequately ready force.

I'm not sure how to take that whole thing; on the one hand, it's blithering nonsense. If Sovereign thinks the Earth should try to be maximally ready, coopting as many Ethereal servants and as much Ethereal technology as possible is obviously a fantastic plan, and any complaints about the risks involved are pretty difficult to take seriously given that the plan is quite clearly largely working; Grey Phoenix and Sacred Coil are minority groups, not representative of how the overall process of trying to integrate Ethereal ex-servants is going.

On the other hand, there are real people who will vociferously argue in favor of similar sentiments in real-life contexts where they are also obviously absurdly wrong, so I can't really say it's unrealistic for Sovereign to have these amazingly stupid beliefs. Furthermore, Sovereign's honesty is unclear -I would quite readily buy that Sovereign is using this rhetoric successfully to get gun-toting folks to back his plan while Sovereign is really just selfishly wanting to be King Of The World. His 'Sovereign' name would certainly be consistent with that scenario!

Also, the extra layer of conspiracy raises the possibility that something else entirely is going on. Claims for effect to manipulate others don't have to make sense, they just have to convince the target audience, and it's not at all clear what tools were being employed by this additional conspiracy layer: if later materials inform us that the Mysterious Pair psionically brainwashed Sovereign into saying this stuff because the Mysterious Pair were trying to get a specific response from people through Sovereign, I'd accept that readily enough.

Backing up another step, though, it's also worth pointing out that Enemy Within gave us EXALT, who was a group of people who were presented as 'more ruthless' than X-COM and basically wished to displace X-COM. EXALT seemed to want to ally with the invaders where Sovereign says he wants to kill the Ethereals, but this is after 20 years of occupation by the Ethereals, which War of the Chosen very successfully sold them as leadership making a brutal regime that's horrendous for most folks; switching from 'I wanna shake hands with Ethereals' to 'I want to shoot Ethereals on sight' would not be some shocking thing for a person to do in context.

And this final mission heavily echoes the EXALT HQ assault mission map: in both cases, a skyscraper has a secret area on or near the roof in which the bad guys have their own red version of the player's Geoscape/City 31-scape hologram map, where the bad guys clearly have a lot of money to throw at their secret base.

Notably, XCOM 2 didn't address EXALT at all, and the 'X-COM lost the war early' scenario seems to have preempted EXALT really getting going. The whole thing has me wondering if Shrike in general, or Sovereign in specific, or the Mysterious Pair plus Sovereign, or whatever, is supposed to trace their roots in-universe to the people that form EXALT in Enemy Within.

Sovereign's base itself is supposed to be an ADVENT command center, but that would fit together quite well with my theory; EXALT was unambiguously backed by people of wealth and at least some top governmental personnel who were meaningfully aware of the supposedly top-secret X-COM Project, and XCOM 2 shows us that exactly such a person -the Spokesman- not only survived the invasion and 20 years of occupation but in fact is placed highly enough in the ADVENT administration to have access to some of their secret info. Sovereign -or his sponsors, or whatever- could easily be the proto-EXALT equivalent to the Spokesman, where inside information enabled the quiet takeover of this ADVENT building.

This theory would also neatly explain why Sovereign's rhetoric echoes the way EXALT was talked about in Enemy Within: because his ideology is literally just EXALT's, aside having grown more hostile to the alien invaders over the course of 20 years of a brutal occupation.

On the whole, Shrike is pretty difficult to tell what the dev intention is, and what's intentional hinting vs sort of coincidental. I like my 'Shrike is EXALT's metaphorical descendants' theory, but I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if the Chimera Squad devs never considered the possibility a player might interpret the evidence that way. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the devs didn't have a concrete plan in mind at all, -or if they changed their minds enough over development that the game isn't really properly consistent with any given plan.

It's worth pointing out here that Shrike has the unique distinction that their in-code designation is not their in-game faction name. If you look in the config files, their consistent overall label is 'The Conspiracy'; this strongly suggests that the concept for what ultimately became Shrike started life as the devs deciding on this whole 'A Conspiracy Is Behind Everything' before settling any details of what The Conspiracy would be like beyond that. In conjunction with the Mysterious Pair adding a further layer of conspiracy in a manner that gives basically no specifics, I suspect the devs were pretty non-committal or undecided on the details of this conspiracy, and only partially out of Chimera Squad's broader commitment to leaving the door open for later games to do what they want without being 'locked in' by Chimera Squad's choices.

Unfortunately, I kind of suspect the entire ambiguous situation with Shrike/Sovereign/Mysterious Pair will never actually be expanded upon. It seems very likely that XCOM 3 will focus pretty purely on the threat XCOM 2's endgame teases of hostiles the Ethereals think only they can save the universe from, and I'd be very surprised if even an expansion pack/major DLC for XCOM 3 thought to follow this thread. (For one thing, I'll be surprised if XCOM 3 starts itself from a position that can plausibly follow this thread reasonably naturally) Frankly, I'm being probably overly-optimistic whenever I talk about XCOM 3 maybe giving us alien squad members as a core part of the experience alongside classic classes; what I've seen from this part of the games industry doesn't seem inclined to approach game design at all the way I think in terms of, and the idea of XCOM 3 being successfully ambitious enough to follow up on XCOM 2's core design while also throwing in alien squadmates and also follow upon Chimera Squad's narrative elements? I'm ultimately skeptical it would happen.

I'll be quite happy if I'm wrong, but for the moment I'm pessimistic.

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Next time, we cover in brief several things I wanted to cover in more detail, and explain why I didn't end up doing that.

See you then.