Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Elite Former Commando (0.9.9.7/0.9.9.8)

HP: 40

Protection: 2 (Technically)

Ranged Accuracy: +5 or +10 (See below)

Melee Accuracy: +3

Ranged Damage: Varies, see below

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+5) Melee

Speed: 100%

Inventory: Equipped Blue Armor, plus ammo depending on equipped weapon

Experience: 608

Danger: 14

Minimum floor: 80/77/74

Maximum floor: Infinite

Experience per Danger: 43.42~

Can open doors, equip Armor, and pick up and use Medpacks, Phase Devices, and Homing Phase Devices. Immune to Acid and Lava on the floor. Always comes equipped with Blue Armor, effectively raising their base Protection to 4 and giving them 20% Plasma resistance. Leaves no corpse when killed.

Weapon is randomly picked from three different possibilities, and is never dropped. These possibilities are;

Missile Launcher: 6d6 Fire damage, hits 2 tiles out from impact point, has +10 accuracy, clip size of 4. Elite Former Commando drops 20 Rockets on death.

Napalm Launcher: 7d7 Fire damage, hits 1 tile out from impact point, has +10 accuracy, clip size of one, replaces a random selection of tiles in impact zone with Lava. Elite Former Commando drops 12 Rockets on death.

Tristar Blaster: 4d5*3 Plasma damage, shots are fired in a spread with one at actual target and the other two to the side, shots explode to hit 1 tile out from impact point, has +5 accuracy, clip size of 45 but consumes 15 ammo per shot so can only be fired three times between reloads. Elite Former Commando drops 60 Power Cells on death.

Attack chance: 75%?

The Elite Former Commando is pretty weird, in that it's mostly not actually the apex threat out of the Elite zombies, not in terms of its ability to kill Doomguy. I'd generally place Elite Former Sergeants and Elite Former Captains ahead of Elite Former Commandos at that job; a Super Shotgun or Plasma Shotgun is absolutely brutal if you let the Elite Former Sergeant fire from close range, while a Laser Rifle-toting Elite Former Captain hits only slightly less hard per pull of the trigger than an Elite Former Commando with a Missile Launcher or Napalm Launcher but can just keep firing if not swiftly killed, rapidly pulling ahead. This is a big contrast with how regular Former Commandos are unambiguously the most lethal of the basic zombies.

By a similar token, while Elite Former Commandos are more durable than the other elite zombies, it's a much more modest difference than with their basic counterparts: a regular Former Commando has literally twice the HP of its peer zombies, and has 2 points of Protection rather than 0, where it's not unusual for a build to semi-reliably paste the other basic zombies in one attack and need 3 or more attacks to kill a basic Former Commando. An Elite Former Commando's 40 HP is twice that of an Elite Former Human, but Elite Former Sergeants and Elite Former Captains are both tougher than that.

0.9.9.8 further shrinks the gap, since it normalizes all Elite zombies as having +5 to their melee damage. In 0.9.9.7, Elite Former Commandos had +3 melee damage, which was weaker than their current number but was 2 points better than the other Elite zombies, making them less prone than the other Elites to being completely trivialized by just getting in their face. (On the topic of changes, I should point out explicitly that the Elite Former Commando is the only Elite zombie whose Danger/experience payout weren't modified by 0.9.9.8)

In Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs, Elite Former Commandos do in fact tend to be non-notable. Their minimum floor is shared with assorted normally-a-boss enemies, which pretty consistently are much more notable threats; if your run dies in the late 70s or early 80s, it's much more likely to be because of a Cyberdemon or Lava Elemental or Shambler than because of an Elite Former Commando. Even the Napalm Launcher variant is unlikely to be notable; I've repeatedly emphasized that it's very important to have permanent Lava immunity in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, so having a late-game enemy give it extra importance isn't terribly notable. (Especially because Lava Elementals present the same problem, while being much tougher and able to teleport)

That said, there's two big points worth noting here.

Firstly, Elite Former Commandos unexpectedly are completely immune to fluid damage and of course are perfectly happy to walk right through it. This is unique among Elite zombies, not intuitive, and easy to forget about, all of which means it's easy to get yourself killed because you think breaking line of sight while they're on the other side of a Lava river is enough to get them off your case and so don't properly prepare for them wading on through, turning the corner, and resuming shooting at you. I assume they have this quality so Napalm Launcher-bearing ones don't kill themselves by spraying Lava everywhere, but it's... really wonky.

Second, the above talk is largely speaking in relation to Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs. In a standard run on a high enough difficulty, though, we get... one of the more unpleasant bits of Doom Roguelike's design. Specifically, the Military Base is a Special Level in Phobos whose most obvious gimmick is that it's populated exclusively by zombie enemies, not a demon to be seen, and higher difficulties solve the 'how do we make things harder while staying in-theme, given zombie enemies are largely designed to be sucky early-game enemies?' problem by mixing in Elite variants. For the most part, this works fine, producing a tense-but-reliably-doable experience, but the bit I really hate is that the southeast corner of the map is a little sealed room with one entrance containing an Elite Former Commando.

This little corner is wonky in general, encouraging you to get the path cleared and then sit next to the entrance and pass turns until each and every enemy blindly wanders into melee range of you so they can't paste you with their very powerful weapons (The Elite Former Commando is not alone in there), but the particularly janky thing is the 1 in 3 chance that you're dealing with a Napalm Launcher. Two-thirds of the time, killing the Commando's buddies in the tedious way and then trying to speed things up by walking in is pretty safe so long as you're at max HP and can afford to spare some Medpacks; the Missile Launcher and Tristar Blaster hurt, but a Marine especially can very reliably shrug off a hit and either back out of sight (And be pursued now that Doomguy has been spotted, drawing the Commando to melee) or close the distance. (Once again dropping the Commando's threat level substantially by getting them in melee range)

But if you get that 1 in 3 chance that the Elite Former Commando is equipped with a Napalm Launcher, it's basically unacceptable to let them fire at all. They're almost guaranteed to turn the corridor into a wall of Lava you'll have to walk through twice to get at the very important Tracking Map, and trying to not melt from Lava at the same time as being shot at by the Elite Former Commando is much more likely to be a death sentence outright. Since it's completely impossible to know what an Elite Former Commando is equipped with except by letting them fire, you must plan as of the Elite Former Commando is always going to be equipped with the Napalm Launcher, even though it's technically a minority occurrence.

Notably, crates block off the door: if this weren't so, the Elite Former Commando would have decent odds of wandering outside the room before you got there, but as-is this is literally impossible.

I really wish either that corner never had an Elite Former Commando, or that Elite Former Commandos couldn't get Napalm Launchers. (And preferably lost their immunity to fluids) Within Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, them getting a Napalm Launcher at times is largely fine, but in the context of their appearance in the Military Base, particularly the one in that one corner guarding the Tracking Map? It does raise the difficulty of the Military Base, but in a manner that's much heavier on 'optimal play is anti-fun' than it is on 'raises the skill bar'.

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Next time, we move on to boss enemies, starting with the earliest possible boss: the Arena Master.

See you then.