XCOM Class Analysis: SHIVS

SHIVs, of course, don't gain experience like a regular soldier. They also cannot climb ladders/pipes, do not have equipment slots of any kind (This is basically a technicality when it comes to their weapons, but it's a big deal when it comes to, for instance, lacking the ability to carry an Arc Thrower), do not benefit from Cover (But they are Hardened, and their innate Defense is equivalent to at least Partial Cover, so this isn't so bad), and are immune to most psychic effects.

In the original game, they had further mobility difficulties, with even small hurdles being completely impossible for them to climb up, but in Enemy Within they can make "hops" where a normal soldier would pull themselves up over an edge or climb over a log. This gave them significant difficulty on many maps set in more outdoors/woodsy environments, and even on some city maps, and it's a relief that such minor obstacles no longer force them to go all the way around.

The SHIVs job is... well, a bit unclear. It's obviously hearkening back to the Heavy Weapons Platforms of the original XCOM, but SHIVs aren't the hyper-durable, hard-hitting, expensive Heavy Weapons Platform. Instead, they're fairly closely equivalent to your own soldiers, up to and including that a damaged SHIV will be unable to participate in missions for several days. It gets labeled as "repairs" instead of medical recovery, but mechanically it's identical. Worse? SHIVs don't have any "armor" HP. As such, for a given amount of damage absorbed, they'll actually be out of action for longer than a human soldier! This only gets worse as the game progresses, naturally...

The result of all this is... awkward.


Basic SHIV
10 HP
0 Will
20 Defense
70 Aim
14 Move
50$, 7 days to construct (3 days in Enemy Within)

Your basic SHIV, and actually overall better than your soldiers in the early game, though on the other hand it costs as much as five soldiers! As technology marches on and your soldiers get more experienced, it falls behind, though more for the fact that SHIVs have limited special skills.

A point worth commentary is that higher difficulties are slightly more favorable to SHIVs. Each difficulty level you go up lowers your soldiers' base HP by 1 point, but SHIVs are unaffected by this, making them comparatively tougher: a rookie on Easy has 7 HP to the SHIV's 10, where on Impossible a Rookie has only 4 HP.

Stats-wise, you simply move on to the...


Alloy SHIV
18 HP
0 Will
30 Defense
70 Aim
15 Move
75$, 20 Alien Alloys, 7 days to construct (4 days in Enemy Within)

Acts as Partial Cover for adjacent units. (Note that enemy units can use this!)

This is your bread-and-butter SHIV. It's unlocked when you unlock Carapace Armor, which is extremely basic, and it's a pretty huge improvement over the basic SHIV, even before you consider the utility of Partial Cover that goes where you want it to go. It's nearly twice as tough in raw HP and its Defense is greater than Partial Cover, though not yet up to Full Cover, extending its durability further.

The Partial Cover behavior can lead to odd AI behavior at times, where an Alien goes up to hide behind your Alloy SHIV, expecting it to be permanent cover, and then you're free to shuffle the SHIV away and leave them completely open. Oddly, the SHIV's cover will protect an Alien from the SHIV, because the remaquel's cover rules are weird like that, which means that when moving your SHIV close to maximize accuracy you should actually stop it a tile away, rather than directly adjacent.

Note that...


Hover SHIV
18 HP
0 Will
40 Defense
70 Aim
17 Move
100$, 30 Alien Alloys, 20 Elerium, 7 days to manufacture (4 days in Enemy Within)

Can fly. Has 12 "fuel" base.

... this isn't actually a 100% improvement over the Alloy SHIV.

I mean, it is, if you don't care about cost or the lack of the Partial Cover aspect, but those are both worth commentary. The Hover SHIV burning Elerium on manufacture, in particular, can be a strong argument for leaving off on building it if you really need Elerium for other purposes.

The Hover SHIV is a little faster and a little harder to hit than the Alloy SHIV -it's basically always in Full Cover, effectively- but the primary reason to consider building it is the flight ability. This is particularly critical if you're playing Enemy Unknown instead of Enemy Within, where SHIVs struggle to get from point A to point B when using regular movement, but even in Enemy Within it still is a big deal. Being more consistently useful in urban environments is a big deal, and having the height advantage is worth 20 Aim, so it's reasonably accurate to consider the Hover SHIV as having 20 more Aim than it actually has, for most purposes. In conjunction with the Plasma upgrade, that's 115 Aim against most targets!

... on the other hand, the Hover SHIV requires Archangel Armor has been researched, and overlaps pretty heavily with simply slapping Archangel Armor onto your troops. It also has the same HP as the Alloy SHIV, and it just doesn't hold up so well compared to late-game armors. A Colonel in Carapace Armor has, on Impossible difficulty, 8-9 HP. (Unless it's an Assault, in which case Carapace Armor puts them at 10 HP in the base game and 13 in Enemy Within) A Colonel in Archangel Armor, on Impossible Difficulty, has 14-15 HP. In other words, the Alloy SHIV is around double the HP of your toughest soldiers if they have tech-equivalent gear, while the Hover SHIV has less than 20% more HP than tech-equivalent soldiers -and that's assuming the soldier isn't carrying HP boosting Items, such as Chitin Plating, which causes these elite soldiers to match or exceed the Hover SHIV's HP.

This is one of the better illustrators of why SHIVs struggle to stay relevant past the early to mid game.

Foundry Upgrades

SHIV Suppression
SHIVs can now Suppress.

Suppression isn't all that useful by itself, unfortunately, but if you do decide to make this Project it is a free skill for the SHIV. It's also actually quite cheap, only costing 40$, so even with how poor Suppression is it's still legitimately worth considering. Especially since SHIVs don't have any other ways of passing their turns usefully, aside from directly shooting things.


SHIV Laser
+2 damage (Total: 8), +15 Aim (Total: 85), +5 crit chance. (Total: 15%)

A respectable upgrade to the SHIV, but probably only worth producing if you insist on using SHIVs from fairly early in the game. Note that it's comparable in expense to equipping an entire team with Laser weaponry! If you wait until more of the mid-game, you should skip right to


SHIV Plasma
+4 damage (Total: 10), +25 Aim (Total: 95), +10 crit chance. (Total: 20%)

Note that this does not require you to produce the Laser version first. You can complete the game with SHIV Laser never having been manufactured and still have SHIVs with Plasma all over the place.

SHIV Plasma is an excellent improvement that should be gotten as soon as possible if you're using SHIVs, and cost-wise it's worth commentary that the Foundry Project is comparable in cost to an individual Plasma weapon for a soldier. This while throwing in Aim, unlike other Plasma weapons! (Admittedly, that's more to compensate for how SHIVs don't level up to gain Aim 'naturally') With it, SHIVs are tied with Mecs as your hardest-hitting units, and they're actually pretty decently accurate compared to the competition. Only Plasma Sniper Rifles beat them for crit chance, too, though SHIVs don't get any skills for improving crit chance so that's a questionable comparison.


SHIV Repair
Arc Throwers can now be used to heal SHIVs for 6 HP per charge. (In Enemy Within: Mecs can be targeted, too)

This is not a worthwhile use of your limited Arc Thrower charges. You should be using them to skip expenses on Plasma weaponry and to unlock new technologies, such as psychic testing. A charge spent on a SHIV is a wasted charge.

6 HP isn't even that good. You get two charges per Arc Thrower, admittedly, but a Medikit with the Foundry upgrade and backed by a Support's Field Medic and Savior skills is 10 HP of healing three times per mission. Even with Enemy Within Deep Pockets, an Arc Thrower's upper limit is 6 HP three times per mission.

Enemy Within's addition of Sentinel Drone makes this a joke, to boot, which is funny because Enemy Within slightly improves SHIV Repair by virtue of Mecs being valid targets for the Arc Thrower-based repair.


Advanced Repair
SHIVs and aircraft recover from damage after missions in less time.

This is a good Foundry Project to be taking for the purposes of benefiting your aircraft, which largely renders it moot whether it would be worth taking specifically to benefit SHIVs.

Somewhat irritatingly, as Advanced Repair requires Heavy Floater corpses/an Autopsy of them to have been completed, this is restricted to the late-game, when SHIVs are losing their luster. Worse, the Officer Training School has an equivalent effect for your soldiers that can be acquired much, much sooner, and at less expense all-around to boot. So even though the odds are decent you'll make the Project, it doesn't do much to make SHIVs relevant/keep them relevant.


Advanced Flight
Doubles Archangel Armor and Hover SHIV's fuel total.

This is nice if you're using Hover SHIVs anyway, but you're probably not going to make it specifically to benefit them. 12 fuel is a lot, and burning through it and then needing more is probably a result of wasteful play, rather than of real need.


Advanced Construction
Can be used to halve SHIV build time while doubling build cost, same as everything else it 'benefits'.

Advanced Construction is a questionable Project in general, and does little to make SHIVs more appealing. It's true that the late-game is where you're liable to have resources to burn, but if you're losing SHIVs at the kind of rate where this could be significantly useful, you're probably so bad a player I'm not sure how you got that far into the game.


Shaped Armor (Enemy Within)
+3 HP to SHIVs and Mecs.

A decent little general-purpose upgrade. In practice you're probably producing it for your Mecs, with the benefit to the SHIVs being entirely incidental. I'd say it helps off-set the degree to which regular soldiers catch up to SHIV HP in the late game, but since it benefits Mecs and is small besides, it really doesn't.


Advanced Servomotors (Enemy Within)
+3 to movement for SHIVs and Mecs.

The fact that it benefits Mecs is, like with Shaped Armor, both a virtual guarantee you'll make it and a strike against it genuinely helping SHIVs be relevant to the game. If Mecs were not largely superior to SHIVs it would probably be all positive, but as-is... ugh.


Sentinel Drone (Enemy Within)
SHIVs self-repair 2 HP per turn and SHIVs will automatically Reaction Fire against enemies that enter to within 4 tiles of the SHIV.

As far as I'm aware, the self-healing is unlimited.

The self-repair is huge, allowing SHIVs to, with somewhat patient play, pretty consistently have superior turnaround to soldiers, and making a SHIV your number-one choice for damage sponge/scout even once your soldiers have largely caught up to the SHIV's HP total. Even better, it's SHIV-exclusive, reasonably cheap, and unlocked by an early-game Autopsy. (Drones)

On top of all that, it throws in what amounts to Close Combat Specialist, which is a nifty thing to be throwing in for free. Alloy SHIVs are particularly likely to benefit from it, as enemies trying to use the SHIV for cover are obviously going to end up in shooting range -and get shot before they reach cover as a result.

If Enemy Within had given SHIVs a couple more Projects like this, they'd probably be pretty strongly competitive with regular soldiers!

But it didn't.

So they're not.

---------------------------------

In Enemy Unknown, the SHIV's main problem, on a design level, is that the developers don't seem to be clear on what role it's supposed to fill on the battlefield. Heavy Weapon Platforms, back in the original XCOM, were bullet sponges (Relatively speaking), disposable scouts (Since they had no leveling mechanic), psi-immune for when you're hunting Sectoid leadership or fighting Ethereals, hit exceptionally hard, and were battle-ready so long as ammo was available. (The Laser Tank, having unlimited ammo, skipped this requirement entirely) Further, they were a way of getting more use out of soldier slots: since a Skyranger could only carry 80 items, that meant the 14 soldiers could only carry an average of about 5.7 items, 2 of which were probably being eaten by their gun and the ammo for the gun! Dropping down to 10 soldiers plus one HWP (They use 4 troop slots) makes it a lot easier to kit your soldiers however you like in the original game.

SHIVs are theoretically still relatively disposable, but the remaquel will gift you free soldiers who are one rank below your highest-ranking soldier for some of your missions, which means even elite soldiers are surprisingly disposable: so long as you have one Colonel, you'll periodically get Majors thrown at you for free. Further, SHIVs are expensive, and with how equipment works in the remaquel, once you have a full kit for a soldier of a given class, any replacements for that soldier are set: in the original XCOM, a dead soldier took their armor with them, and depending on how events played out all their gear could be destroyed as well, making the HWP's high up-front expense not so painful, especially since they didn't pull a salary.

SHIVs are something of a bullet sponge in the early to mid game, but ultimately have only slightly greater durability than elite soldiers in the late game. They kind of fail at this job.

They're psi-immune, but psychic powers just aren't as threatening as they were in the original game, no longer spammable multiple times a turn every turn, no longer able to target units from anywhere on the map so long as the target had been spotted by someone, and even if that was all still true psychic Aliens will never have more than 4 individuals on a map anyway! Worse yet? Of the two psi-capable enemies, one of them has two psychic attacks that not only work against SHIVs but are more effective than against your regular soldiers, due to SHIVs having zero Will.

SHIVs are actually less reliably battle-ready than regular soldiers, since the entirety of their damage will be counted against them when determining their recovery period, where a soldier armor's bonus HP isn't counted against them when calculating wound recovery time. A soldier in Carapace Armor who takes 4 damage, for instance, won't spend any time recovering -a SHIV will always have to spend some time being repaired no matter how little damage it takes.

Now, of course, it's not inherently a problem that SHIVs fail to pull off anything like what HWPs seem to have been intended to do, but it is a problem when combined with the fact that "be like HWPs in the original" seems to have been the guiding design principle behind SHIVs.

Enemy Within does at least make them a much more effective bullet sponge/scout, but good play tends to revolve around minimizing the opportunities for enemies to shoot at your soldiers in the first place.

It's really disappointing, because Enemy Within is clearly trying to make SHIVs better, enough so to be competitive with regular soldiers, but it just... doesn't pull it off, particularly when you consider how Mecs fill much the same role, but for the most part do it better.

Next time, we cover psychic powers.