Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Former Captain

HP: 10

Protection: 0

Ranged Accuracy: +2

Melee Accuracy: +0

Ranged Damage: 1d6*4 Bullet

Melee Damage: 1d3 (-1) Melee

Speed: 80%

Inventory: 10mm ammo*100, plus their Chaingun

Experience: 47

Danger: 3

Minimum floor: 5/2/1

Maximum floor: 15

Experience per Danger: 15.66

Can open doors, equip Armor, and pick up and use Medpacks, Phase Devices, and Homing Phase Devices.

Attack Chance: 75%

Evasion: Base of 10%, +3% per tile of distance, making for a maximum of 34%

Former Captains are simultaneously kind of pathetic and yet absurdly dangerous.

On the one hand, they're only slightly faster than a Former Sergeant and no more durable: if you expect to kill a Former Sergeant before he takes a shot, you expect to kill a Former Captain before he takes a shot too. And the Former Captain costs 50% more Danger! Two Captains is often easier to cut through quickly than three Sergeants. Furthermore, they're actually subject to Dodge and Accuracy checks, where it's not unusual for a Former Captain opening fire to only hit with one bullet because you Dodged one or two and the other one or two passed through Doomguy's tile without hitting him. Captains are also fairly susceptible to Protection (And light Bullet resistance), where eg a basic Green Armor slashes their max damage by a third.

On the other hand, a Former Captain's peak damage potential is very high, and this is so even at long range: a Sergeant opening fire at max range caps at 10.56 damage, whereas a Captain can hit for 24 damage if Doomguy has no Protection and no Bullet resistance. Normally this will basically never happen, of course (For one thing, a Former Captain expects to miss a shot at line of sight), but less extreme scenarios that are more likely can still be shocking spikes: having a Former Captain land three bullets for 5, 6, and 5 damage when your Armor was just destroyed is 16 damage, or just under a third of Doomguy's default max HP!

Angel of Max Carnage pulls all this to the front very dramatically, where Former Captains actually become the scariest threat from an early-game perspective and even later in a run tend to overshadow several enemy types that are normally much more worrying, such as Barons of Hell. After all, outside Dodges, a Former Captain opening fire will always result in 4 hits of 6 damage apiece! That's 24 damage, when a Baron of Hell's absolute maximum damage is 20: being naked around a Former Captain is a very, very bad idea in Max Carnage runs.

Also, the fact that Former Captains are firing 4 bullets per volley means they're disproportionately dangerous to strong defensive builds. If you've got enough resistance and Protection that more or less everything in the game does one damage per hit, then Former Captains become one of the most concerning attackers around, beaten out only by Former Commandos, Arachnotrons, Nightmare Arachnotrons, and some of the Elite zombies! After all, 4 hits of 1 damage is literally four times as deadly as 1 hit of 1 damage. This is one of the more perverse implications to the minimum damage of 1 per hit.

Former Captains are also very dramatic about getting into melee basically neutralizing them. 1-2 damage per punch with only a 50% chance to land the punch is sad in general, but especially when compared against what they can do at range. (Especially when comparing them against a Former Human, who is just as sad in melee but less able to be lethal with their firearm and so the contrast is less dramatic) They're one of the better enemies to keep in mind the possibility of stepping a tile or two closer to cripple their damage output.

Overall, Former Captains are a pretty high-priority target a lot of the time. Partly because they're fairly dangerous if left alone, but partly because they're so easy to kill. For example, if you have both a Baron of Hell and a Former Captain in view, they actually have pretty similar damage potential (4d5 from the Baron vs 4 shots of 1d6 from the Captain), but then the Baron of Hell has six times the Former Captain's HP, not to mention 2 points of Protection. Put another way, you could be using a single-target attack and kill 6 Former Captains in the time it would take to put down one Baron of Hell, and killing 6 Former Captains is much more of a reduction in firepower coming your way than killing a single Baron of Hell.

This can be complicated by positioning, damage resistance types, how much Protection you have, etc, but overall it's a useful comparison/rule of thumb.

On a different note, Former Captains are of course a great source of 10mm ammo, particularly if you're willing to hassle with unloading their Chainguns and/or them reviving is on the table. Whether the monster group of them and Archviles spawns late in a run can easily be what determines the fate of a run that is wholly dependent on 10mm ammo: starvation, or success. Try not to mulch them and their ammo in the late game if your run is dependent on 10mm ammo!

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Next time, we cover Cacodemons.

See you then.