XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Neonate Viper

HP: 2
Armor: 0
Defense: -24/-24/-16/-8
Dodge: 0
Aim: 55/55/60/60
Mobility: 14/16/16/17 (9/18 on Rookie, 10/21 on Regular/Commander, 11/22 on Legendary)
Damage: 2 (+1)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/0/10%
Will: 40

No, that's not a series of typos: Neonate Vipers do, in fact, have negative Defense, even up on Legendary.

Also note that Neonate Vipers have only one shot before needing to reload.

Immunities
Immune to Poison.

The relevancy here is fairly low, as Neonate Vipers already die to almost literally any damage source on every difficulty; Venom Rounds not boosting damage against them is irrelevant, and Gas Grenades not Poisoning them on impact is irrelevant since they're dead, even aside how you probably don't have either when you launch the Nest mission.

That said, it can crop up by a regular Viper spitting Poison, whether by this failing to kill Neonate Vipers in the impact zone, or by a Neonate Viper casually slithering through an affected area without issue.

Bizarrely, this immunity isn't actually listed in-game; you won't see it if you Dominate them or use a mod to check their abilities. In conjunction with how low its relevance is, you could be forgiven for thinking they don't have this protection.

Bind
Binds an adjacent humanoid enemy, doing 1 damage on initial activation and 2 damage on each following turn and preventing the Viper and their victim from taking action until either the Viper takes damage or their target dies or falls Unconscious. Both damage sources have -1 Pierce, effectively treating an Armored target as having 1 more point of Armor than it actually has.

Neonate Vipers not only have a weaker Bind, they actually lack Tongue Pull outright, though you could be forgiven for assuming otherwise.

The negative Pierce is a weird technicality I don't really get. You're intended to hit the Nest really early, far before you should have Plated Armor completed and thus have access to E.X.O. Suits or have fought a Shieldbearer to have any chance of having access to Plated Vests, so... Blast Padding is the only way you might have Armor. (Well, or a SPARK, but they can't be Bound) And pity damage ensures that this negative Pierce can't affect the damage anyway, given this Bind only does 1 or 2 damage anyway. So, uh, why?

It's too bad this mechanic never shows up on a proper main-game enemy with enough damage to care about negative Pierce. It'd be pretty cool to have a key enemy or three that Armor is particularly useful against, and it would make Warden Armor picking up a point of Armor more significant, as well as make Shred on enemies more significant since being Shredded to zero prevents negative Pierce from kicking in.

Alas, even in War of the Chosen this possibility goes unexplored.

Neonate Vipers are, of course, exclusive to Alien Hunters. More precisely, they're exclusive to the optional-to-enable Nest mission, where their primary purpose is to make Bradford seem cooler and more powerful than he objectively is.

Speaking of!

Much like how Shen forcibly joins you as a sort of high-level, unfairly good Specialist when you do Lost Towers, Bradford shoves himself into the squad for the Nest because he hopes to be able to rescue Vahlen the way he rescued you in the Tutorial, and is set up as a variation on a high-level Ranger, specifically a Sword-focused one: Blademaster, Bladestorm, Reaper. Also Run And Gun, Untouchable, and Shadowstep.

Interestingly, this makes Bradford a legal base-game Colonel Ranger, as that's a valid level progression and unlike Shen none of his abilities behaves differently from the proper class version. The only ability weirdness he has going on is they actually forgot to give him Hunker Down -not that you're liable to miss it, but whoops regardless.

That said, he's still cheating a little, as...

.... instead of carrying a Shotgun or Rifle, he's carrying a 'Multipurpose Combat Rifle', which is essentially a Magnetic Rifle with six Weapon Attachments squished into its frame, all of them Advanced-tier: he's only missing a Repeater, presumably so you're not guaranteed to have a 10% chance of instantly killing the Viper King. Reminder: Scopes and Laser Sights are mutually exclusive, so this is double-cheating! (It should be pointed out this rifle only gets +2 damage from crits, where Magnetic Rifles get +3, but still)

Notably, the Advanced Stock means Bradford will always kill any Neonate Viper he points his rifle at, since he'll do a minimum of 2 damage and they only have 2 HP. This is one of the more straightforward examples of Neonate Vipers being carefully designed to make Bradford seem better than he is.

Amusingly, in War of the Chosen Bradford's special rifle doesn't necessarily impress as much, as it's not classed as a Rifle or anything, and so doesn't benefit from Breakthroughs. It's entirely possible to eg hit the mission with Magnetic Rifles unlocked and backed by Improved Assault Rifles and Improved Magnetic Weapons, and so now your Specialists are carrying Plasma Rifle-strong firearms and Bradford refusing to carry anything except his overmodded weapon is actually putting him behind your squad in raw damage. (As in, I literally had that happen to me one run)

It's also worth pointing out that this is actually the visual design Bradford's rifle uses in the first Tutorial mission;

Though in the Tutorial it doesn't have all these Attachments and so on, just functioning as a Conventional Assault Rifle.

I'm rather curious as to why Bradford has this unique weapon model at all, given it was already existent out the gate for the Tutorial. It serves a clear enough purpose in the Nest -let the devs power up Bradford compared to an expected early hit of the Nest with minimal impact elsewhere- but that doesn't really explain why the model was made for the base game. Was this originally the model for Conventional Rifles, and they'd already done a pre-rendered cinema showing Bradford carrying it by the time they changed their minds? Or something?

In any event, keep in mind you're not allowed to lose Bradford; you'll get an immediate game over if he dies. Untouchable and the ease of killing Neonate Vipers leaves this much less of a concern than with Shen in Lost Towers, but if you end up with Bradford low on HP you need to heal him or keep him away from further fighting.

The Nest itself is not anywhere near as involved as Lost Towers. It's just one map, for starters, and it's not very long, nor is it so heavy on controlled, scripted encounters. Lost Towers was very clockwork: the Nest is a bit more like a regular, organic mission, aside that the map itself is fixed.

Still, it's predictable enough that in talking about Neonate Vipers I'm better off discussing the mission per se.

Like Lost Towers, you actually start Concealed, though thankfully it makes more sense narratively. There's zero time pressure, as well, so initially it's good to approach the mission like you might an Avatar Project Facility: advance until you find a pod, and then prep to fall on it with your squad's full might.

Unlike a standard mission, the Nest's range of enemies is extremely limited. There's a ton of Neonate Vipers, a handful of regular Vipers, and at the end of the map the Viper King will show up. You'll never see any other enemy types, so you can kit your team out appropriately. (eg don't bother to bring Venom Rounds if you have them)

You start in a rocky area with no enemies, then you'll advance to a room...

... that looks like somebody grabbed a room from the Ethereal underwater base, buried it in sand, and then excavated it. Generally you'll encounter a pod here -I say 'generally', because one of the ways the Nest is more like a normal mission is that the initial pods patrol semi-randomly. You might have no pod in the room, you might have multiple pods in the room, you might have one pod. It's usually one pod, though.

It's also worth explicitly pointing out that the Vipers that show up in the Nest are always acting as leaders to Neonate Viper pods. You'll never encounter just a full pod of regular Vipers, which makes sense given the base game expectation is pretty obviously that you'll hit the Nest really early, so early you might not have even encountered a Viper pod leader yet, and certainly so early that pods of three Vipers are impossible. You'll probably take a bit longer in War of the Chosen, though...

Anyway, not long after you've hit this room, the enemy turn will involve a wave of...

... 5 Neonate Vipers pulling themselves out of an array of holes near ground level you probably didn't pay any attention to. (More rarely, they'll actually fall straight down from... holes in the ceiling, one assumes, though no such holes are visible) As such, ideally you'll be advancing slowly, Overwatching at every step. Bradford in particular should be Overwatching, since he'll always kill one reinforcement if he pulls the trigger.

The next turn, this repeats, with a second wave of 5 Neonate Vipers showing up. Tygan will indicate this is the last wave, and this is correct enough. As such, once you've dealt with the first wave, you should sit tight and Overwatch, assuming you haven't pulled any pods in the process of dealing with the first wave.

Note also that these reinforcements are dynamically generated based on your squad's positions. There's actually a lot of possible reinforcement points, where any given run through the mission will see only a small portion of the holes. Generally speaking you'll get Neonate Vipers spawning within sight of your squad, but not so close they're at immediate risk of a one-action-point-flank. As such, you can't just memorize where they spawned on a given attempt and expect that to serve you in all future runs, because the fiddly details of your own squad's positions will change where Neonates come in at.

After that, it's time to advance and probably activate literally all of the pods hanging around Vahlen's base camp. This is the other way Bradford is made to look cool and powerful: the best solution to the horde of Neonates is to have Bradford Reaper his way through a bunch of them before finishing with his rifle. (Or maybe tossing a grenade, if you get lucky with Neonate Vipers being bunched-up) If you've given him the Hunter's Axe -or if you've upgraded to Ionic Swords- Bradford will be able to 100% reliably melee 5 Neonate Vipers to death before the damage penalty stacks up enough he can roll 1 damage. Ideally, if you can, you'll open the chain by killing a regular Viper, though you'll ideally soften up the Viper before he takes the swing.

Like yeah, Reaper is cool and all, but you don't usually get an opportunity to have a Ranger Reaper through five enemies in a single turn, even with endgame gear.

Anyway, this very large group is a semi-dangerous encounter and you shouldn't be reluctant to eg toss grenades if it will help a lot. You're nearly done with the mission already, and while Neonate Vipers are individually weak, there's something in the vicinity of 10 of them you're probably activating at once, and probably a couple of regular Vipers too. You can easily have someone die here if you're careless and a bit unlucky.

This is especially true if you ended up activating these pods while still dealing with the reinforcement waves, instead of managing to keep them cleanly separated. That can pretty easily go surprisingly badly.

In any event, once you've fought your way through Vahlen's camp, you'll be on approach to what is probably intended to be a giant glass wall that's been busted open. At some point Tygan will point you to a body embedded in ice past this point: this is a bit of a mean trap, as once you're sufficiently far past the busted glass wall...

... the Viper King will spawn in behind the body and immediately activate! Furthermore, a couple of Neonate Vipers will spawn in.

This is the point where Neonate Vipers having Bind, however weak theirs might be, can actually be a Big Problem, as it can put you in nasty situations where you want to free someone, but freeing them will trigger a Ruler Reaction. Honestly, the ideal thing to do is to get your entire squad into Cover very close to the line that triggers the Viper King to activate (I've never worked out exactly where it is, but my rule of thumb is that walking past the nearest chunk of high ground is going to put you too close), have most of the squad enter Overwatch, and then have one soldier cross the line. This will hopefully do a decent chunk of damage to the Viper King to start, as well as wipe out the initial Neonate Viper spawns. (In spite of the Viper King visually arriving first, your soldiers will actually fire on the Neonate Vipers before considering targeting him)

This is especially effective in War of the Chosen thanks to tweaks to Alien Rulers, but even in the base game it's a decent way to get the jump on the Viper King.

Note that there's at least one more turn of reinforcement Neonate Vipers. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually keep arriving as long as the Viper King is around, but I've never had him stick around long enough to see so I don't actually know, I just know if you drive him off in one turn you won't get a second turn of reinforcements. This wave is unlikely to be a real problem simply because the Viper King will probably run, whether due to damage or the turn limit on Alien Rulers. (Though that's for next post) You'll still need to mop up the Neonate Vipers, but 2-4 Neonate Vipers with no support is not a threat.

Anyway, you're actually given an objective to kill the Viper King, but it's okay to fail it (By virtue of him escaping) and if you're playing the base game the way the devs clearly expected it's basically guaranteed you won't manage to kill the Viper King before he runs: you're expected to show up with a squad size of 5, everybody below Captain, and your gear more or less unimproved. You'd basically have to deliberately stall on hitting the mission until you had magnetics, realistically speaking.

In War of the Chosen, Fatigue and injuries might stack up such that you put the Nest off for a while, especially if you also have Lost Towers on and went for it first. Showing up with magnetics, potentially backed by Breakthroughs, actually makes it quite plausible you can kill him!

Which brings me to the point that you possibly shouldn't try to kill him. There's apparently a glitch where killing the Viper King at the Nest can result in his corpse not dropping: I don't know what the conditions for this glitch are nor how reliable an issue it is, but you may wish at minimum to drop a save before making an attack that can kill him so you can load that if it doesn't drop. If you're playing Ironman, you should probably just never kill him. (Unless you don't care about the Serpentsuit, I suppose)

Another oddity you're unlikely to notice in a base-game run but can occur fairly readily in War of the Chosen is that, bizarrely, if you have the Nest enabled the game won't let you upgrade the Bolt Caster, Hunter's Axe, or Shadowkeeper until you've completed the Nest. I'm not sure why. The game itself doesn't justify this, and indeed doesn't have anything hinting this is a mechanic at all! My best guess is the concept shifted in development and nobody noticed that it no longer made sense, because in normal play you have no reason to notice -it can crop up readily in War of the Chosen, but you have to be turning the Nest on for it to happen, and probably 99% of War of the Chosen runs that have access to DLC just run with Integrated DLC.

Anyway, one final thing that can be a bit confusing: if you have the Alien Hunters DLC, the Skyranger area/barracks screen is adjusted to have 'the lodge', which is basically a giant trophy case: as you kill new alien types, heads will be mounted on the wall, or entire bodies in cases like Sectopods, and you'll get a number below the trophy. Said number is how many instances of that enemy you've killed, and Neonate Vipers are treated as Vipers by the lodge...

... but they don't actually drop Viper corpses when killed. Doing the Nest is a helpful injection of Viper bodies, but not the more than 20 you might expect. It's just the regular Vipers giving bodies, and there's not that many of them.

Surprisingly, Legendary difficulty doesn't do anything dramatic/obvious to the level. It doesn't provide more reinforcement waves, or make the waves much larger, or add in new enemy types to the map. There's more Neonate Vipers lying around, but that's it aside the stat modifiers.

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I actually quite like the Neonate Viper's aesthetic; in fact, I like the way they look more than regular Vipers! It's too bad they're not switched. The bandit look from the stripe around the eyes is great and very biologically believable (There are plenty of real animals whose eyes are strikingly outlined by a different color), and the color scheme simultaneously manages to be in line with ADVENT colors without having the same level of Overtly Bad Guy Colors to it. If this had been the basic Viper's look, that would be excellent; I'm a little sad it's not. (And glad Torque in Chimera Squad is more in line with the Neonate coloration)

Also, a detail I'm curious about is that Neonate Vipers are noticeably less prone to opening their mouths in animations. Regular Vipers have multiple first-sighted animations in which they open their mouth, generally to hiss at your soldiers, and similarly do so for a moment during a Bind. As far as I'm aware Neonate Vipers only open their mouth for Bind -and it's obvious they're directly recycling the regular Viper Bind animation there. I'm curious what lead to this, especially if it was an actual decision as opposed to 'not enough time for more detailed and interesting animations to be made'.

Narratively... well, Neonate Vipers have a bunch of wonky elements to them. There's the point that the game has the player killing what's implied to be juvenile Vipers, no ethical questions raised at all even though Vipers are clearly meant to be at the same sort of level as a human when it comes to intelligence and whatnot. Nobody is going to wonder if maybe we can talk to these newborn aliens that grew up away from Ethereal influence? Maybe try to point them at our enemies, if we're just going to stick to ruthlessness? We're just going to present it as A-OK to murder children en mass? Sure, they're attacking us, but we're an armed group invading their home. That makes us the ones in the wrong by default.

Of course, this jank connects into a larger strangeness of the Alien Hunters DLC. Let's start out by pointing out what the Neonate Vipers are wielding:


Their own Bolt Casters.

This is very, very odd. Regular Vipers wield a completely different weapon, so reskinning them to produce Neonate Viper graphics wouldn't result in this. (Nor would reskinning the Viper King readily produce Neonate Vipers, for that matter) Somebody on the team very deliberately gave them a different weapon, and specifically made the choice to give them the one-of-a-kind player weapon. I'm not even complaining about the obvious wonkiness that the player should end up with 20+ of the things from completing the Nest; my actual point is that the Alien Hunters DLC seems to have started out from one concept and then extremely awkwardly tried to pass off its content as being part of a completely different narrative that got kludged in later, probably by virtue of the DLC ending up rushed. (I don't know for a fact that it was rushed, but I would be extremely surprised if I got strong confirmation it wasn't)

Let's also point to the name: Alien Hunters. In the version we got, this is a pretty inexplicable name: you aren't hunting the Alien Rulers, and they're not hunting X-COM. Narratively, we're supposed to think you just kind of... randomly run into each other repeatedly. Even the Nest doesn't help any, as the story of the Nest is finding a Skyranger -from the invasion era, not the version on the Avenger- that has a box of weird gear (The Shadowkeeper, Hunter's Axes, Bolt Caster, and Frost Bomb), backtracking its flight path, and ending up finding Vahlen's camp/lab, which is overrun by Vipers and has the Viper King lairing deeper within. Your crew is just following breadcrumbs pointing to old allies, with it turning into a rescue operation partway through the investigation.

I strongly suspect the original idea behind Alien Hunters was a sort of proto-Chosen concept, or perhaps more precisely a proto-Hunter concept, with a strong undertone of Predator to the whole thing, suggested by how in the final state the Shadowkeeper, Hunter's Axes, and Bolt Caster are all faux-primitive weapons. (Reminder: the Skirmishers would go on to have blatant Predator influence, so the Predator series was absolutely on the team's mind while making XCOM 2) The Alien Rulers wouldn't have been escaped experiments, but rather would've been favored alien elites who made a game of hunting down whoever the Ethereals wanted dealt with, so convinced of their innate superiority they weren't taking things entirely seriously.

The fact that War of the Chosen went on to make the Chosen is especially suggestive, as the Chosen are very much a refinement on Alien Rulers in terms of an elite, characterful foe who you're intended to only take out permanently after clashing with them across multiple mission. The notion was clearly on their mind, and the Hunter's entire personality is extremely consistent with this theory, being a big game hunter sort of character who explicitly talks about hunting dangerous aliens out of boredom and handicapping himself in hopes of getting a challenge. (So exactly like Predators holding themselves to rules like 'only hunt armed people')

Wrapping this back to Neonate Vipers, I strongly suspect their original concept was as some kind of Viper King Elite Guard, hence why their color scheme is broadly in line with his, and particularly hence why they have Bolt Casters. Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the original intention was for each Alien Ruler to always be escorted by an elite guard unique to them, and the model used for Neonate Vipers just ended up being the first one completed.

In this scenario, very likely the Nest was originally imagined not as a place where Vahlen did Mad Science and had it go Horribly Wrong, but rather was a hidey-hole for ex-X-COM folks (Probably still including Vahlen, the DLC collectively addressing the fate of your missing support staff is a sensible goal regardless) and you're stumbling upon it after the Viper King found them and made a game of murdering them all.

Notably, one aspect of the Nest that's extremely conspicuous and completely ignored by your support staff is the state of the bodies and the multiple skull trophy racks dotting the area. The version of the narrative we got is telling us that the Viper King has just been breeding with... I dunno, random regular Vipers who stumbled onto the area through blind coincidence? (A lot of elements of the Nest story don't make sense if you think about them at all, it's a big part of what fuels my suspicions) Point is, what we're told in the final product is this is a breeding ground and also three experimental aliens busted loose, with the other two having immediately fled into the countryside. This makes it extremely strange that we're finding human bodies whose skulls have been picked completely clean, and untenably strange that there's all these skull trophy racks, to the point that the mission's map icon is a skull trophy rack! (You can excuse the bodies being picked clean by suggesting the Neonate Vipers ate them. It's a weak excuse, but... technically functional. The skull trophy racks are impossible to reconcile, though)

A Predator-esque sport hunter deliberately cleaning up the skulls and mounting them on spikes to bask in their kills/intimidate the people yet to be hunted down/use the fires a lot of these racks have to burn off the remaining flesh/whatever would make a lot of sense. Baby Vipers -or escaped genetic experiment Subject Gamma The Viper King- doing the same is just baffling. (Especially since some of these skull racks are on fire. There's no other fires on the map, either; this isn't just random fires, somebody deliberately set some skull racks in specific on fire) The fact that your support staff completely ignore the skull racks in turn strongly suggests to me that the devs got the map's physical appearance mostly done, then got told to rush the DLC, and instead of spending time cleaning up the skull racks now that the narrative concept had completely changed they just kind of hoped players wouldn't think anything of them.

There's more to this I'll be covering as we get to the Alien Rulers themselves, but this is plenty conspicuous, especially in conjunction with the broader evidence that the game's team was increasingly being pushed to hurry products out the door. (By internal culture, external corporate overlords, whatever, I don't know and it's not super-important to my point)

I'm particularly curious if this hypothetical Viper King Elite Guard would've dropped regular Viper bodies or what, and especially whether they'd stay a part of the general pool even once the Viper King was dead. I've alluded before to the idea that I think the game really needed an elite Viper unit, and I'm curious if such a thing got taken away by corporate meddling/whatever or if the devs never had any such intention at all.

Ah well.

To be fair, there are some aspects of the Nest that are consistent with the final concept in a manner that could be argued as inconsistent with this theory. The frozen back area you fight the Viper King in actually does have several very large eggs scattered about; they're easily overlooked and I suspect the vast majority of players don't notice them at all, but they are there.

However, I said 'could be argued', because honestly, it's not that hard to imagine a scenario consistent with this info that's still consistent with my theory. Maybe the Nest was always envisioned as a Viper nest, but the original idea was it was a secret breeding ground Vahlen's team stumbled upon, and they managed to temporarily lock up the Viper King, instead of Vahlen doing mad science, ending up with the Viper King, and then it escaping and breeding.

Also, one more bit of strangeness to the Nest's narrative is that you have multiple audio logs from Vahlen and for several of them she hisses out her 's'es like a stereotypical snake person, something she did not do in Enemy Unknowm/Within. She even does it when you Autopsy the Alien Rulers! (You get Vahlen talking over those Autopsies, instead of Tygan, presumably for nostalgia reasons) This is not acknowledged by your staff and there's no payoff to it, but it makes me wonder if Vahlen was supposed to... I dunno, be upgrading herself with Viper DNA? Tuning into a Viper due to exposure to the Viper King? Whatever the intention was, I'll be surprised if the XCOM series ever actually acknowledges/pays off this element. I'm not really disappointed we won't get whatever was intended with this, but I do wish I had some idea what it was intended to be, because it's so weird and disconnected from both what we got and what I suspect was the original intention with Alien Hunters.

On a different note, one element of the Nest I'm unambiguously not terribly fond of is that it is filled to the gills with decorative snakes slithering about. As far as I can tell, there's no deeper reason than because this is a Viper place, Vipers are snake-like, ergo the devs threw in dozens of decorative snakes without regard to whether that makes sense. It's not like any of your support staff acknowledge the Earth snakes.

They look neat in motion, to be fair, but... seriously, why?

Also worth pointing out is that Vahlen's camp actually has the ADVENT symbol painted onto at least one of the makeshift buildings. It's one of the more low-key elements of the Nest not jiving with the story we're given, as the structures are clearly intended to have been assembled by Vahlen's crew sometime after they found the alien facility chunk, and the 'escaped lab experiments' scenario provides no obvious explanation for why such a marking would've been created, and makes it difficult to generate a believable one. If an ADVENT patrol swung by... why would they spray-paint their symbol and then just leave everything abandoned?

It's a strange detail no matter what, honestly, as I'd expect the Ethereal symbol -the one that's the basis of the Chosen icon- to be what an Alien Ruler or their elite guards would put up, but in the 'Viper King working for the Ethereals and coming down like a hammer on Vahlen's crew' scenario I could buy the Viper King or his minions putting up the symbol as a message to any humans who found the camp. (That message, of course, being "ADVENT was here, and you'll join all these bodies if you push back against ADVENT") The escaped experiment explanation just... gives no room at all.

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Like Lost Towers, the Nest actually has unique music, with a distinct non-combat tune and a distinct combat tune. (I can't find an upload of the non-combat version. Not too big a deal, given it's basically just the combat version minus the main beat)

I think it's a very solid tune that fits to the Predator vibe the DLC seems to have been originally intended to have, but it would probably feel pretty out of place in the main game so I don't mind so much it not being part of the broader music rotation.

If you do want the tune in broader rotation, the mod I linked previously actually doesn't add these tracks into rotation. You'll need another mod (At least as of this writing) if you want the Alien Hunters music in rotation... which still requires the first one... and does a bunch of other stuff... it's a frustrating situation.

Oddly, the music in the Nest itself is actually tied to the Viper King. The game will switch to general music options the instant the Viper King escapes, if you let him escape. This is particularly bizarre given one of the main Alien Hunters glitches is that normally an Alien Ruler escaping forbids the music from ever changing until you complete the mission.

I am a little surprised the Alien Rulers don't force this tune upon activating them, in the same sort of way the Chosen have personal tunes, not even in War of the Chosen. I'm even more surprised no mod implements such behavior!

Conversely, as far as I'm aware the Nest does not have a unique menu visual associated with it. It's possible I've just never rolled it -the vast majority of my runs have had the Nest off- but I'd be a little surprised if that's why I've not seen such.

Anyway, like with Shen in Lost Towers, if Bradford gets injured in the mission you'll eventually get told he's recovered, as apparently his soldier self isn't properly deleted. Also like Shen, this doesn't actually matter, though honestly in this case I totally understand that: you have little cause to actually look at Bradford aboard the Avenger, so they'd, what, make new versions of literally every cinema involving Bradford? Record new, pained versions of his dialogue? Anything that would actually display Bradford's ongoing recovery to the audience would be a huge amount of work for an extremely limited payoff.

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Next time, we do an overall overview of Alien Ruler mechanics.

See you then.