XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: ADVENT Trooper
Basic
HP: 3/3/4/4
Armor: 0
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0
Aim: 65
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 3 (+1)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 10%
Will: 50
Tech: 125
As with my analysis of the prior game, stats are provided either as a set of four numbers or as one number: if it's a set of four, it correlates to the effects of difficulty level (In the format of Rookie/Regular/Commander/Legendary), whereas if it's one number the stat is the same on all difficulty levels. For Damage, the number in parentheses is the damage on a crit, just like when I did weapons.
Mobility works much as it did in the previous game. 12 is the default Mobility of X-COM's agents, so if an enemy has more than that you're not going to be outrunning it, and if it has less than that you can kite it forever, or more accurately until you hit the map's edge. It still takes 2/3rds of a Mobility point to walk in a straight line, and a full Mobility point to walk diagonally, though apparently the game doesn't round down anymore so 12 Mobility now translates to 8 tiles of straight-line movement instead of 7. I'll still be providing the actual tile counts in parentheses to make it easier to understand the actual meaning of the number.
Basic ADVENT Troopers are the weakest, most generic threat of the game. They have no interesting qualities beyond bare minimum XCOM 2 enemy functionality, having neither passive abilities nor active abilities nor bonus qualities not directly alluded to by the game. They have a gun. They try to shoot you with it. That's their entire thing.
Do note that their Aim value means that High Cover is a fairly substantial step up in protection from Low Cover, taking you from a 45% chance of being hit to a 25% chance. High Cover is always good to take, of course, but the effect is more pronounced the lower an enemy's Aim is, and this level of bad Aim becomes less and less common as you progress through a run, albeit not as dramatically as in the prior game.
By a similar token, if you're in Cover of any kind and Suppressing an ADVENT Trooper, they're not hitting anyone. This usually isn't useful in practice because they'll just move before taking a shot, but there's edge case situations it actually matters in, such as if you're playing War of the Chosen and have Tactical Analysis and triggered it. (... and are still early enough in the game to be fighting Basic Troopers...)
Overall, though, ADVENT Troopers don't require special tactics. Try to flank them, try to destroy their cover, try to get high ground on them, etc. Everything you do when fighting most enemies.
Advanced
HP: 6/7/8/9
Armor: 0
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0
Aim: 65/70/70/70
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 5 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 10%
Will: 50/50/60/60
Though hey let's back up and talk about that whole 'Advanced ADVENT Trooper' thing.
Where in the prior game your enemies all operated at a fixed strength, with the progression aspect primarily being handled by displacing weak species with overall more dangerous ones, leading to unfortunate consequences like 'Thin Men are a threat with a distinct dynamic that stops mattering past the early game because they're pathetic and there's no replacement', with only Heavy Floaters, Sectoid Commanders, and Muton Elites providing higher-tier variations of prior Aliens... in XCOM 2, ADVENT's forces 'level-up' as the game progresses, with most of their units having 2-3 versions of increasing quality. Interestingly, the actual Alien forces do not have equivalent progressions; there's no elite Sectoid to contend with, and indeed the Sectoid Commander doesn't actually have an XCOM 2 equivalent. As such, there's still a few cases of early-game interesting threats falling by the wayside, but it's less consistent an issue than in the prior game, especially since early-game Aliens are consistently positioned as fairly elite and powerful for that point in the game, allowing the late game to reuse them without them being completely sad.
One thing worth pointing out, however, is that ADVENT's forces really basically start from the Advanced tier. Several ADVENT units just have a basic form and an Elite form, and the time frame in which you're facing Basic-tier enemies is really brief, being less 'this is the foundation of combat' and more 'this is the game babying you while you get to the point that you're not throwing Rookies at things'. As such, Advanced Troopers being such a big spike in difficulty compared to Basic Troopers is misleading; you're not expected to find Basic Troopers a problem. You're expected to start being challenged once the switch to Advanced occurs.
Overall, Advanced Troopers aren't fought very differently from Basic Troopers, in spite of gaining a Frag Grenade. Mostly, you can't be as reckless because it's no longer the case that you'll routinely one-shot them with basic weapons.
On a different note, I appreciate how XCOM 2 does a much better job of getting stats to believably align with concepts. It's still got issues -it's pretty ridiculous that the fully-armored, magnetic-weapon-wielding basic ADVENT troops are literally a Rookie but somehow worse- but there's nothing on the level of the prior game's issues, particularly if you focus on enemy statlines 'internally'. That is, it's ridiculous that a basic ADVENT Trooper is 100% worse than your Rookies in spite of ostensibly being better-equipped, but if you're comparing one enemy to another, their stats tend to make a reasonable amount of sense for their aesthetic, particularly if you focus on the elite forms as your point of comparison. That is, don't compare the basic ADVENT Trooper to a Sectoid, but rather compare the Elite Trooper to a Sectoid; using the Elite form as a comparison gives the intuitively logical result that the armored soldier wielding a large rifle is harder to kill and more lethal than the naked alien with a wrist-mounted weapon.
Elite
HP: 8/8/12/12 (8/8/10/11 in the base game)
Armor: 0
Defense: 0/0/10/10
Dodge: 0
Aim: 70/75/75/75
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 5-6 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 10%
Will: 50 (50/60/60/60 in the base game)
Aesthetically, I have mixed feelings about ADVENT troops. Things get a little better when including the War of the Chosen content, but base-game ADVENT is all about the black-with-red-highlights color scheme and faceless, dehumanizing uniforms. I'm not a fan of bad guy-ification in games going for nuanced stories in general, but in XCOM 2's case it's flat-out a mistake. While the society the Ethereals have imposed on humanity is a dystopia, a key part of dystopias is that they look like utopias until you dig deep enough. Having stereotypical Evil Colors soldiers with massive guns in full-body armor like they expect to take a bullet any moment as the 'peacekeepers' of the ADVENT dystopia fails to really sell the notion of ADVENT as a plausible dystopia.
This is especially problematic since XCOM 2 is supposed to be a near-future environment that, prior to aliens showing up, was more or less our reality. (Aside Enemy Within heavily implying that The Bureau is canon, anyway) That most modern folks can instantly recognize these designs as Bad Guy Designs is a problem when the population is literally supposed to be actual real life people in the very near future. A fantasy setting or the like can get away with these stereotypes because there's no reason to assume they're recognizable Evil Stereotypes in-universe. A near-future basically-our-reality setting can't do that; this kind of thing is all over pop culture, in many parts of the world, where even people who aren't big on consuming pop culture are at least tangentially aware of these stereotypes.
This is especially problematic given the Aliens still performed a violent invasion, dropped in pods to abduct people, and so on. The Ethereals really ought to have a lot of bad blood to work through; any successful PR campaign should logically involve staying away from the Vader look.
To be entirely fair, I have some suspicions about development stuff. The game frontloads its problems in this regard; as you start seeing more advanced Aliens, the game starts making more of an effort to make the PR Problem Aliens the ones that show up almost exclusively away from prying civilian eyes as well as prettying up the Aliens that are routinely shown to the public. This suggests to me that the beginning-of-game enemy designs got 'locked in' relatively early, before the game's tone was properly set.
The other big thing is that I have suspicions that in the base game the different segments of the development team were just fundamentally operating on different premises of what the game is about, narratively. The base game's plot, as well as elements of its gameplay, seem to be in rough agreement about this being a futuristic utopia other than that secret dark underbelly the average citizen is unaware of, with XCOM being gritty guerrilla fighters that can't possibly go toe-to-toe with the Aliens/ADVENT; you keep winning individual fights through ambush and getting out before your enemies bring in a real army, but the Doom Clock is always ticking down and it's only a decapitation strike that ultimately saves the day, heavily implying your various individual victories aren't really hurting ADVENT/the Aliens.
Meanwhile, the art gives everyone massive guns and Mad Max-style armor where it's utterly unbelievable that your rag-tag band of soldiers is somehow sneaking around in ADVENT's clean city centers at all, suggesting the art team is coming at things more like 'post-apocalyptic punks taking it to The Man', and the sound team seems to be operating on this idea that this is a Heroic Story about Heroically ROFLStomping Clearcut Bad Guys. (The post-battle victory music in particular stands out for being agonizingly out of place by embracing this Heroic Awesome Victory Of Clean Happiness model)
Particularly notable is that these problems lessen in War of the Chosen. The new ADVENT troops better fit to the clean image ADVENT would need to be projecting, and the tone of the music shifts much more heavily toward a foreboding, menacing mood, like every mission could cost someone their life. They don't go back and overhaul literally every ADVENT-related art asset nor rip out and replace all the old and inappropriate music, but War of the Chosen is overly-ambitious as-is, so fair enough.
This would suggest that everyone got more on board with the same premise, instead of all operating on radically different notions of what kind of game-slash-story this is, when making War of the Chosen.
One other bit of evidence in favor of this theory is that some loading screens depict ADVENT propaganda posters, which present ADVENT troops in shiny silver designs that resemble Robocop more than anything else. Still not the nicest image, but much less foreboding than their in-game designs, and I suspect the propaganda poster images got made later in the development than the core gameplay graphics.
As such, while ADVENT troops bug me for the lack-of-fitting problem, I have more patience with the game than with its predecessor when it comes to problems like this, as it's clear the problems aren't due to active self-sabotage or similar, but rather were in part the kind of problem it's extremely difficult for any sufficiently large team to avoid running into precisely due to how many people are working together.
As with my analysis of the prior game, stats are provided either as a set of four numbers or as one number: if it's a set of four, it correlates to the effects of difficulty level (In the format of Rookie/Regular/Commander/Legendary), whereas if it's one number the stat is the same on all difficulty levels. For Damage, the number in parentheses is the damage on a crit, just like when I did weapons.
Mobility works much as it did in the previous game. 12 is the default Mobility of X-COM's agents, so if an enemy has more than that you're not going to be outrunning it, and if it has less than that you can kite it forever, or more accurately until you hit the map's edge. It still takes 2/3rds of a Mobility point to walk in a straight line, and a full Mobility point to walk diagonally, though apparently the game doesn't round down anymore so 12 Mobility now translates to 8 tiles of straight-line movement instead of 7. I'll still be providing the actual tile counts in parentheses to make it easier to understand the actual meaning of the number.
Basic ADVENT Troopers are the weakest, most generic threat of the game. They have no interesting qualities beyond bare minimum XCOM 2 enemy functionality, having neither passive abilities nor active abilities nor bonus qualities not directly alluded to by the game. They have a gun. They try to shoot you with it. That's their entire thing.
Do note that their Aim value means that High Cover is a fairly substantial step up in protection from Low Cover, taking you from a 45% chance of being hit to a 25% chance. High Cover is always good to take, of course, but the effect is more pronounced the lower an enemy's Aim is, and this level of bad Aim becomes less and less common as you progress through a run, albeit not as dramatically as in the prior game.
By a similar token, if you're in Cover of any kind and Suppressing an ADVENT Trooper, they're not hitting anyone. This usually isn't useful in practice because they'll just move before taking a shot, but there's edge case situations it actually matters in, such as if you're playing War of the Chosen and have Tactical Analysis and triggered it. (... and are still early enough in the game to be fighting Basic Troopers...)
Overall, though, ADVENT Troopers don't require special tactics. Try to flank them, try to destroy their cover, try to get high ground on them, etc. Everything you do when fighting most enemies.
Uninteresting does not mean un-threatening, though. Indeed, ADVENT Troopers should often be prioritized over other targets, because an ADVENT Trooper is going to try to do damage to your squad first turn every turn. Many enemies have abilities they heavily prefer to use that can't hurt your squad immediately; if a Sectoid is leading two Troopers, killing the Troopers and leaving the Sectoid alive will almost always result in the Sectoid going for a Mindspin or Psi Zombie instead of shooting someone, whereas the reverse will leave you with two Troopers taking shots. This is exacerbated by Trooper frailty: on every difficulty, a Sectoid has literally at least as much HP as two Troopers. So you can actually be literally choosing between 'kill the Sectoid and neither Trooper' vs 'kill both Troopers and not the Sectoid'.
Advanced
HP: 6/7/8/9
Armor: 0
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0
Aim: 65/70/70/70
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 5 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 10%
Will: 50/50/60/60
Tech: 125
Frag Grenade
The Trooper may throw a single Frag Grenade, which does 2-3 damage and Shreds 1 Armor.
It's an Advent Trooper, but it has roughly twice the HP and better damage. If you're playing above Rookie, it also has slightly higher Aim, and if you're playing above Regular it has slightly higher Will.
Oh, and the Frag Grenade of course.
In the base game, the Frag Grenade might as well not exist. Advanced Troopers are strangely reluctant to actually lob their grenade, even if you pack four people together and Full Cover is involved, far preferring to just take a shot at you and desperately hope they get lucky. They're still not fond of actually tossing it in War of the Chosen, but if you're regularly giving them chances to attack you'll actually see Troopers tossing their grenade several times across a run, unlike the base game where it's entirely possible to be shot at literally dozens of times with not a single grenade thrown.
Frag GrenadeThe Trooper may throw a single Frag Grenade, which does 2-3 damage and Shreds 1 Armor.
It's an Advent Trooper, but it has roughly twice the HP and better damage. If you're playing above Rookie, it also has slightly higher Aim, and if you're playing above Regular it has slightly higher Will.
Oh, and the Frag Grenade of course.
In the base game, the Frag Grenade might as well not exist. Advanced Troopers are strangely reluctant to actually lob their grenade, even if you pack four people together and Full Cover is involved, far preferring to just take a shot at you and desperately hope they get lucky. They're still not fond of actually tossing it in War of the Chosen, but if you're regularly giving them chances to attack you'll actually see Troopers tossing their grenade several times across a run, unlike the base game where it's entirely possible to be shot at literally dozens of times with not a single grenade thrown.
The grenade itself has a wider blast radius than you'd expect, having 1 tile more than your own Frag Grenades. This is a recurring oddity with enemies, that if they're conceptually using an explosive you also have access to, their version is slightly weaker but has a slightly larger blast radius. As such, you have to spread out further than you'd intuitively expect to avoid having multiple people caught by a single grenade's blast. Otherwise, it's about what you'd expect, including having the usual explosive 20% chance to roll +1 damage.
A weird bug note: enemy grenades of any kind are not, in fact, coded as attacks that unavoidably hit, but rather are coded as attacks with a base accuracy of 100. This matters because if you penalize an enemy's Aim and they elect to toss the grenade, it's suddenly possible for it to miss! Notably, Panicking enemies suffer from a significant Aim penalty, and are willing to toss their grenade as their Panic action: there's a notable chance for the grenade to do no damage to your soldiers in that case. (Though it will still smash Cover, keep in mind)
This isn't a particularly useful bug to the player. Panic is a tool the player can never reliably induce and it's still risky to Panic an enemy with a grenade, Disorientation completely blocks grenade usage and so it being an Aim penalty is irrelevant to this point, Poison is inferior to fire if the goal is to negate grenade usage... it'll crop up every once in a while if you don't actively shun Poison tools, Insanity, and Void Rift, but even knowing the bug exists you're unlikely to make a decision on the idea of fishing for it.
Though hey let's back up and talk about that whole 'Advanced ADVENT Trooper' thing.
Where in the prior game your enemies all operated at a fixed strength, with the progression aspect primarily being handled by displacing weak species with overall more dangerous ones, leading to unfortunate consequences like 'Thin Men are a threat with a distinct dynamic that stops mattering past the early game because they're pathetic and there's no replacement', with only Heavy Floaters, Sectoid Commanders, and Muton Elites providing higher-tier variations of prior Aliens... in XCOM 2, ADVENT's forces 'level-up' as the game progresses, with most of their units having 2-3 versions of increasing quality. Interestingly, the actual Alien forces do not have equivalent progressions; there's no elite Sectoid to contend with, and indeed the Sectoid Commander doesn't actually have an XCOM 2 equivalent. As such, there's still a few cases of early-game interesting threats falling by the wayside, but it's less consistent an issue than in the prior game, especially since early-game Aliens are consistently positioned as fairly elite and powerful for that point in the game, allowing the late game to reuse them without them being completely sad.
One thing worth pointing out, however, is that ADVENT's forces really basically start from the Advanced tier. Several ADVENT units just have a basic form and an Elite form, and the time frame in which you're facing Basic-tier enemies is really brief, being less 'this is the foundation of combat' and more 'this is the game babying you while you get to the point that you're not throwing Rookies at things'. As such, Advanced Troopers being such a big spike in difficulty compared to Basic Troopers is misleading; you're not expected to find Basic Troopers a problem. You're expected to start being challenged once the switch to Advanced occurs.
Overall, Advanced Troopers aren't fought very differently from Basic Troopers, in spite of gaining a Frag Grenade. Mostly, you can't be as reckless because it's no longer the case that you'll routinely one-shot them with basic weapons.
On a different note, I appreciate how XCOM 2 does a much better job of getting stats to believably align with concepts. It's still got issues -it's pretty ridiculous that the fully-armored, magnetic-weapon-wielding basic ADVENT troops are literally a Rookie but somehow worse- but there's nothing on the level of the prior game's issues, particularly if you focus on enemy statlines 'internally'. That is, it's ridiculous that a basic ADVENT Trooper is 100% worse than your Rookies in spite of ostensibly being better-equipped, but if you're comparing one enemy to another, their stats tend to make a reasonable amount of sense for their aesthetic, particularly if you focus on the elite forms as your point of comparison. That is, don't compare the basic ADVENT Trooper to a Sectoid, but rather compare the Elite Trooper to a Sectoid; using the Elite form as a comparison gives the intuitively logical result that the armored soldier wielding a large rifle is harder to kill and more lethal than the naked alien with a wrist-mounted weapon.
And there's good meta arguments for focusing on the elite forms as the 'true' statline, since the game never directly acknowledges the form progression on ADVENT units and in most ways the game doesn't treat them as 'canon': ADVENT Troopers don't have different graphics for their different quality tiers, for example, and the game will never deliberately mix together different tiers of a given unit on a mission. (With one exception I'll get to in a later post... which is the only case where the different tiers have different graphics, it should be noted) You'll never see an Elite ADVENT Trooper leading a pair of Advanced ADVENT Troopers, for example. You can see different tiers of a given enemy within the same mission, but this is purely due to edge case artifacts of underlying engine stuff: reinforcements sometimes use a different Force Level than the initial mission generation, for example, which can lead to Basic ADVENT Troopers reinforcing into a mission otherwise made entirely of Advanced ones. (Or vice-versa) Similarly, the Blacksite has a 'boss' pod of one ADVENT Mec and two Basic ADVENT Troopers; if you put off attacking the Blacksite, the rest of the enemies will perform normal random generation and so include Advanced or, if you waited forever (I've done this for testing purposes, to be clear, so this isn't hypothetical), Elite ADVENT Troopers, while this one pod will still have a pair of Basic ADVENT Troopers.
But a mission is never designed to deliberately mix tiers in that sort of way.
On the note of mixing tiers, though, it's worth mentioning that ADVENT troops don't advance in lockstep. That is, when ADVENT Troopers first switch to Advanced, ADVENT Stun Lancers remain Basic, only later switching to their own mid-tier form. This is a pleasant surprise, as staggering the progression of enemies makes for a less jagged progression of difficulty, but usually when games have an equivalent concept they'll insist on moving everything in lockstep, even though this is usually harmful to the game design. XCOM 2 being willing to spread it out a bit more is strikingly unusual.
Elite
HP: 8/8/12/12 (8/8/10/11 in the base game)
Armor: 0
Defense: 0/0/10/10
Dodge: 0
Aim: 70/75/75/75
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 5-6 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 10%
Will: 50 (50/60/60/60 in the base game)
Tech: 125
Frag Grenade
The Trooper may throw a single Frag Grenade, which does 3-4 damage and Shreds 1 Armor.
Take an Advanced Trooper, bolster its HP a decent bit more, bolster its Aim a little bit, and slightly increase the damage on both its gun and its Frag Grenade. Throw in some Defense on the higher difficulties, just enough to be annoying when going for Slashes. Done.
Elite Troopers are a sufficiently small improvement over Advanced Troopers that if you're not paying attention to the name pop-up when targeting a unit you might actually fail to notice that they've moved on to Elite, particularly if you're not a fan of Rangers and/or prefer to keep the summary of hit modifiers hidden. I am a fan of Rangers and do keep the summary open and still sometimes fail to notice the switch has occurred!
One oddity you're unlikely to notice on your own is that Elite Troopers have slightly better odds of rolling +1 on their Frag Grenade than their Advanced predecessors: a 33% chance instead of the 20% chance. It's such a small difference I'm not sure why it exists, but there you go.
Frag GrenadeThe Trooper may throw a single Frag Grenade, which does 3-4 damage and Shreds 1 Armor.
Take an Advanced Trooper, bolster its HP a decent bit more, bolster its Aim a little bit, and slightly increase the damage on both its gun and its Frag Grenade. Throw in some Defense on the higher difficulties, just enough to be annoying when going for Slashes. Done.
Elite Troopers are a sufficiently small improvement over Advanced Troopers that if you're not paying attention to the name pop-up when targeting a unit you might actually fail to notice that they've moved on to Elite, particularly if you're not a fan of Rangers and/or prefer to keep the summary of hit modifiers hidden. I am a fan of Rangers and do keep the summary open and still sometimes fail to notice the switch has occurred!
One oddity you're unlikely to notice on your own is that Elite Troopers have slightly better odds of rolling +1 on their Frag Grenade than their Advanced predecessors: a 33% chance instead of the 20% chance. It's such a small difference I'm not sure why it exists, but there you go.
Also, yes, War of the Chosen bumped up their HP on higher difficulties and slightly lowered their Will on non-Rookie difficulties. The Will nerf is kind of whatever, but the HP bump is appreciated, as Elite Troopers really were a touch too frail in the base game.
Overall, not a lot to say relative to prior tiers.
A final mechanical point: you can see the Elite Trooper's damage is operating on +1 mechanics. In almost every case of an enemy attack utilizing +1 mechanics, the chance is 50%. As such, I'll only be explicitly noting the handful of exceptions in future posts; if I don't comment on the +1 damage on a given enemy, you can assume it's the usual 50% chance.
On a different topic, it's worth explicitly stating that in any case where a unit comes in multiple tiers, they don't count as different corpse types. That is, Basic, Advanced, and Elite ADVENT Troopers all provide an 'ADVENT Trooper' corpse, which is then used for the ADVENT Trooper Autopsy, no need to worry about holding onto Basic corpses out of fear they'll be phased out in short order. This is a concern you have to worry about some with certain early-game Alien units that largely drop out of existence, but it's certainly not a concern with ADVENT Troopers.
A related point: a mechanic you'll run into in the game is Tygan informing you that your forces have enough experience fighting a given enemy type to instantly perform the related Autopsy. This is an extremely misleading statement, as the actual mechanic in play is that an Autopsy will switch to Instant if you have enough corpses of its type in storage... strangely, the wider internet claims that Instant Autopsies also remove that number of corpses from your storage, but I've tested this manually and only ever lost 1 corpse, period. So as far as I can tell, there's no reason to not take advantage of an Instant Autopsy once you've unlocked it, unless you'd literally rather sell off all the corpses rather than perform the Autopsy.
In the case of low-value, extremely common enemies like ADVENT Troopers themselves, this isn't a big deal. While their Instant threshold is 15 corpses, they're the single most common enemy type in the game. (Not counting the Lost, anyway) That said, don't sell them off like crazy. You need them for Predator Armor and E.X.O. Suits in fairly heavy numbers. You should at least wait until you've bought Predator Armor.
On a different topic, it's worth explicitly stating that in any case where a unit comes in multiple tiers, they don't count as different corpse types. That is, Basic, Advanced, and Elite ADVENT Troopers all provide an 'ADVENT Trooper' corpse, which is then used for the ADVENT Trooper Autopsy, no need to worry about holding onto Basic corpses out of fear they'll be phased out in short order. This is a concern you have to worry about some with certain early-game Alien units that largely drop out of existence, but it's certainly not a concern with ADVENT Troopers.
A related point: a mechanic you'll run into in the game is Tygan informing you that your forces have enough experience fighting a given enemy type to instantly perform the related Autopsy. This is an extremely misleading statement, as the actual mechanic in play is that an Autopsy will switch to Instant if you have enough corpses of its type in storage... strangely, the wider internet claims that Instant Autopsies also remove that number of corpses from your storage, but I've tested this manually and only ever lost 1 corpse, period. So as far as I can tell, there's no reason to not take advantage of an Instant Autopsy once you've unlocked it, unless you'd literally rather sell off all the corpses rather than perform the Autopsy.
In the case of low-value, extremely common enemies like ADVENT Troopers themselves, this isn't a big deal. While their Instant threshold is 15 corpses, they're the single most common enemy type in the game. (Not counting the Lost, anyway) That said, don't sell them off like crazy. You need them for Predator Armor and E.X.O. Suits in fairly heavy numbers. You should at least wait until you've bought Predator Armor.
Also keep in mind they're notably less common in War of the Chosen. Priests and Purifiers start displacing them fairly early in a run, Chosen dropping in will 'eat' a pod that probably included at least one Trooper if you're talking the early game, The Horde missions reduce how many missions you end up fighting Troopers at all, and other Sitreps can also prevent Trooper encounters. (eg an early Psionic Storm leading to a horde of Sectoids and Priests, with the 3+ Troopers that would normally have appeared nowhere to be seen) In the base game you'll hit the Trooper Instant Autopsy threshold fast, enough so that a research order that slightly puts off the Officer Autopsy may finish it and be instantly prompted to Instant Autopsy Troopers. In War of the Chosen, you'll almost always hit that Instant threshold eventually, but it can sometimes take until you've already developed Plasma Rifles! As such, if you consider Battle Scanners essential before the late game you may wish to burn real lab time on the Trooper Autopsy.
I personally don't find it terribly necessary -just buy Scanning Protocol via the Training Center if you want the utility, which even avoids eating an Item slot- but Battle Scanners are actually more useful in War of the Chosen.
In the base game, whether it's worth burning lab time on the Autopsy basically depends on how terrified you are of Faceless. Getting Battle Scanners unlocked before your first Retaliation mission can easily prevent casualties/mission failure by preventing a Faceless from ambushing you. If you're not terribly concerned by Faceless in that first Retaliation mission, though, you'll generally hit the Instant threshold before Battle Scanners start coming into their own and so it's better to let it do so. I prefer to let Troopers hit their Instant Autopsy threshold, but I also rarely bother to build Battle Scanners once I do have them, and there are genuine flaws with this way of playing. Like getting people ambushed by Faceless.
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One thing I like about ADVENT is that there's a gameplay/story integration regarding ADVENT improving over time while Alien troops do not: it's an actual plotpoint that the earliest ADVENT soldier designs were stronger than more recent ones, in-universe, so in turn it makes a lot of sense that as XCOM's efforts increasingly give the Ethereals a headache they'd hold back ADVENT's strength less and less. Their Alien forces, meanwhile, are presumably already operating at the edge of what the Ethereals are willing to tolerate from their minions, and so don't have much, if any, room to be improved. As I noted earlier it's ambiguous how 'canonical' the soldier progression we see is in-universe, but...
Given one of my frustrations with the prior game was how the gameplay and the narrative were so frequently at odds with each other, it's nice to be able to look at a setting detail, look at the gameplay progression, and go 'yeah, these fit together'. XCOM 2 isn't perfect at this by any stretch, and in fact I've already gotten into some of its issues in this regard, but it's a massive improvement over the previous effort.
In the base game, whether it's worth burning lab time on the Autopsy basically depends on how terrified you are of Faceless. Getting Battle Scanners unlocked before your first Retaliation mission can easily prevent casualties/mission failure by preventing a Faceless from ambushing you. If you're not terribly concerned by Faceless in that first Retaliation mission, though, you'll generally hit the Instant threshold before Battle Scanners start coming into their own and so it's better to let it do so. I prefer to let Troopers hit their Instant Autopsy threshold, but I also rarely bother to build Battle Scanners once I do have them, and there are genuine flaws with this way of playing. Like getting people ambushed by Faceless.
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One thing I like about ADVENT is that there's a gameplay/story integration regarding ADVENT improving over time while Alien troops do not: it's an actual plotpoint that the earliest ADVENT soldier designs were stronger than more recent ones, in-universe, so in turn it makes a lot of sense that as XCOM's efforts increasingly give the Ethereals a headache they'd hold back ADVENT's strength less and less. Their Alien forces, meanwhile, are presumably already operating at the edge of what the Ethereals are willing to tolerate from their minions, and so don't have much, if any, room to be improved. As I noted earlier it's ambiguous how 'canonical' the soldier progression we see is in-universe, but...
Given one of my frustrations with the prior game was how the gameplay and the narrative were so frequently at odds with each other, it's nice to be able to look at a setting detail, look at the gameplay progression, and go 'yeah, these fit together'. XCOM 2 isn't perfect at this by any stretch, and in fact I've already gotten into some of its issues in this regard, but it's a massive improvement over the previous effort.
Aesthetically, I have mixed feelings about ADVENT troops. Things get a little better when including the War of the Chosen content, but base-game ADVENT is all about the black-with-red-highlights color scheme and faceless, dehumanizing uniforms. I'm not a fan of bad guy-ification in games going for nuanced stories in general, but in XCOM 2's case it's flat-out a mistake. While the society the Ethereals have imposed on humanity is a dystopia, a key part of dystopias is that they look like utopias until you dig deep enough. Having stereotypical Evil Colors soldiers with massive guns in full-body armor like they expect to take a bullet any moment as the 'peacekeepers' of the ADVENT dystopia fails to really sell the notion of ADVENT as a plausible dystopia.
This is especially problematic since XCOM 2 is supposed to be a near-future environment that, prior to aliens showing up, was more or less our reality. (Aside Enemy Within heavily implying that The Bureau is canon, anyway) That most modern folks can instantly recognize these designs as Bad Guy Designs is a problem when the population is literally supposed to be actual real life people in the very near future. A fantasy setting or the like can get away with these stereotypes because there's no reason to assume they're recognizable Evil Stereotypes in-universe. A near-future basically-our-reality setting can't do that; this kind of thing is all over pop culture, in many parts of the world, where even people who aren't big on consuming pop culture are at least tangentially aware of these stereotypes.
This is especially problematic given the Aliens still performed a violent invasion, dropped in pods to abduct people, and so on. The Ethereals really ought to have a lot of bad blood to work through; any successful PR campaign should logically involve staying away from the Vader look.
To be entirely fair, I have some suspicions about development stuff. The game frontloads its problems in this regard; as you start seeing more advanced Aliens, the game starts making more of an effort to make the PR Problem Aliens the ones that show up almost exclusively away from prying civilian eyes as well as prettying up the Aliens that are routinely shown to the public. This suggests to me that the beginning-of-game enemy designs got 'locked in' relatively early, before the game's tone was properly set.
The other big thing is that I have suspicions that in the base game the different segments of the development team were just fundamentally operating on different premises of what the game is about, narratively. The base game's plot, as well as elements of its gameplay, seem to be in rough agreement about this being a futuristic utopia other than that secret dark underbelly the average citizen is unaware of, with XCOM being gritty guerrilla fighters that can't possibly go toe-to-toe with the Aliens/ADVENT; you keep winning individual fights through ambush and getting out before your enemies bring in a real army, but the Doom Clock is always ticking down and it's only a decapitation strike that ultimately saves the day, heavily implying your various individual victories aren't really hurting ADVENT/the Aliens.
Meanwhile, the art gives everyone massive guns and Mad Max-style armor where it's utterly unbelievable that your rag-tag band of soldiers is somehow sneaking around in ADVENT's clean city centers at all, suggesting the art team is coming at things more like 'post-apocalyptic punks taking it to The Man', and the sound team seems to be operating on this idea that this is a Heroic Story about Heroically ROFLStomping Clearcut Bad Guys. (The post-battle victory music in particular stands out for being agonizingly out of place by embracing this Heroic Awesome Victory Of Clean Happiness model)
Particularly notable is that these problems lessen in War of the Chosen. The new ADVENT troops better fit to the clean image ADVENT would need to be projecting, and the tone of the music shifts much more heavily toward a foreboding, menacing mood, like every mission could cost someone their life. They don't go back and overhaul literally every ADVENT-related art asset nor rip out and replace all the old and inappropriate music, but War of the Chosen is overly-ambitious as-is, so fair enough.
This would suggest that everyone got more on board with the same premise, instead of all operating on radically different notions of what kind of game-slash-story this is, when making War of the Chosen.
One other bit of evidence in favor of this theory is that some loading screens depict ADVENT propaganda posters, which present ADVENT troops in shiny silver designs that resemble Robocop more than anything else. Still not the nicest image, but much less foreboding than their in-game designs, and I suspect the propaganda poster images got made later in the development than the core gameplay graphics.
As such, while ADVENT troops bug me for the lack-of-fitting problem, I have more patience with the game than with its predecessor when it comes to problems like this, as it's clear the problems aren't due to active self-sabotage or similar, but rather were in part the kind of problem it's extremely difficult for any sufficiently large team to avoid running into precisely due to how many people are working together.
I can be sympathetic to that kind of problem.
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Next time, I cover ADVENT's Officers.
See you then.
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Next time, I cover ADVENT's Officers.
See you then.
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