XCOM 2 Mission Analysis: Guerrilla Ops

At last we come to Guerrilla Ops, the first standard mission type introduced by the game.

Broadly speaking, Guerrilla Ops are XCOM 2 refining Abductions from the prior game: three generate simultaneously once per month, you only get to pick one to actually perform, and they have randomized rewards attached. There's enough differences and further details I suspect I'm not the only one to take a while to make that connection, though.

So first of all, where Abductions were all a very bland 'kill everything on the map' mission with no sub-variations whatsoever, Guerrilla Ops actually comes in a huge variety of mission types -nine in the base game, eleven in War of the Chosen. Admittedly 'kill everything on the map' is always mandatory to clear the mission (Even though it mostly doesn't make sense), but still, that's a pretty big contrast with Abductions, and it gets tied into the randomization, complicating which Guerrilla Op to pick.

Second, Abductions were tied into the Panic system, which XCOM 2's closest equivalent is the Avatar Project bar, which Guerrilla Ops only indirectly interact with in a limited way. (I'm talking about the possibility of blocking a Minor or Major Breakthrough) A side effect of this is that Guerrilla Ops are, oddly, position-agnostic -in the base game, which areas they generate in doesn't matter outside affecting Avenger travel time, while in War of the Chosen it only matters thanks to Chosen territoriality, and only erratically at that. Not to mention taking out all the Chosen makes it stop mattering...

Third, Guerrilla Ops have a reversal of distribution dynamics -Abductions started out able to spawn almost anywhere in the world while being blocked off by Satellite coverage, such that you could entirely prevent them from spawning if you covered the whole world. Guerrilla ops instead only generate in regions you're in contact with, and thus will instead start out generating in a limited portion of the world and ultimately end up hitting anywhere in the world if you bother to contact the whole world. Not that you really care where they generate, as noted earlier, but still, the reversal is interesting, particularly in terms of indicating XCOM 3 is liable to be willing to make similar radical changes.

Anyway, focusing more on XCOM 2 itself...

First, let's get into the randomness elements.

Guerrilla Ops have four major elements of randomness in the base game, and a fifth in War of the Chosen. These are: Dark Event blocking, mission reward, mission type, mission 'difficulty', and in War of the Chosen there's also the consideration of Sitreps.

Dark Events I already largely covered in their own posts, but to briefly reiterate the most relevant points: up to three Dark Events generate per month (Except the first month only generates two), when Guerrilla Ops generate each Guerilla Op will be tied to a Dark Event with no overlap, with succeeding at a mission causing the associated Dark Event to be canceled, while failing causes the Dark Event to go through instantly. 

Mission reward, meanwhile, is pulled from a random list of possible rewards, including Supplies, Intel, an Engineer, a Scientist, or a reward soldier. A detail to note here: each reward type will show up only once in each given set of Guerrilla Ops; if one Guerrilla Op is offering Supplies, then the other two are not offering Supplies. (Annoyingly, soldier rewards are partially exempt -I've never seen two Guerrilla Ops offer the same class, but I've absolutely seen one offering a Ranger while another offers a Grenadier. I've yet to have all three Guerrilla Ops offer reward soldiers, at least)

Mission type we'll of course be getting into in detail in this post, but it should be immediately emphasized that this also is forbidden from doubling up; if one Guerrilla Op is Protect The Device, the other two are not Protect The Device. This furthermore makes Guerrilla Ops unusual in regards to the game attempting to cycle through the full pool of mission types, as Guerrilla Ops can't actually force you to do any given mission type the way Retaliations and VIP missions can. (Outside the first and potentially the second Guerrilla Op, anyway) Indeed, the game actually only forces missions to generate, it doesn't care whether you did them; if you shun a Neutralize Field Commander mission in favor of a different Guerrilla Op, you're not going to see Neutralize Field Commander put back into the pool for a few months. Of course, generating three Guerrilla Ops per month means nothing is off the table for long; in the base game, the pool is fully cycled through in three months if you have contact with at least three regions, and War of the Chosen only slows it by 2/3rds of a month.

Mission 'difficulty' is a bit of opacity I understand the impulse of but think is ill-advised in practice -it is literally the game telling you the number of enemies and their pod distribution, just rendered in the form of vaguely describing a mission as 'easy' or 'hard' or the like. They are...

Very Easy (5 enemies)

Easy (6 enemies, three pods of two, the lowest difficulty you'll see in Regular and Commander)

Medium (8 enemies, two pods of three and one pod of two)

Hard (9 enemies, three pods of three)

Very Hard (11 enemies, three pods of three and one pod of two)

Impossible? (14 enemies. I've never actually seen this and so don't know the distribution -I'm getting the count from the config files. I'd assume four pods of three and one of two, but I don't know for sure)

I've personally only seen Very Easy when trying Long War 2, where it didn't even have the same affect -it means 7 enemies in Long War 2. Which makes sense given the config files indicate it's exclusive to Rookie difficulty, which I've literally never touched. So that's why I don't have a listed distribution; I've no idea what it's distribution is.

Sitreps I've already covered extensively, but a refresher; a lone Guerrilla Op has a 50% chance to generate with a Sitrep, if two Guerrilla Op missions generated one has a 75% chance to generate with a Sitrep while the other has a 25% chance, while if a full three Guerrilla Op missions generated the odds are 100%/50%/5% for the first/second/third slots to generate with a Sitrep.

Anyway, I'm saying four/five major elements, but it's probably more accurate to say five/six, it's just the game doesn't actually inform you of the fifth/sixth: plot type.

Guerrilla Ops are nearly unique when it comes to plot types, particularly in the base game. I've already been over Retaliation missions being consistently Shanty, and similarly been over how the VIP missions, though in War of the Chosen they collectively cover three plot types, they individually are much more rigid, with only one of them having even two possible plot types. This is pretty typical; the vast majority of missions outside the Guerrilla Op pool have a single plot type they use, with a handful having two plot types.

Guerrilla Ops, meanwhile, all share two possible plot types in the base game (Small Town and Slums), and War of the Chosen has many of them expand to five possible plot types. Slums vs Small Town is already actually pretty different, but War of the Chosen adding Sewers, Subway, and Abandoned City to many of these is even more dramatically variable; for one thing, remember that Abandoned Cities always come with Lost, even if no Sitrep was actually rolled. Sewers and Subway, meanwhile, are underground maps and so have effects like expanding the pool of possible reinforcements to include assorted non-ADVENT enemies. There's an impressive level of variety here!

Also, every Guerrilla Op involves some form of time pressure at some point, though not necessarily an explicit timer. One of War of the Chosen's new missions is a bit weird in that the timer doesn't actually kick in until squad Concealment is lost, and thus it uniquely lets you stall indefinitely initially, but even it has a time limit once you've broken squad Concealment, so time pressure of some kind is actually consistently a thing in Guerrilla Ops.

Guerrilla Ops also all share the point that it's possible to fail a mission but still profit; if you fail the objective, you can still kill all the enemies, and you'll loot their bodies. (No matter which specific mission type it is) If things are going really wrong, I guess you can Evac after the objective is failed to minimize casualties, but this isn't really a thing you should be doing.

Notably, the squad Evaccing and/or dying automatically fails the mission, even if the objective seems like it ought to be valid to solve as 'get in, grab the thing we need, get out'. That is, even if you collect the widget your squad is here for, and the soldier carrying the object Evacs successfully, ending up with no soldiers conscious on the field will fail the Guerrilla Op anyway. (Including denying you corpses as loot, where failing the objective but killing everything at least gets you the bodies)

This is one of the more unfortunate design missteps, as Guerrilla Ops are premised, in terms of the game design, around the idea that the player kills everything on the map -Guerrilla Ops are your most common source of looting enemy corpses, especially as a run goes on and Retaliation missions become less common. Meanwhile, the majority of your Guerrilla Ops are objectives that really ought to be hit-and-run missions like the base-game VIP missions; only one of your nine base-game missions makes sense as demanding you kill everything to qualify for mission success! War of the Chosen adds two more missions, and only one of them is sort of understandable as requiring you kill everything to succeed. (And only with some questionable assumptions and willingly ignoring key elements of the narrative/gameplay intersection)

Guerrilla Ops really either shouldn't have been made to be your primary source of looting bodies, embracing the in-and-out logic (And transferring Protect The Device to a different mission pool), or should've been given objectives that fundamentally made sense for 'kill everything' to be an essential assumption.

Anyway, one of the complexity/learning curve issues with Guerrilla Ops is that your very first Guerrilla Op is a non-standard Guerrilla Op that is highly misleading about what Guerrilla Ops are about; it generates alone, occurs before Dark Events are even revealed, is guaranteed to have its reward be an Engineer, and occurs early in the first month before the normal Guerrilla Op generation occurs. (As in, in addition to the normal Guerrilla Op generation) It otherwise does function as a Guerrilla Op, pulling from the Guerrilla Op mission pool and using normal rules for the mission and all (Including that it has a chance of generating with a Sitrep in War of the Chosen, though it seems much lower a chance than is normal for a solo Guerrilla Op), but it's highly misleading an introduction. It's especially confusing given VIP/Resistance request missions are already a dedicated once-a-month mission type for throwing Scientists and Engineers at you; I'm not sure why they didn't just make your first such mission force an Engineer and call it a day.

An additional wrinkle is that there's a (rare) Rumor type that, once finished scanning, generates a lone Guerrilla Op. Aside being alone, this Guerrilla Op is fully standard; randomized reward, blocks a Dark Event (Unless you fail or skip the mission, in which case the Dark Event goes through immediately), etc.

Before getting into specifics on Guerrilla Ops, a non-obvious change caused by War of the Chosen is that Hacking opportunities are much rarer; in the base game, every Guerrilla Op can potentially generate security towers (Because Slums and Small Town maps can have security towers), and 7 out of 9 of your mission types involve Hacking an objective, while every VIP mission is guaranteed to have security towers and 2 out of 5 mission types have Hacking as part of the objective -with the pool initially restricted so that it's 2 out of 3.

In War of the Chosen, your three new VIP missions never have Hacking opportunities of any kind (With your first month forced to pick between two of these no-Hacking mission types), while Guerrilla Ops have gained two new missions whose objectives aren't Hacks and four of the old mission types are now only a 2 in 5 chance of picking a plot type where security towers are valid. (With those same odds applying to the new mission types)

Taken altogether, in the base game most months you'll get 2-4 Hacking opportunities (Up to 6 in the first month!) and at worst will have a minimum of 1 Hack opportunity (Because security towers are guaranteed in VIP missions), whereas in War of the Chosen you can have 2-4 Hacks in any given month but you'll actually generally get 1-2 Hack opportunities per month. (And in the first month it's no longer possible to get up to 6 Hacking opportunities; 4 is the limit)

As such, the utility of Specialists being good remote Hackers (And SPARKs being bad but at least still remote Hackers) is significantly less in War of the Chosen even though they've suffered no direct nerf on the topic.

(Technically, rescuing Kidnapped soldiers is a new possible source of Hack opportunities, but I've repeatedly alluded to how reluctant the game is to let you rescue soldiers if you even let them get Kidnapped in the first place. I'm also leaving out the part where landed UFOs are actually another Hacking opportunity; it's possible to get 5 Hacks in a later month because of this. I'm similarly not counting Rumor-derived Guerrilla Ops and Lost Towers. This all ultimately doesn't change the core point)

On a more trivial topic, it's worth pointing out that the Xenoform biome is forbidden to all these Guerrilla Ops. I suspect this comes down to the fact that the only plot type Guerrilla Ops use that uses the biome system is Small Town, and Xenoform seems to be broadly intended to be hostile to human life. I'm less sure if this is yet more 'War of the Chosen was rushed' at work or not, though; Xenoform Small Town could certainly be done even if Xenoform is meant to depict an environment hostile to human life, but it would require more work, ensuring that Small Towns are consistently abandoned or some such. So maybe that was the intent, and they never got to it because of the rushing... or maybe there was never any intention of Xenoform Small Town being a thing.

Anyway, mission specifics!

Hack The Hidden Resistance Computer

Hack the Hidden Resistance Computer can take place in Slums or Small Town, plus in War of the Chosen it can take place in Abandoned City, Sewers, and Subway plot types. The primary objective is to successfully Hack an object before the timer runs out, with of course a secondary objective of needing to murder everything on the map to slake Bradford's lust for blood because the devs intend for Guerrilla Ops to be a primary source of corpses.

The object in question is represented by a laptop sitting on some Low Cover object like a table, and is placed inside a building, with clear line of sight from outside the structure to the laptop; this is a great Guerrilla Op for Specialists (Or SPARKs) to shine, as their Remote Hacking can generally get the job done 1-2 turns earlier than somebody walking to the object would. Notably, a pod is assigned to guard the Hack object, and is almost always lingering somewhere just beyond it; often, a soldier advancing to the Hack location will actually trigger this pod. (Though not always; they can be outright behind the building, and the building doesn't necessarily have windows in its back) Remote Hacking is thus safer in addition to faster.

Abandoned City variants are more prone to the pod actively sitting right on top of the objective such that seeing the objective means seeing the pod; Reapers are a big help here. Sewer and Subway variants don't have the objective in a literal building, and windows aren't a relevant concept, but it works out much the same as with Small Town and Slum instances, where the pod is very likely to be activated if you have a soldier run to the Hack point whereas a Remote Hack will likely let you avoid activating the pod too early and will certainly be faster. (And, if it's a Specialist, more likely to give a bonus reward)

One wrinkle to note with all Guerrilla Ops is that if your objective involves Hacking, whoever performs the Hack will have a star icon appear on them. This is meaningful: if that soldier dies, they will drop timed loot with a 4-turn timer, and if that loot times out, you fail the objective. For four of these mission types, this is reasonably intuitive, as they're framed as retrieving an actual physical object (Even if there's no in-universe reason for it to time out once dropped), but for this one and the following two missions it's easy to figure that you copied some data and obviously it got promptly sent to the Avenger or shared wirelessly with the whole squad or whatever, and nope, you're wrong, it's still carried on a specific soldier.

I imagine the vast majority of players are entirely unaware of this mechanic, as normally you're almost done with the mission when it's possible for it to crop up, making it unlikely the Hacker will die, and extraordinarily unlikely the objective loot will time out before you finish the final pod. Nonetheless, if you end up in that situation, you need to either retrieve the loot or finish off the last non-Turret enemies fast; don't make the mistake of thinking it's regular timed loot and ignoring it as not valuable enough to be worth retrieving.

This being a thing in this particular way is pretty unfortunate, because the majority of the time it might as well not be a thing at all, but I guarantee there's a non-trivial fraction of players who have failed a Guerrilla Op and been left completely mystified as to how they failed it at all, and especially how they failed it after they'd succeeded, not connecting the timed loot to the mission objective. (Whether because they don't remember who did pick up regular timed loot earlier in the mission or because they happened to perform the Hack with someone who had picked up regular timed loot)

The intriguing thing is that you can evade this circumstance by having the Hacker Evac before you finish off all the enemies, ensuring they can't die and drop the objective. It makes me wonder if a full squad Evac post-Hack was intended to be a valid course of action at some point in development; certainly, that's how Long War 2 handles its equivalents, and Firaxis and Pavonis did work together when it came to XCOM 2.

Unfortunately, if this is evidence of changed plans, the change really should've been taken a bit further; in the current design, the only thing that would change if a successful Hack didn't result in the game tracking the loot as a specific in-world object but rather just toggled the 'mission accomplished' flag is that a non-obvious edge case way to fail these missions that almost never matters would go away. So pure improvement to the design; there's no purpose served by having a hidden 'gotcha!' that probably the devs don't even remember (realize?) exists.

Still, it's not too bad...

Overall, though, I have little to say about this particular mission type, as it's just... normal. 7 out of 9 base-game Guerrilla Ops work like this; there's a Hack objective, a timer, a rectangular map with a clear direction to advance, a pod near the objective, reinforcements can trigger upon completing the Hack (Or wiping out all non-Turret enemies on the map prior to performing the Hack), etc.

Narratively, this is the start of an unfortunate trend; that the timed nature of Guerrilla Ops tends to not naturally follow from the narrative premise. You're here to retrieve some data on a laptop left behind by resistance fighters, which will become impossible to Hack after a while... why?

This particular case is especially unfortunate since it would be so easy to slightly rework things to make it make sense; either say ADVENT is trying to hack the laptop and the player's goal is to stop that, or say ADVENT is hunting for the laptop, intending to destroy it. Full representation would require some actual gameplay tweaks, but even just saying either of these would do a lot to make the timer more natural, as it would get to represent 'time until ADVENT hacks or finds and destroys the laptop'. And mission timers are already a bit abstract, so further abstraction isn't out of place.

Hack The Workstation In ADVENT Facility

It's Hack The Hidden Resistance Computer, but your target is in an ADVENT building. As part of this, it's restricted to Slum and Small Town even into War of the Chosen; it would be tremendously silly for there to be an ADVENT building in a sewer, yeah?

While it's broadly alike to the immediately prior mission type, the switch to an ADVENT building has a few implications. The big one is that it's pretty common for there to be ADVENT Turrets placed atop the building, usually placed on the side you're expected to approach from. They won't be able to fire into the building, so they're less of a hurdle to running in and Hacking directly than you might expect, but that's on top of the pod that's usually lingering on the other side of the building; you should ideally take out the Turrets first, not to mention still prefer to Remote Hack the objective.

Notably, the ADVENT building's windows are laser-fenced, so you can't just hop through them; this further raises the utility of Remote Hacking compared to the prior mission. (Because, rather strangely, Gremlins can fly through laser fencing without issue)

Occasionally Remote Hacking's utility is curtailed by virtue of the wall facing you not actually having windows, or the workstation being placed so there isn't a clear line of sight through the window(s). This is atypical, though, and it's fairly safe to blast your way through if it does happen; the workstation is always away from the walls.

It's also not unusual for the building to have ADVENT vehicles parked nearby. This is largely kind of whatever, but it can include a very large truck, which is significant because entire pods can hide behind the truck. They're annoyingly prone to just lingering there if they do spawn there, as well, leading readily to you deciding the area must be clear because two turns of approach didn't spot anything and whoops now you're effectively being ambushed by a pod!

The building itself is theoretically a nice little high ground fortress, but unfortunately this usually doesn't matter; the AI rarely tries to take advantage, and it's perfectly normal to wipe out all pods and Hack the workstation without ever getting a good opportunity to put someone up there. This is particularly true in War of the Chosen, where reinforcements occur less consistently and can be circumvented entirely due to their delayed flare-spawning behavior and failure to aggressively trigger in response to every enemy being dead.

The Hunter and Warlock are prone to ending up fighting from atop them, so that's something at least.

Overall, though, this is Another Kinda Generic Guerrilla Op: for all that Guerrilla Ops are the widest pool of mission types, the meaningful differences between types are a bit limited, particularly in the base game. This isn't too bad a problem when playing, in part because of the pick-one-of-three stuff, but it means I don't have a lot to talk about with individual ones. I do hope XCOM 3 is a little better about real variety; the game would be slightly different if you just removed a bunch of redundant mission types, but it wouldn't be clearly worse for the change, which is an unfortunate statement to be able to make.

Narratively, this mission is a little weird, but holds up better than the prior mission; what you get told is that the workstation is connected to a larger ADVENT network and you have a limited window before the terminal shuts down. The exact wording and presentation is odd, but the basic idea is actually sound; in real life you'll get work computers that automatically log out the current user after enough time has passed, and this is in fact a security-conscious thing. It's believable that an ADVENT insider has arranged to coordinate with the resistance a day that they'll log in and 'forget' to log out when they leave, where X-COM thus has a limited window of usability for the workstation because it'll still log out automatically. Straining believability but not actually impossible would be X-COM trying to take advantage of a genuine 'ADVENT employee forgot to log out' opportunity, for that matter.

It'd be nice if Bradford was talking in terms of the workstation logging out rather than talking in terms of it shutting down, but still, this holds up okay.

Hack The Workstation On ADVENT Train

Surprisingly, being attached to a train makes this noticeably different from the prior two, even though you're still Hacking a workstation and all, in spite of the train never moving, and in spite of sharing the 'only Slum or Small Town' limits of the ADVENT building variant.

This comes back to the train itself, as train maps are extremely consistent about starting you near one end of the train and designing the map so advancing alongside the train is the order of the day. In various ways, for various reasons, this produces a very different experience from just walking through a Slum cityscape or Small Town almost-wilderness.

First and most obvious is that the train itself is one long and tall obstructer of line of sight/fire. (Albeit one punctuated intermittently by single-tile gaps) This is distinctive to train maps, and creates a noticeably different set of concerns from the majority of maps when it comes to pod activation. On the one hand, you can largely treat the train-side as safe in the sense that advancing will almost never activate a pod from that direction. (Notably, the points where train cars meet is normally not treated as a gap; even if it looks like you should be able to see between the cars, you can't) Every once in a great while a pod will actually be stopped right on the other side of an open part of the train, but this is much rarer than I'd have guessed when first playing the game. Similarly, some train cars are actually not tall obstructions and so a pod on the other side can be readily spotted -but usually a train will be an unbroken chain of tall cars.

On the other hand, train cars have climb points intermittently, and pods are in fact willing to patrol up onto the train. Thus, pods can readily patrol right into your squad's face in a way that's much less likely to occur in most map types. This is generally a good thing to let happen, since it makes it easier to get flanks and close-range accuracy bonuses and so on, but is certainly unique, and can be concerning if it happens while already engaged with a different pod. It's also one of the rare times Purifiers are liable to be in a position to light up people with their flamethrower; a pod patrolling into view at the edge of your line of sight ends up with the Purifier too far away to reach people in one turn and burn them. A pod patrolling over a train, five tiles away from your leading scout, can result in the Purifier literally leaning against the Cover your frontmost soldier is using!

More rarely, this type of idea can occur with other enemies. An early Savage Sitrep -so early it forces all the pods to be Faceless- is a lot more likely to be trouble on a train map than on a non-train map, because a Faceless pod will probably patrol over the train and end up in easy reach of your squad as a result. (Unless you just stay far from the train, of course) This can crop up more erratically with other melee enemies, though they're generally fast enough it mostly doesn't matter... Lost waves are another case it can be significant with, as while the game will prefer to spawn them on your side of the train in the direction of the far engine, sometimes it'll decide a wave should spawn from the other side of the train, in which case they'll very possibly spawn just behind the train and then climb over it right into your squad's face. This is one of the few ways Lost are liable to actually deal damage to your soldiers, if a big enough wave spawns and you either get unlucky on Headshot strings or are already having to divert attention to another pod. (Maybe an Alien Ruler stumbled into your squad on the enemy turn)

The train cars are also a mixture of completely indestructible elements (The bottommost portion the wheels are attached to and all, as well as part of each end) and destructible-but-unusually-durable elements, with opportunities to use them for Cover almost always being High Cover. Thus, if a pod activates and at least one member decides to take cover inside the train itself, they'll be difficult to expose, but usually not impossible. Among other points, this means train missions are one of the cases where your technology improving has a very noticeable impact beyond just keeping up with enemy stats rising; an early train mission you might as well treat the train as indestructible, even though this is technically untrue. With a later train mission, you gain realistic access to blowing holes in the train.

(I actually wish this was more normal; the degree to which objects tend to be either very frail or completely indestructible means that stuff like the switch to Plasma Grenades is less impactful than you might expect, and makes the late game feel less like a true progression in technology than it would if you more consistently, clearly improved in your ability to smash parts of the environment for tactical advantage)

The tops of trains are also unusual in that they're very accessible high ground that generally isn't worth taking. Part of this is that train missions usually offer other options -in this case, there's usually buildings running alongside the train- but mostly it's the design of the train tops and larger mission design. The tops of the trains are directly unappealing because they have awful Cover; most train cars have their Cover restricted purely to a pair of Turret sockets, which are only Low Cover and are poorly positioned for getting line of fire on enemies. (You won't be able to shoot enemies hugging the train itself, among other issues) They're also unappealing because of pod activation concerns: taking to the top of a train makes it far more likely that a pod on the other side of the train will be activated during your turn, instead of the enemy turn, when the latter is the more desirable scenario.

Indeed, one reason it's better to let pods on the other side of the train patrol over it into your squad is that the combination of climb point positioning and Turret socket positioning means that such a pod will virtually never get Cover benefits if caught by Overwatch. Free damage and all.

On the note of Turret sockets, unsurprisingly Turrets are very common in this mission, because it's a train mission, and there's usually two -or more!- Turrets plopped into these sockets. (Reminder: Turret sockets that a Turret took over don't function as Cover. This makes train tops even worse of a Cover situation than they first look) If you're playing War of the Chosen, you may wish to consider prioritizing this mission -or Recover Item From ADVENT Train- to improve your odds of unlocking the Defense Matrix in a timely manner.

It's worth noting that hugging the train itself ensures Turrets can't fire on whoever is doing the hugging. This is particularly useful to know when on final approach to the objective -a soldier can just hug the train if there's a Turret on the last car and you're not ready to destroy it but are running out of time.

The objective itself has something janky about it, as the workstation's car is a non-standard variant that has window strips across most of it, where it really seems like you should be able to use Remote Hacking to get at it through the window, but the way the game draws 'line of fire' for Remote Hacking means that most reasonable-looking angles don't actually let you do the Hack. I've sometimes had a Specialist standing on a nearby roof able to Remote Hack the workstation through the window, but even that is frustratingly finicky.

In practice, it's generally best to approach this mission as if Remote Hacking won't help you, because it probably won't. Among other points, this workstation is handled as a much larger object than the one tile object that objective Hacks usually are; I've tried blowing up the train wall to make Remote Hacking possible, and have yet to figure out a way to do that without it usually destroying the workstation itself. A couple times, I didn't even get the friendly fire warning but still blew it up!

Anyway, returning to the larger map, it's worth noting that in addition to the train per se, this and the other train Guerrilla Op have a fair few broader environmental objects you won't see elsewhere. The most obvious one is a fuel station up against the train, where the train is obviously meant to be refueling at this stop, but it's not the only one. So that's one of the more direct ways these train missions trend toward distinctiveness.

Overall, I like this mission a lot. XCOM 2's train missions work pretty well pretty consistently and are a surprisingly different gameplay experience from most mission types, even though for example this sounds like it's just Hack The Hidden Resistance Computer or Hack The Workstation In ADVENT Facility with a different aesthetic. I wouldn't mind at all if XCOM 3 contrived a reason to return to train maps.

Narratively, this is a lot more strained than the prior 'hack a workstation' mission. Why is there a workstation to hack on a secure ADVENT train in the first place? Why is it active and unmanned while the train is stopped somewhere? What's this workstation supposed to be for? Why does it time out?

I can sort of stretch and posit some broadly similar ideas to the prior mission, but it's more difficult, and the in-game framing is that the train's workstation is carrying important data per se, rather than being an access point to info elsewhere -this would probably work better if XCOM 2 was able and willing to do stuff like have the train leave the map, so the timer could be showing how long it is until the train leaves.

I do wonder if that was the intent, and the devs just didn't manage to get the game engine to cooperate on trains being moving objects before it was time to prep for release, or something of the sort. I would readily buy that the devs underestimated how big an obstacle having the trains moving in-game would be -terrain that moves raises a lot of mechanical questions that require answers, and usually when I see tactics games have terrain conceptually move the actual mechanical behavior is extremely simplified and dodges the majority of the attendant questions. (eg in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, there's a mission where the 'terrain' is clouds that drift as the battle goes on -but units are not moved, and all the terrain slides a tile at a time, avoiding a bunch of mechanical questions needing to be answered) 'Terrain that moves' also seems to be one of those things developers routinely think is a cool idea that couldn't possibly be that hard to implement, only for it to be much more problematic than they assumed.

So I really, really wouldn't be surprised if the trains were intended to move, and what we got is a late kludge when that didn't work out very well narratively.

Still works surprisingly well mechanically, though.

Recover Item From ADVENT Facility

Our first 'recover item' mission...

... and it's basically exactly the same thing as a 'hack the whatever' mission. The objective is a chest rather than a workstation or resistance laptop, but mechanically you just Hack it to open it, and as I noted earlier the Hack objectives have you carrying a concrete object; that's not a layer of distinction between 'hack workstation' objectives and 'recover item' objectives.

So basically this is Hack The Workstation In ADVENT Facility a second time. This includes both of them being restricted to Slum or Small town plot types, Turrets liable to be on the building, and Remote Hacking tending to be possible and useful, a pod guarding the back of the building...

I'm curious what went on in XCOM 2's development that we ended up with two sets of categories that sound distinct but aren't.

As a further layer of unfortunate, the 'recover item' missions are consistently much more narratively nonsensical than the 'hack thing' objectives. Why are you on a timer for these chest-contained objects? According to Bradford, 'self-detonating charges' are set up inside the chest, so it will automatically be destroyed when the timer hits 0.

What? Why? If ADVENT wants to destroy the evidence or whatever, why did they lock the goods up in a chest with timed explosives to wipe them out later? Why not destroy them immediately? Or if the idea is that ADVENT would rather destroy them then let them fall into resistance hands, why is there a timer counting down the very instant the mission starts? Shouldn't they either manually destroy the object when they're unhappy with how close your squad is, or start the timer in response to squad Concealment breaking?

It's especially unfortunate since it's not actually necessary. Broadly, I'm sympathetic to the issue that Guerrilla Ops are premised under being time pressure missions and coming up with a good variety of sensible timed missions that don't require significant mechanical modification to represent is genuinely hard. I'd honestly expect, with nine different missions in the base-game pool, at least one of the missions being timed to be narratively strained. Notably, if plans did indeed significantly change, it's entirely possible this is at least partially a casualty of such; I wouldn't be at all surprised if hack vs recover was either intended to be much more different but the original idea proved difficult to implement, or if they were more different at one point but one of them got effectively cut in the form of being made more like the other because of gameplay problems. 

Even so, it wouldn't require that much work to say the object is going to be made off with and you need to grab it before it gets picked up. (If nothing else, it being teleported out would be a low-effort solution) Alternatively, Bradford could tell us that ADVENT is destroying a bunch of stuff, and we're here for a specific thing ADVENT doesn't know is specifically important, with the timer representing how long until ADVENT gets around to the thing we specifically care about. Or ADVENT could be in the middle of decrypting a coded message, and we're here to stop that from happening.

I'm genuinely a bit mystified by this extremely bizarre 'self-detonating charges' explanation getting produced, as opposed to any of the more sensible explanations available.

Recover Item From ADVENT Train

It's Hack The Workstation On ADVENT Train.

Okay, that's unfair. Where the workstation variant has the pod usually on the far side of the train, and has the workstation visible through windows, this variant has the chest placed in a compartment with no windows and usually has the pod sitting directly atop the objective, inside the train. These differences do matter; melee is much more useful in this variant than the workstation variant, and Remote Hacking is essentially completely worthless instead of horribly finnicky but useful if you can get things lined up right.

But otherwise it really is the same thing.

I still like it well enough -train missions are good in XCOM 2- but I have little to say about it that isn't covered in the prior train mission writeup.

Recover Item From Resistance Haven

This is essentially Hack The Hidden Resistance Computer, including that War of the Chosen expands its plot type list to include Abandoned City, Sewers, and Subway.

There's... genuinely not anything to add here. I'm not aware of any differences of substance between the two. Bradford has different dialogue for the two, but that's it.

I guess I'll take this opportunity to point out that all these Hack-based objectives can call in reinforcements in response to the Hack being performed in particular. In the base game this will spawn the flare instantly, and it's very reliable about happening, while in War of the Chosen the flare spawns at the start of your next turn and the game is much less consistent about doing reinforcements in the first place. (Which is another reason you get Instant Autopsies less readily in War of the Chosen: fewer bodies dropping into Guerrilla Ops for you to collect) Also, in any Guerrilla Op where the game has decided reinforcements will spawn in response to completing the objective, killing every enemy on the map without having completed the objective will trigger the reinforcements -and a reinforcement flare being present counts as enemies being alive on the map in terms of preventing the mission from ending because you're not considered to have killed everything, so in the base game you can't bypass such reinforcements. (ie you can't kill every enemy, then Hack the objective, and have the mission end before the reinforcement flare spawns, because killing everyone instantly triggered the flare)

Recover Item From ADVENT Vehicle

This isn't 'it's hack a thing with a different name'. There is no mission to hack a workstation in a truck, after all.

Indeed, what it's actually most like is the VIP mission to rescue a VIP from an ADVENT truck, as it uses the same truck and even places the chest in the same place as where the VIP starts standing. Unlike the VIP mission, though, the doors are unlocked; it's the chest you need to Hack.

This puts Remote Hacking into a slightly weird place, as these doors are unusual; most doors in XCOM 2 can be opened by virtue of simply ordering a unit to move to a location beyond the door. Either the unit will knock the door out of their way, or they'll pause for a second as it opens on its own; either way, most doors are no impediment even if technically closed, as your soldiers don't even spend a tile of Mobility on this or anything.

These doors have to be manually opened by stopping in front of them and using the contextual input to open them before soldiers can pass through, which is not technically unique but is pretty close; as far as I'm aware, the VIP-in-truck mission is the only other case of a door functioning this way in the base game, and in its case it doesn't matter normally because Hacking the doors opens them automatically. You have to actually manually close those doors for it to crop up, and it's really unlikely you'll ever have cause to do so. (War of the Chosen's subway maps have the subway train doors also work this way, but this still isn't very intrusive)

Anyway, the need to open the doors manually cuts into your ability to Hack safely from range -somebody has to approach the doors and open them- but on the other hand it also means it's harder for a single soldier to handle the whole thing unless they have Remote Hacking: a Specialist or SPARK can spend an action point on getting up to the doors, open them as a free action, then Remote Hack the chest. A Grenadier would instead walk up, open the doors, then walk over to the chest and be out of action points. So Remote Hacking's utility is in a weird place in this mission, and only this mission.

Alternatively, Run And Gun is helpful here, letting a soldier approach the doors, open them, approach the chest, and use their Run And Gun action point to actually Hack it. It can be helpful with any Hack objective, of course, but the door weirdness gives it much greater odds of cropping up here than with other Hack objectives.

Unsurprisingly, this is one of the missions that's still restricted to Slum or Small Town into War of the Chosen. Why would you find an ADVENT truck in an Old World city, or underground?

Overall, while the truck is different once you're there, for the rest of the map it's not that different from Hack the Hidden Resistance Computer or whatever.

Narratively, this is another case where I have to wonder if vehicular movement was supposed to be a thing at some point. This mission would make perfect sense if the truck was scheduled to leave soon, or was disabled somehow and the timer represented how long it would take for ADVENT to fix the issue and get moving, and either way the timer hitting zero was the moment the truck left the map and took its cargo with it.

Alas, we got 'self-detonating charges' instead, which remains an absolutely baffling explanation for the timer.

I do wonder if vehicles-as-terrain-that-moves will be one of the major engine improvements to XCOM 3...

Destroy The Alien Relay

At last, a mission that isn't 'Hack some thing before time runs out'!

The goal in this case is to destroy an 'alien relay' before it completes some transmission. The alien relay in question is a hostile environmental object rather than a proper unit, and so the game sets accuracy against it to 100% without regard to factors like range. (This isn't coded perfectly; internally, the game is still performing a standard accuracy check and applying most modifiers to it, it's just range-and-Squadsight modifiers that are excluded. By which I mean that skills like Rapid Fire and Deadeye that impose accuracy penalties can miss; Rapid Fire will be two 85% chances to hit, for example. So too can Poisoned and Disoriented soldiers potentially miss) You also can't crit against environmental objects normally, it should be noted: only Rupture's forced-crit can let you crit against an environmental object. Anyway, the alien relay is also a High Cover object, which is mostly irrelevant but will occasionally result in an enemy taking cover against it and thus making it easier for you to get a clean shot on them.

The alien relay's HP starts the campaign at 6 -so possible to destroy in one hit with Conventional weaponry, but only on a high roll and not on weak stuff like Rifles- and rises as you get deeper into a run. It doesn't rise very much, though, certainly nowhere near as fast as your squad's firepower does; you're a lot more likely for an early instance of this mission to involve you desperately scrambling to scrape together the damage to destroy it before the timer zeroes out than if you get it later. I've never bothered to work out the exact progression, or even what it's tied to (Force Level. The answer is basically always Force Level for this kind of mechanic), because it's difficult to care when its actual progression is pretty uniformly 'easier than the last time you got this mission' in terms of practical outcome.

Anyway, this is one of those missions that War of the Chosen expands to be able to occur in Sewers, Subways, or Abandoned Cities; I only really find that last one weird, because an interesting quality of Destroy The Alien Relay is that the relay is always hidden inside an ordinary civilian structure. (Well, not in Sewers or Subway, technically, but shhh) It comes across like ADVENT needs the alien relay to be out among civilians but wants it kept secret for some reason, where they can't just plop it into one of their public laser-fenced facilities; this mission type is one of the better examples of why I feel Faceless are a bit wasted in the final product, as it would've made a lot of sense for eg a Small Town version to have the alien relay placed in a regular house (Which is already what happens most of the time) but for the house to have at least one civilian inside and any such civilians always be Faceless, so we'd have an implicit story of Faceless having smuggled the alien relay into the house.

In any event, this in turn makes it reasonably believable for the alien relay to be in Sewer and Subway plot types, because it makes intuitive sense that dropping the alien relay underground would be a way to have it close to civilians yet hidden from them... assuming they're attached to cities in use, admittedly, which is maybe a bit questionable given Subway in particular comes across like an abandoned subway system... still, Subway and Sewer plot types are handled sufficiently ambiguously I can buy they're meant to be attached to City Centers and this just never gets explicated.

The alien relay itself, interestingly, looks to be a much smaller version of the Hyperwave Beacon from the prior game. The game itself doesn't draw your attention to this and it's admittedly slightly weird that your support staff have zero interest in getting a hold of such a device (Even considering they presumably don't know about the Hyperwave Beacon to make that connection -the Commander might, but the Commander isn't allowed to speak), but it's still a touch I like. It's also suggestive of the reason why the alien relay would need to be placed near civilians but kept a secret, as the Hyperwave Beacon was apparently used by the psionically powerful Sectoid Commander to communicate with their psionically powerful masters, the Ethereals; while Enemy Unknown itself never suggests the Hyperwave Beacon is some manner of psionic technology, I would easily believe that it's meant to be (Especially with XCOM 2 more broadly embracing psionic technology as an idea; maybe that wasn't the idea in EU/EW's development but retroactively is the idea now), and in turn that the alien relay is, say, psionically scanning people. If there's side effects like headaches, it would make perfect sense for the Ethereals to want such monitors in place but also want no public indication of their existence so as to minimize the odds of ADVENT citizens going 'you know, we all started feeling bad once the Totally Innocent Alien Device got installed in downtown: maybe that device is the problem?'

This all fits together a little dubiously with the narrative fed to you by Bradford, in that your timer in this mission is justified by virtue of saying the alien relay is performing a transmission and your goal is to destroy it before said transmission occurs... but first of all, that's possible to reconcile -maybe the alien relay scans people for a month, then beams its info all at once- and more importantly it's pretty obvious the timer justification is something of an after-the-fact kludge. What this transmission is doing is never specified, why there'd be a specific window before it's done and destroying it becomes completely useless is never explained, etc. It's pretty obvious this is in the same category as 'self-detonating charges are in place at the target' -desperate flailing to come up with something vaguely sensical that justifies the timer.

It's possible I'm reading too much into this regardless, mind, but I do genuinely doubt the final narrative we got for this mission is the originally-conceived one.

Protect The Device

The other mission in the base game that isn't a variation of 'Hack some thing before time runs out'.

Like Destroy the Alien Relay, it's another case of War of the Chosen expanding the plot types to include Sewer/Subway/Abandoned City. It also involves a destructible object, though in this case the object is under attack by your enemies rather than being attacked by you.

This Guerrilla Op is unique for never having any timer at all. (Which is a little awkward in War of the Chosen now that there's timer-related Resistance Orders and settings, and they're not special-cased to affect this mission some other way) Instead, the time pressure is based on inactive pods being allowed to attack the device you're supposed to protect -this works basically exactly like the mechanics for inactive pods killing civilians in Retaliation missions, where only one inactive pod can attack per turn, the pod leader in particular performs the attack, and only one pod per turn is allowed to attack the device.

Tied to this is that, uniquely for a Guerrilla Op, all enemy pods start in a yellow alert state in this mission. This mostly isn't very important, but will periodically result in you being unable to get a clean shot from squad Concealment because the pod patrolled up against Cover, so it's something to be aware of. Interestingly, pods also have the unusual behavior of tending to try to patrol toward the device, which is actually a bit design-unfortunate in practice because you often end up with two pods sitting right on top of the objective, difficult to disentangle -this is one of the better missions to bring a Reaper on, as they can let you pull only one of the two pods more reliably.

You might expect to need to hurry, but the device's HP is shockingly high to start and actually rises over the course of the campaign, fast enough enemy damage rising is slow to pull ahead. Enemies also, rather oddly, don't seem to benefit from the player getting forced to 100% base accuracy against environmental objects, as they'll intermittently miss it. As such, even though there's always a pod that spawns very close to the objective and almost always starts shooting on the first turn and can actually reload while inactive so they'll fire every turn... there's less danger than you might expect.

That said, you shouldn't treat your time as infinite, and unlike other Guerrilla Ops your 'timer' is effectively hidden from you, as for some bizarre reason the objective's HP is invisible until one of your soldiers spots the device... at which point you can see its HP even if your squad loses sight of the object... and since its starting HP is variable you can't even just note down all the damage it's taken to work out its current HP. I really don't get why they didn't just have its HP bar visible at all times. Anyway, point being, until you get sight on the device you won't be able to tell if you're starting to run out of time and need to hurry up or if there's plenty of time and you can wait for soldiers who fell behind to catch up or a key ability cooldown to finish or whatever. Which is another reason a Reaper is great to bring into this mission: they can reliably get sight on the device very quickly so you do know what your time situation looks like.

Do note that friendly fire is a concern with the device, and it is a High Cover object. Enemies are surprisingly prone to not actually using it as cover, but in the event one does so you'll end up in an awkward situation, since you fail the mission if you destroy their cover and you may have difficulty catching them with explosives without hitting the device. Similarly, you should avoid using it as cover yourself -this is rarely a real concern since usually there'll be nothing alive by the time you're in a position to try to use it as cover, but in the event it does happen you're just inviting the enemy to do things like hurl Plasma Grenades and Micromissiles to simultaneously hurt a soldier and push your objective closer to failure.

Anyway, it should also be pointed out that this shares with Destroy The Alien Relay the point that the objective very consistently spawns in a regular civilian building. (Or equivalent space for Sewer/Subway plot types) This contributes to the issue of accidentally pulling two pods, as it's easy to pull one pod, not realize there's an area none of your soldiers can quite see into, and only activate the second pod when you're halfway through your soldier turns and so have much less ability to go nuclear on the situation. Indeed, points like Rangers and Templar being melee specialists incentivized to go for kill-strikes in specific subtly encourages you to push yourself into these traps, as you'll usually need to soften the enemy up before your melee soldier can get their assured kill and suddenly you've spent a minimum of two soldier turns before getting around to activating the second pod.

(I kind of wish melee and Concealment were complementary specialties instead of opposed ones: if you could build a Ranger to be able to kill a target in melee while still Concealed, melee having the hazard of pod-pulling would go away and these kinds of traps would be not an issue at all for a prepared player. Alas, while mods regularly treat the two as going together, I've yet to see a mod make the necessary overhauls to Concealment mechanics for this to be at all possible)

Amusingly, this is a mission type Alien Rulers will tend to give you warning of their presence on, as the objective zone is placed right behind the device and so they spawn right on top of it and almost always proceed to patrol to it and attack it. The Viper King in particular has completely unique visual and audio for his attack, so even if the game doesn't fully reveal him (This mission sometimes has issues with revealing the attacking pod, for whatever reason), you can still ID him on the basis that he's firing his Bolt Caster and playing his unique audio. He in particular also tends to end up slightly easier as a result, because his Bolt Caster only has one ammo; if you activate him, he's probably out of ammo and will need to spend a Ruler Reaction on reloading before he can shoot anyone. (Alas, the Berserker Queen and Archon King don't have ammo concerns, so they'll be as rough as ever... but at least you still get warning)

Also amusing, though I've pointed it out before, is that getting The Lost Sitrep on this mission results in the inactive pods spontaneously attacking the Lost, which is interesting. Usually mildly annoying in the moment since it means the Lost are less able to act as distractions for active pods (By virtue of there being fewer of them to act as distractions), but interesting.

Much more comedic is getting the Savage Sitrep, specifically if it results in Berserkers on the map, as the thing where Berserkers can attack their own buddies ends up also interacting with this 'inactive pods allowed to attack' mechanic to result in the Berserkers attacking their own pod every turn. Only the pod occupied attacking the objective escapes this fate; Savage can thus make this mission noticeably easier. It also goes pretty well with Tygan talking about ADVENT being 'barely able' to control the forces Savage forces in...

I'm not entirely sure whether reinforcements are possible in this mission or not, and have no idea what the trigger is if they are possible. I'm not actually sure whether I've seen any reinforcements in this mission, and its format doesn't allow for the standard Guerrilla Op rules on reinforcements.

Overall, though, this is a pretty straightforward Guerrilla Op that doesn't tend to be too different from other types, aside reducing the value of Specialists and SPARKs compared to the usual Hack objective.

Narratively, this is straightforward at a glance but a bit strained if you think about it: Bradford invariably informs us that the device you're protecting is a 'data tap' placed by the resistance, which ADVENT has found and is of course attempting to destroy. This readily explains it defaulting to being hidden in a building, and explains why the objective is centered on ADVENT trying to destroy something. The time pressure is also natural enough; if you're rushing to prevent something from being destroyed, then of course there is a point past which you are too late. (However silly it might be that a 'data tap' is able to absorb gunfire for, what, several minutes?) Even better, it's the only Guerrilla Op in which killing everything that moves is fundamentally in service of the objective rather than sating Bradford's lust for blood.

Unfortunately, further thought raises a bunch of questions the game is not interested in answering that cast doubts on how much sense this makes. Fundamentally, in asymmetric warfare of a scattered underdog resistance against a literally global superpower, being hidden is key to survival, by which I mean the data tap being discovered means it's going to be destroyed and there's nothing you can do to prevent this in any meaningful sense. Your mission is at best delaying its destruction by forcing ADVENT to send a second force -which is liable to be a larger one to prevent them also being defeated- leaving the question of why you're even bothering and how this is supposed to help any.

There are ways to reconcile this, but they require making assumptions the game doesn't provide grounding for: you could guess that X-COM moves the data tap elsewhere after clearing out the hostiles, or that they extract what data it's collected and then abandon it (Or destroy it themselves to deny ADVENT information, depending on exactly what this 'data tap' actually is), or otherwise are protecting the device in only a temporary, targeted sense... but the game itself doesn't suggest this, instead presenting things as if the device being protected from one wave of attackers leaves it protected for all time. That's not a product of the game formatting itself in a way that provides no window to address such possibilities: in the base game, as with any Guerrilla Op, Bradford will hold up gameplay to remark upon the success of the mission before the success screen is allowed to pop in, and he has custom dialogue for this specific mission type. The devs could absolutely have had Bradford allude directly to moving the device or harvesting its data or whatever in this success dialogue, and instead he just acts like everything being dead means you've done your job and there's nothing more to care about.

(By contrast, War of the Chosen cuts out almost every case of Bradford preventing you from interacting with the game while he talks, including most end-of-mission dialogue and most of his rants about needing every alien dead. Plot missions keep their end-of-mission dialogue, but don't force you to sit through it anymore. As such, some of War of the Chosen's new missions also have 'but what happens afterward?' questions, but War of the Chosen has removed its best opportunity to address them; I'm more sympathetic to War of the Chosen's new missions running into this issue)

It's also worth noting that while this is a big offender, it's not the only one: Retaliation missions suffer from a similar issue, where ADVENT has located a camp and decided to destroy it, yet there's no suggestion you help the camp relocate before a new attack wave can arrive, or anything of the sort. (This is part of why it bugs me you don't bring these people aboard the Avenger) Just like the 'data tap', realistically the primary thing protecting these people is ADVENT not knowing where they are, or possibly having known but not actually decided on exterminating the camp. Point being, ADVENT knowing where they are and intending to kill them is not a problem you resolve by destroying a single strike force, and the game never gets around to suggesting you also did something more long-term useful.

Anyway, Protect The Device also suffers from the fact that it doesn't fit into the Dark Event element of Guerrilla Ops, not as presented. Part of the reason I was suggesting 'harvest the data it collected' as a thing that would make sense is it would more clearly tie into the aspect of countering a Dark Event: one could assume the data tap had info that was somehow then used to foil whatever leads into the Dark Event. As-is, it ends up coming across unusually disconnected, where the connection between foiling an attempt to destroy the data tap and a single Dark Event being prevented is particularly tenuous.

By a similar token, Protect The Device is particularly disconnected from the randomized rewards. This is something of an issue in general with the Guerrilla Op system, and one I mostly feel doesn't deserve to be criticized because it's good for the gameplay, but for the other Guerrilla Ops it's also a lot easier to draw a connection between 'I accomplished a task' and 'it gave a specific payout' through some reasonably intuitive scenario. Protect The Device feels like it should be a mission attached to protecting an investment -imagine you could build data taps for an Intel stream, and ADVENT could specifically launch attacks on these data taps and ADVENT successfully destroying them would take away said Intel stream.

I do hope XCOM 3 manages to get the mission pool concept not only more varied but also more coherent. I'd prefer variety at the cost of coherency if forced to pick one or the other, mind, but I do hope both pieces improve.

Sabotage (Psi) Transmitter

The in-game name does not specify the 'psi' part, which is unfortunate: I spent a long while perpetually seeing Sabotage Transmitter, thinking 'aha! I like the mission to destroy the miniature Hyperwave Beacon!' and being extremely annoyed when it turned out I'd picked this mission. They really needed names that more clearly referred to different concepts; I doubt I'm the only one to suffer this mixup, especially given the game doesn't exactly make it easy to connect the names of mission types to the missions themselves. If a mission's name was displayed somewhere inside mission play -as in, have it constantly hovering somewhere in the UI- it would be a lot easier to connect a mission's name to itself.

Anyway, one of two Guerrilla Ops added by War of the Chosen, Sabotage Transmitter is quirky but broadly stays true to the basic framework of requiring you reach a specific location and interact with a specific object before the timer hits zero. It's not a Hack objective, mind, but rather requires somebody set an X4 charge, and so Specialists and SPARKs get no advantage here. Rangers and Templar tend to be better choices due to their ability to advance aggressively while attacking and set the charge followed by moving somewhere less vulnerable as part of an attack. (If only through Momentum/Implacable letting them move after the attack) Setting an X4 charge itself is a free action, but requires the soldier have at least one action point to be able to do it anyway, unlike, say, evacuating. The objective is also a very large High Cover object, 2x2, so depending on enemy positions it can be a good place to take cover on its own merits. Though conversely you'll occasionally get a pod hidden just behind it, which can be an unpleasant surprise. Fortunately it's rare for things to line up such that this is an actual problem.

The timer itself is handled differently from other Guerrilla Op timers, in that it has a low base time -4 turns- but there's a half dozen psionic repeaters on the map that can be destroyed, with each one destroyed adding 1 to the timer. This... ends up awkward in practice, since it pressures you to break squad Concealment quickly -if you fail to find a pod by the third turn you're going to have to break squad Concealment regardless- and interacts in janky ways with multiple Resistance Orders and two different start settings, as I've covered before, but I do like the basic idea.

The psionic repeaters are hostile environmental objects with 2 HP that qualify as Low Cover until destroyed, which get sprinkled semi-randomly across the map, mostly spawning roughly between you and the objective. (Emphasis on mostly: I've occasionally seen one spawn behind the objective area, for example) Unlike, say, the alien relay, this HP value is fixed (Aside Beta Strike doubling it), and it's a conveniently low number: even a Conventional Pistol will always destroy one in one hit, and since psionic repeaters are objects rather than enemies regular shots can't miss, allowing Sharpshooters and Templar to clean up psionic repeaters at line of sight completely reliably, as well as allowing Rangers to Slash them away without worry of missing even if they lack Blademaster.

Of course, there are a few disadvantages. A number of special shooting actions (And a few non-shooting offensive actions, like Soulfire or Volt) don't/can't target objects: a Sharpshooter or Templar can't use Faceoff to clear away four psionic repeaters in one turn. Similarly, Reaper-the-skill won't trigger on them, Death From Above won't trigger on them, Arc Wave can't destroy them and won't trigger properly when targeting one... you can still use area-of-effect attacks to clean them up if they're close enough, and Quickdraw can allow a Sharpshooter or Templar to shoot two in one turn, so there's still tools for having one soldier deal with multiple in a single turn, but not as many as you might hope. For that matter, Untouchable and Implacable don't trigger when destroying psionic repeaters.

Melee attacks are particularly noteworthy options for dealing with psionic repeaters, as they resolve a couple of the main hazards presented by needing to deal with Psionic Transmitters; the ammo tax of destroying at least one per turn to stave off the clock, and the attendant slowing of soldiers caused by needing to spend half a turn shooting a repeater instead of walking toward the objective. Simply Slash/Rend a repeater that's on the way to the objective and you've dodged both those issues. A Templar can even use Momentum to charge more aggressively than they could if no target was present.

Pistol and Autopistol fire don't resolve the issue of being slowed -Templar in particular really ought to just Rend in most cases- but they do provide a way to avoid running out of ammo in the middle of combat. So Sharpshooters and, again, Templar are pretty good options for bringing into Sabotage Transmitter options; running out of ammo from dealing with the repeaters is a genuine hazard.

Conversely, Grenadiers are erratic. Sometimes three repeaters will spawn close enough together that a Grenade Launcher-backed grenade can catch them all at once, which is really efficient in terms of soldier action economy, enough so to be worth spending a grenade on. Even just two can be a worthwhile target -or just one if you're in combat and catching it alongside an actual enemy. If no such clustering does happen, though, Grenadiers are one of the least helpful classes for repeaters per se, as they're working with limited ammo on their primary weapon and their class skills don't really help.

Skirmishers are also erratic, trending toward being just bad. They're already huge ammo hogs: they can't really afford to spend even more ammo. They can end up doing well, their innate Grapple potentially letting them keep moving forward even while burning action points on shooting repeaters, and as they level up Whiplash and Reckoning can make them very efficient... or terrain can end up not really helping and you're using a low-level Skirmisher and at that point you're stuck with the issue of not really being able to spare the ammo.

Reapers are bad at helping with the repeaters in a direct sense, but in reality this is one of the missions they most shine in. They can aggressively search for that initial pod to ambush so you're unlikely to be forced to break squad Concealment prematurely, and past that point they let you very reliably avoid stumbling into a pod when you're not ready while still advancing as aggressively as you can while smashing repeaters. I rate this mission just below Stop The ADVENT Retaliation for 'bring the Reaper, possibly even if they're Tired'.

Specialists are whatever. They're less good than you might hope -Capacitor Discharge can't destroy repeaters, for example- but they do at least have 4 ammo on their gun and no significant flaws.

Psi Operatives are outright bad, aside the qualifier that Stasis being a pause button can salvage horrible messes. If you didn't bring a Reaper (They're injured, for example), a Psi Operative might be a good fallback option. Probably don't bring the Bolt Caster, though. (No matter the class you prefer to have the Bolt Caster on, really)

It's also worth pointing out reinforcements are possible on this mission type, though I'm not sure what the exact rules are. I've had them trigger only rarely, and always well before I reached the psi transmitter, so it's not standard rules. My best guess is that breaking your first repeater is the trigger, but don't quote me on that.

Overall, this is a mission whose execution is rough around the edges in a way that can be incredibly frustrating to engage with -this is probably the single hardest Guerrilla Op for a learning player- but which I like to a surprising extent and which, like so much War of the Chosen content, isn't actually that much harder than base-game content once you do know the full picture. Among other points, I actually like the action point and ammo tax for dealing with the psi repeaters; in the base game, ammo is a bit awkward of a mechanic because it's very easy for missions to play out such that it never creates problems by running out or otherwise matters, but then every once in a great while you'll find that everything lines up such that someone ends up short on ammo at a key moment, which is frustrating rather than  feeling like a punishment for mismanaging your ammo. The presence of Autoloaders and Expanded Magazines in particular means that even as your squad starts picking up ammo-hungry abilities it's easy to still not really matter: your base-game Colonel Ranger using Rapid Fire on literally every enemy can still end up running out of enemies before ammo becomes a concern, because a Superior Autoloader by itself lets them Rapid Fire eight times before needing to spend an action point on reloading. As your Ranger is not, in fact, soloing entire maps, ideal play often works out to a Rapid Fire per pod, not per enemy; most missions can't have eight pods, let alone the nine that would be necessary.

War of the Chosen actually makes several changes to make ammo more substantively interesting of a mechanic, like Skirmishers being broadly an ammo-hungry class, the Lost being introduced and soaking huge amounts of ammo through the Headshot mechanic, and this mission, which is nice and gives me hope that XCOM 3 will get ammo to be a reasonably engaging mechanic right out the gate.

As for the action point tax, I like this because it makes the time pressure more continuously relevant. The base-game Guerrilla Op missions use time pressure reasonably well, but it's not something you really engage with in a dynamic way. There's basically only three squad speeds in them: so fast that even if one or more fights take unexpectedly long you're in no danger, sufficiently slow that you may be forced to have someone ignore an ongoing fight to complete the mission, or so horribly slow you're going to fail the mission before even reaching the objective. Broadly, the time pressure pushes you to try to be in that first box, and once you're at the point of understanding how to move quickly without gratuitously pulling pods you'll tend to be in that first box, at which point the timer doesn't feel very pertinent. (Among other points, getting through missions fast is already a thing to shoot for just in terms of the real-person level of 'maximizing how much time is spent engaging with the interesting parts of the game') Only that second box actually involves you making a difficult (And interesting) decision due to the timer.

Sabotage Transmitter here, meanwhile, can put you in that second box repeatedly, where you're in a fight and have someone smash a repeater instead of fighting the enemy because you don't want the timer to run out and fail the mission. That's a pretty neat trick! If XCOM 3 returns to timed missions as a standard, I rather hope this aspect of Sabotage Transmitter is a standard part of the package somehow.

On a different note, it's worth pointing out that Sabotage Transmitter is essentially the return of the Bomb Disposal Council request from EU/EW, just replacing 'interact with these objects to delay mission failure' with 'blow up these objects to delay mission failure'. Mechanically, I much prefer Sabotage Transmitter, even if it's frustrating how it intersects with Concealment, Beta Strike, Time Turner, and a few Resistance Orders; shooting objects lends itself to better gameplay than interacting at point-blank with objects, leading to you juggling ammo a bit more than usual (Which, as noted earlier, is inherently propping up the meaning of a mechanic that needs said propping up) but pretty free to move people where they need to be, instead of having to follow the breadcrumb trail of objects to avoid mission failure, even if it's really bad positions for the current fight. (And conversely disabling bomb nodes being a free action once against them makes it a bit mindless of a thing; among other points, running to and disabling nodes when not in combat isn't an interesting mechanic at all)

Narratively, it's a bit more mixed. Bomb Disposal was fundamentally hurt by the orbital superiority of your alien enemies; if they're going to blow up an area indiscriminately, there's no reason to set a bomb on the ground. Just strafe the area with a UFO. It also had the issue that it was extremely questionable for there to be a bunch of enemies guarding the bomb with no evidence of an escape plan yet they were fully ready to fight to the death to protect it; even with War of the Chosen successfully depicting the Ethereals as completely cavalier with their minions' lives, it's still pretty bizarre to plant a sizable guard on a bomb who will inevitably be blown up with it, particularly the part where said guards are dutifully carrying out their suicide mission. I can imagine specific scenarios, like a bunch of rejects having been sent on a suicide mission and led to believe it's not a suicide mission and also led to believe they're not hated by their superiors, but as a standard mission you basically have to lean hard into theories like 'every alien is being actively puppeted by the Ethereals even when the game isn't clearly indicating such' for it to start making sense...

... and even jumping through those hoops leaves you with 'just strafe the area from the skies' as a simpler, more effective solution that X-COM can't really interdict. Just exit orbit right on top of your target and open fire.

Sabotage Transmitter escapes these problems, as your enemies are guarding an important infrastructural object you are trying to blow up, not them, but it runs into the new problem that your mission success threshold doesn't actually make sense. Putting an X4 charge on the transmitter before it finishes its thing should be an important step toward victory, but not the step that makes the timer go away; blowing the thing up should be required. As X4 charges are consistently depicted as so powerful they can hit a sizable fraction of a map when they go off, there's not really any room to pretend the charge is quietly detonated without being depicted in-game.

Put another way, this would've made a lot more sense as another Hack objective, where conceptually your squad is going to hack the transmitter to somehow break it. 

Still an overall improvement to the narrative end, though.

Side note: one of the more direct examples of War of the Chosen map content being less varied is that in both Sewer and Subway maps, the Psi Transmitter is...

... always set up in a specific little 'building'. This is specific to Sewer/Subway cases: the other plot types have some actual variety to its location.

This particular example of War of the Chosen being rushed also leaves me unsure how much meaning to attribute to the strangeness of the distribution of Psionic Transmitter locations: if you get it in a Slum or Small Town, it'll be pretty consistently very visible and adjacent to an ADVENT facility, whereas in Abandoned City, Subway, and Sewer plot types it's not only placed in an out-of-the-way region in general but is then hidden within even that area. (eg in Abandoned City it can show up tucked inside a warehouse) That comes across pretty strangely -is ADVENT trying really hard to hide that these exist or not?- but I'm genuinely unsure what might've been done here if War of the Chosen weren't so hugely rushed. Is it weird and inconsistent-seeming due to dubious underlying intentions... or is it weird and inconsistent because the game as a whole got shoved out the door in a hurry? Or both, for that matter. No idea.

For that matter, I've already been over how Beta Strike's modifications work out pretty jankily in this particular mission...

Neutralize Field Commander

The other Guerrilla Op added by War of the Chosen, and definitely the weirder one.

First of all, this is the only Guerrilla Op where you don't start under any form of time pressure. You can in fact wander around indefinitely, looking for your target, until such time as you break squad Concealment -and it is specifically breaking squad Concealment. Using a Reaper to delete a pod with Claymores and/or Silent Killer abuse will leave the ADVENT General wandering around, clueless anything is wrong.

Even when the timer does kick in, it's still not actually the case that it hitting zero fails the mission. Instead, the timer starting occurs alongside a hostile Evac zone being marked out in red flares instead of the blue/white flares your Evac zones use, which the ADVENT General can use to escape only once the timer hits zero. Thus, this is also the only Guerrilla Op where the timer can hit zero and yet you go on to win the mission: so long as the ADVENT General can't Evac for some reason (Such as you hitting them with the Frost Bomb), the mission is still fine. (It should be noted that the Evac point has nothing marking its location until the timer kicks in: you can't find it while Concealed and spawn-camp it)

Second, it's the only mission in the entire game to have an enemy type unique to it -as I've covered before, though the ADVENT General's graphic is just a reskinned ADVENT Officer they're actually a very different unit, among other points being the only enemy in the entire game to have access to a Flashbang Grenade. Some other missions come close to this, as if you count hostile VIPs as an enemy unit they're restricted to two mission types that are very similar, or you can look at how Avatars only have one mission they appear in a 'standard' way in, but Neutralize Field Commander having a fully exclusive enemy combatant type is unique.

Third is, of course, that the ADVENT General has extremely non-standard AI, attempting to flee your squad for the Evac point and often Overwatching in the shadows, where normally enemies always try to pursue and will normally refuse to Overwatch if you can't see them even if it's the only sensible action available to them. (eg Turrets refusing to Overwatch if nobody is in sight) To be clear, this is just the General: their podmates will still aggressively attack your squad instead of escorting the General to the Evac point. (Qualifier: if the General's pod is inactive, the General running for the Evac point will of course drag their podmates with them until the pod does get activated)

It's also worth pointing out that the ADVENT General and their pod does not replace a standard pod spawn: they are in addition to whatever would normally spawn, and so Neutralize Field Commander generally has an above-average enemy count. (I'm unsure whether 'mission difficulty' counts the General's pod) This is interesting given XCOM 2's standard procedure with non-standard enemies is for them to displace normal pods. Less interesting but also worth pointing out us that the General is always the leader of their pod and is restricted to leading ADVENT-type troops, so the variety of possible escorts is pretty limited and importantly has a pretty low cap on their power: you're not going to see Andromedons escorting a General, let alone Sectopods or Gatekeepers.

Fourth is the map design itself. The other ten Guerrilla Ops all default to 'corridor' design, where the map is a non-square rectangle with your squad placed roughly at one end and the objective placed close to the other end. Neutralize Field Commander instead produces square maps, with no particular rhyme or reason to where the General is located. This actively encourages a careful search for the General in conjunction with the behavioral stuff and lack of initial time pressure, as it's much more plausible to skirt around other pods and/or stumble into the ADVENT General as the first pod you spot.

This goes nicely with fifth: that Neutralize Field Commander is unique for having your objective move, as the ADVENT General performs standard pod patrolling while inactive. This is another reason you need to do some amount of searching, as even if the General has a predictable spawn routine (I've no idea and don't care) just beelining to their start location would be inadequately reliable for finding them.

A further unique mechanic to this mission is that, once your squad spots the General's pod, the General in specific will be marked out with a red alien head icon. (This will happen even if none of your soldiers actually gets line of sight on the General in particular: the pod-sighted reveal of the full pod still happens, after all) Normally I wouldn't feel a need to mention this -I don't tend to mention UI convenience features- but in this case it's actually mechanically significant, as the alien head icon will mark the General's location even if you can't see the the General. You thus don't have to guess their exact location when pursuing, which is nice given this isn't a game where losing track of a target is supposed to be a part of the gameplay.

Also, I have personally never seen reinforcements spawn into this mission type. I tend to avoid it, though, so it's possible I've missed it through chance rather than that being a commentary on the mission design. I'd assume reinforcements would at least occur if the Rapid Response Dark Event was in play, but I've personally never had that happen, so... I don't actually know, and War of the Chosen is sufficiently rough around the edges I wouldn't be at all surprised if the intuitive outcome isn't the actual outcome.

This is another mission Reapers are highly recommended in, as they let you seek out the General and take them out first thing, or at least make it easier to run them down second instead of getting tangled on every other pod on the map. Grenadiers are also noteworthy if you have the Frost Bomb, since that's one of the few ways for you to prevent the General from running after the timer has zeroed out, and Grenadiers are of course the best deliverer for the Frost Bomb and can even give it a second charge via Heavy Ordnance. Psi Operatives with Stasis are another option, though less great than a Grenadier with a Frost Bomb. (Only one turn of disabling, unlikely to get two uses on the General, prevents further attacks instead of making them more likely to hit...) Venom Rounds and Gas Grenades are also worth noting, since Poison will slow the General down: this may outright prevent them from Evaccing the second the timer hits zero if they start far enough from the Evac point and you Poison them early, and it will certainly at least make it easier to chase them while still doing damage to them.

Overall, this is one of the roughest missions in XCOM 2. I very much like the idea of it, but it's radically different from most missions in a way the game design isn't really prepared for: not only is there a learning curve issue, but even once you have a handle on how this mission is different from most, it doesn't do a lot to highlight normally-neglected tools. I can contrast this with the Lost-using missions, which do things like prop up the utility of Sharpshooters and are generally overall easier once you get past the hurdle of there being so many weird ways for Lost-on-ADVENT mechanics to mess you up and you'll probably learn them mostly by virtue of things going horribly wrong. Neutralize Field Commander is just... too different in the wrong kinds of ways.

It's unfortunate, because this is the kind of mission X-COM as an organization should be doing, but XCOM 2 built its fundaments to be poorly-prepared for such.

I'd say 'I hope XCOM 3 gets this more right', but honestly the evidence for what XCOM 3 is liable to be about makes me doubt it'll lend itself to a Neutralize Field Commander type of mission making sense...

Bizarrely, this is another mission type that uses the full Guerrilla Op range of plot types: Slum, Small Town, Abandoned City, Subway, and Sewer.

This dovetails neatly into talking about the narrative jank: right away it's pretty mystifying that Neutralize Field Commander uses this set. I'd expect Small Town, Wilderness, and maybe Shanty if we wanted to represent a General checking up on an ongoing operation to clean up what was once a resistance camp. Slums and City Center are also plausible. I can even squint and imagine Abandoned City is a General checking up on how a Lost-torching operation is doing.

But why is it so regular to see ADVENT Generals hanging out in Sewers and seemingly-abandoned Subways?

More consistently problematic is the usual insistence that you need to kill everything on the map to complete the mission. In this case, Bradford insists we can't let ADVENT recover the General's body -but provides absolutely no explanation for why this is a thing we care about. What, are we expecting them to just grab a Chosen Sarcophagus, shove the General's corpse inside, and they pop out alive and only momentarily inconvenienced?

This in particular runs into a broader frustration point: that the mechanic for picking up and even Evaccing friendly bodies can't be used on enemies. This is broadly a bit janky -there's no narrative reason why I can't, when extracting a VIP from a City Center, opportunistically haul a few bodies with my squad as they leave- to the point I am utterly unsurprised a mod exists to let you carry enemy bodies and extract them, but normally can be kind of glossed over as a mild case of the gameplay and narrative operating on different tracks. After all, the narrative elements of the game don't really acknowledge the degree to which collecting dead enemies is important to your organization growing more powerful, and in fact I've commented before on how you develop your own magnetic and then plasma weaponry instead of stealing enemy examples and using those: the narrative of XCOM 2 actually seems to be pretty opposed to running with the idea of growing powerful by standing atop mounds of corpses. It's thus easy to accept that whether you can or can't collect bodies is primarily a game design consideration, because that's how the game pretty clearly approaches it.

But in this case it's a glaring issue. The obvious response to Bradford arbitrarily declaring that we can't let them collect the body is to just grab it and run. (Indeed, Bradford's justification for insisting you kill everything is so bizarre it ends up feeling like he's just doing a poor job of hiding his base-game lust for blood, rather than it being fully gone) You can't do that because the mechanics don't exist to let you, not because it makes sense for that to not be an answer.

Indeed, I'm genuinely a bit mystified as to why Neutralize Field Commander was slotted into the Guerrilla Op pool and not the VIP pool. Conceptually, this is essentially Neutralize VIP, but with the VIP being armed, armored, and willing to run when they realize you're here instead of standing in place, freaking out. This would make a lot more sense plugged into the base-game VIP mission framework -among other things, even if the General happens to have an unusually light escort in the moment, I'd expect ADVENT to be especially quick to respond aggressively to an assault on a key military figure. The base-game VIP framework of a hard timer and need to grab something and run with it would be perfect for this.

I dunno, maybe coding the game to let you carry the General's body without it looking awful is far harder than I'd intuitively expect and this final outcome is a significant kludge?

To be fair, War of the Chosen already has too many missions in the VIP pool, but... this is still so weird I have to wonder what happened that we got this strangeness. Like yes War of the Chosen was blatantly rushed, but I'm skeptical that's really the entire explanation for this oddness.

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It's unfortunate Guerrilla Ops are the standard mission type with the most consistent clashes between mission mechanics and mission narrative, given they get disproportionate presence in the first month and so will tend to be notably influential on a first-time player's perception of XCOM 2's design and general effectiveness.

I'm rather curious as to why Guerrilla Ops in particular suffer this fate. Bits and pieces are suggestive: the fact that Guerrilla Ops always have time pressure and always have you kill everything and loot the bodies suggests those were mandated from on high, it's plausible stuff like train missions are suffering from engine limitations forcing the devs to rework essentially-complete mission types, and of course the game in general clearly got rushed even when just looking at the base game... but it's still a bit weird. Other missions have issues like this, but the degree and consistency of Guerrilla Ops suffering from this is striking for how much further it goes than any other mission set, and there's not really any obvious thing to point to for why.

Notably, War of the Chosen's additions don't really shake these issues, which stands out when War of the Chosen overall trends toward its additions tending to better fit their context than the base game's average performance on that topic. So even into War of the Chosen, this oddness continues. What was happening internally to the team that this was so?

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Next time, we move on to Supply Raids.

See you then.