XCOM 2 Analysis: Misc WotC Missions

War of the Chosen has added a surprisingly large number of missions that don't fit into a reasonably clean overall category. The only fully common point of these is that none of them can roll Sitreps -some of them will present a Sitrep in the UI, because they force Lost presence or the like, but they don't do actual random Sitrep generation.

So on to specific missions.

Lost And Abandoned

Pretty much the tutorial mission for War of the Chosen, including that enabling the Tutorial forces Lost And Abandoned to be enabled in War of the Chosen runs. Sensibly enough, you can enable Lost And Abandoned while leaving the Tutorial disabled; after all, plenty of players will need some tutorialing on War of the Chosen content while not needing help with basic controls and so on.

Unfortunately, it shares with the Tutorial the issue of making for a rougher early game than if you played with it disabled, though a bit less drastically than the Tutorial by itself. Specifically, you won't start with a Resistance soldier (Making Gatecrasher in particular harder, unless you have the Tutorial enabled to not get regular Gatecrasher, but you're still not getting them for the effective replacement), the game won't let you construct the Resistance Ring until you've completed the Lost And Abandoned mission and thus you won't get started on Covert Ops as quickly, and then the Lost And Abandoned mission itself is a bit rude, with Purifiers showing up earlier than you'll otherwise encounter them, a forced fight with the Assassin that occurs earlier than your usual first Chosen mission, and it being a three-part mission where the first two parts have you operating with lower-than-usual squad sizes.

Interestingly, it actually has UI support for it splitting your squad, where you pick and equip two people for the first part and then pick and equip two more people for the second part. I'm curious if XCOM 3 will build on this, or if it'll just be a weird one-off mechanic. In any event, it barely matters here since Lost And Abandoned occurs so early your troops will have barely any experience and equipment options (You will have done literally just two missions prior to this point), but for reference the first squad does the first part with Elena the Reaper while the second squad does the second part with Mox the Skirmisher. (And then everybody meets up for part three, of course)

Anyway, like the Lost Towers and Nest missions, this mission is pretty rigidly designed but doesn't do the Tutorial Gatecrasher thing of completely taking away player choice, which means it's time for me to talk in more detail.

The first part opens on a cinema bit with your two soldiers approaching a Reaper campsite in the city, where they're cooking a Chryssalid head. Dialogue happens, Elena claims your troops are agitating 'them' (ie the Lost, but the game doesn't want to reveal them yet), and she wanders off with your troops to the mission while a...

... bunch of other Reapers are left behind to break down the camp or whatever. It's not very clear.

Anyway, the actual first map is pretty easy and a bit of an awkward introduction to Reaper mechanics, as Concealment isn't helpful with basic Lost and Shadow isn't any better. You're best off just having Elena shoot Lost until her Shadow breaks and leaving it broken.

The first reason it's easy is that Lost are the only threat on the map; no ADVENT forces are about. The second reason is it's only basic Lost, no Dashers or Brutes. The third reason is that Lost wave mechanics don't actually apply in this map; there's a finite number of Lost on the map, and once you kill them all there'll be chatter confirming they're all gone (Aside Elena adding 'for the moment'), at which point you can just run for your target zone in the northern corner of the map.

That said, it's worth pointing out the rather odd point that the target zone has an extra-large pod of eight Lost hanging about it, and even weirder is that this one pod is pretty widely spaced, with half of them on top of the target zone and half of them inside a nearby building, where half a screen or so separates the pod's halves. This might actually give you some trouble if you activate the pod with no action points left, or if you don't notice the Lost in the building and so stop people in easy reach of them, unaware active Lost will be able to pop through the windows and attack.

If you're wanting to optimize, a Sharpshooter and/or Ranger are the things to assign to the first squad; the Sharpshooter for Pistol Headshot chains to reliably clear out the many 2 HP Lost, the Ranger for reliably clearing out slightly tougher Lost. It's not necessary to optimize, but hey, there you go.

The map itself is tiny, one of the smallest maps in the game. It's also got a pretty clear 'intended path' involving cutting through a building, passing through an alleyway, and there you go you're at the target zone. You absolutely can take other routes, and going northeast is probably more optimal for dealing with the weird super-sized Lost pod safely, but the map design and initial Lost positions subtly guide you to the alleyway, and it's not like it's bad to go with the flow here.

Also, your squad doesn't start with squad Concealment. Not that it would be useful anyway, but it's a little surprising, and the game makes no attempt to justify it.

Upon completion, you get a non-standard loading screen of the Skyranger hovering dangerously low in the city, jumping intermittently between two general camera positions, the whole thing clearly occurring within the 3D game engine. I'm... not really sure why this bit is used for this transition, but okay. I do like it as a relatively economical way to make a new loading screen sequence; if XCOM 3 messed around with a bit more variety to mission loading screens in this way, that'd be a bit neat.

The second part also opens on a cinema bit with your troops approaching a burning bit of enemy stuff, but instead of a Chryssalid head being cooked it's an ADVENT aerial transport that's apparently crashed. This is mildly interesting as far as somewhat-subtle visual parallels, but unfortunately the game offers no explanation for how this transport is supposed to have been downed: where Elena had something like a dozen Reapers with her, Mox seems to be alone, and there's no attempt to suggest he had a rocket launcher or anything. So... um?

I'd normally write it off as a coincidence that was maybe a bit thoughtless of the devs, but your troops end up rushing forward in response to an explosion, find Mox finishing off a Purifier, and he proceeds to assure you that he dealt with the patrol before it could get out a warning. This seems like a pretty clear attempt to indicate that, yes, Mox took out an entire little group of ADVENT troops, including their aerial transport. So... again, how?

Whatever the case, Mox joins up with your troops, the cinema ends, and the second part of this mission begins properly.

This second map is of a more normal size than the first map, but is actually much emptier. The map's initial state has exactly one pod of two Purifiers patrolling a bit ahead of your starting area, and once you've dealt with those two Purifiers there's nothing of note on the map until you've tripped the next plot bit.

The two Purifiers themselves are a bit of a rude introduction to Purifiers; Lost And Abandoned triggers midway through the first month, while Purifiers don't enter normal rotation until the first Supply Raid, which is to say late in the second month; this is basically a full month earlier. And normally you don't get multiple Purifiers in individual pods when they first show up. While they're probably a bit undertuned for regular play, they still have good HP by the standards of so early in a run, and their Incendiary Grenade can be basically an unavoidable instant kill on your troops given how little HP your soldiers have so early, while you're stuck with only three troops to fight them, and one of them is a Skirmisher; Justice is a terrible idea to use on Purifiers given the death explosion risk, and getting close enough to shoot them reliably with the Bullpup has the same issue. As a bonus, the map's design is such that they're very likely to get into High Cover readily; you may want to assign a Grenadier to this second squad, in hopes of blasting their Cover and doing some damage completely reliably. (You might think this would generate Lost, given all the dialogue, but nope)

This is where it's really unfortunate your squad inexplicably doesn't start with squad Concealment, as you won't get to do an Overwatch ambush on the Purifiers. You can try to advance carefully and catch them with Overwatch -they actually wander around- but your odds of landing hits are pretty bad; don't be surprised if it ends up just wasting ammo. In any event, keep your troops spread out once the pod is activated, and keep in mind that breaking line of sight entirely is basically foolproof protection. Don't be afraid to chuck grenades, either; neither of them has timed loot, and you probably won't miss the grenades later in the mission.

Once the Purifiers are dealt with, it's time to approach the northwestern edge of the map, triggering a cinema showing a bunch of Purifiers torching Lost while Officers watch, presumably providing oversight. Mox decides you don't have the time to be dealing with this force, which is a bit of a strange rationale but whatever, and proceeds to...

... shoot one of the Purifiers in the fuel tank, causing them to spray flames for a bit, explode, and cause the ADVENT vehicle to also explode, taking the entire group out.

This is kind of ridiculous, honestly, but whatever. More interesting is that the game actually teleports Mox to a specific point in the northwest and eats his action points when you trigger this cinematic, ensuring he's actually behind the abduction pod as the cinema depicts him. This can be amusing if you had Mox wander far away before tripping the cinema so the teleportation is really blatant...

This all then leads into Lost spawning from the south corner of the map and the northeastern edge of the map, and kicking off roughly standard Lost wave generation mechanics. Also, you get a 4-turn timer while Bradford tells you to hold position, as he's looking for an alternate route to get to the meetup point. You should not actually heed this advice; just head southwest to the western corner, as the new target zone will always generate there and there's really no reason to wait for Bradford to tell you to go there.

Especially because these Lost are actually vaguely dangerous, including Dashers and generating Lost in decently large numbers. You can actually end up with people taking damage or getting killed through getting a few too many misses if you linger, and the area Mox gets teleported to isn't actually all that great a defensive position.

Once you've gotten everyone to the target zone after it's actually spawned, it's time for another non-standard loading screen, this time of just a random stretch of the city. I'm not sure why this wasn't the type of image used for the first loading screen, honestly, but okay.

Once the loading screen is done, the game kicks right into the cinema of Elena and Mox actually meeting, which is a little jarring, but okay sure.

Of course, the Assassin attempting to invisibly kill Mox interrupts Elena and Mox being combative, which leads pretty directly into the third and final map.

At this point you've got a full squad of six people (Which is actually abnormally large of a squad this early in the game, but shh), all sitting atop a raised train track area, with no apparent enemies. As the Assassin was shown turning invisible, it's natural enough to assume she's lurking invisibly in the area and try to huddle in a defensible formation or the like. In actuality, she's not on the map as yet, and will do the standard Chosen spawning stuff after you end your turn. Furthermore, she has Shadowstep guaranteed, so trying to catch her with Overwatch after she reveals herself is useless.

What you should actually be doing is having Elena go into Shadow (Assuming you had her break it in the first map) and advance as fast as she can toward the abduction pod visible down below, so you can try to have her reveal the Assassin immediately after she spawns. Everybody else should also advance aggressively, though probably retaining the high ground.

The Assassin herself functions basically normally aside the qualifier that once you've removed a third of her HP she uses Vanishing Wind out of turn order and bails (Note that you do not get Ability Points for this!), triggering the abduction pod to do sonic nonsense that draws in Lost, turning this third part into another round of running to a designated point while Lost are regularly spawning. (Every second turn, specifically) This includes that Dashers get spawned, so it's actually a little dangerous!

The final evac point is up in the northern corner of the map, so if you can it's useful to, while fighting the Assassin, have your squad drift northward. Though ideally you simply drive her off without ever letting her have a turn, which would make this a bit moot.

The actual run to the north involves passing through buildings, and getting up their top bits is a good way to reduce the threat of the Lost, especially if you bother to block the ladders with people as the opportunity arises.

Oddly, Alien Activity will keep popping up after the Assassin leaves, but as far as I'm aware there's no non-Lost enemies on the map. I suspect the Assassin is literally still present on the map in engine terms and that's what's causing this, but it's possible I've just managed to never stumble into some ADVENT unit in some weird corner or something.

In any event, once everybody is in the designated zone, a cinema kicks off of Elena and Mox making their way to the Skyranger while Lost are closing in; you're done with the mission and can just watch the two bonding over shooting zombies.

Up until the Assassin pops out of nowhere to grab Mox, anyway.

A few more notes about the mission: first of all, you don't loot bodies, which makes sense, especially since it would be a bit janky for Lost And Abandoned to give super-early access to Purifier corpses. Instead, you get a Scientist (For no explained reason) and a decent chunk of Intel. (Which is more plausible to rationalize) Second, if Mox or Elena goes down in any of these three parts, the game will immediately inform you that you've game over-d and give you a prompt to load a save or restart the mission. On the plus side, 'restart the mission' actually restarts the map; if Mox dies in the second map, the game won't force you to redo Elena's map. Amusingly, your X-COM soldiers are completely disposable, though obviously you don't want them to die, and I'm pretty sure you'd unavoidably lose any gear on them if they died. This is so early in a run there's limited room to be losing stuff, but for one thing if you have the Tactical Legacy Pack it'd be pretty bad to bring in TLP weapons and then lose them. So try not to let X-COM soldiers die, even though the mission doesn't care about their survival.

Also, rather oddly it has unique combat music. It sounds enough like a couple of generally-used combat tunes I imagine a lot of players do Lost And Abandoned once and then hear the similar-ish tunes in later missions and incorrectly go 'oh, it's the L&A tune, cool', but no, it's actually unique to here. I'm not really sure why; it'd work fine as a general tune, where the Nest and Lost Towers tunes are more targeted at their missions, such that I understand why they got locked to their missions. (Even if I wish the Lost Towers tunes weren't locked; they really deserve to be heard more) There's a mod that makes it more general if you care, at least, though it has a bunch of other effects I'm personally not a fan of.

Of course, Lost And Abandoned does more than just have a one-off special mission: Mox getting captured is actual gameplay and he requires a rescue, with this replacing the normal Covert Op for contacting the Skirmishers, and even before you get to the mission it has a bunch of effects. Indeed, it forces quite a bit of tutorial handholding stuff even if you have the Tutorial disabled, in part as... just a side effect of the narrative stuff, actually.

Specifically, since Lost And Abandoned is premised under X-COM starting out with a strained relationship with the Reapers and Skirmishers (And no relationship with the Templar), you start with no Resistance soldier at all, having to wait until Lost And Abandoned to get your first one. Similarly, you don't get to build the Resistance Ring until you've completed Lost And Abandoned, since Covert Ops are premised as cooperation with the Resistance factions you start out not having such easy cooperation with. And for the most handholding-as-side-effect, there's the initial impact on the Geoscape, where you're forced to scan Rumors with zero interactivity, because you don't start with access to any Resistance faction HQs, having to wait until Lost And Abandoned is finished to gain access to the Reaper HQ.

Also for no clear reason the Assassin gets forced to have Shadowstep as one of her initial Strengths, not just within this mission but in fact for the entire run. I really don't get why. More understandably, Lost And Abandoned causes your first Retaliation mission to not be jumped by a Chosen, since Lost And Abandoned is acting as the start of your Chosen schedule.

Much like the Tutorial effects, this all unfortunately trends toward making the game harder. You end up behind on Ability Points (Because your first Chosen fight doesn't provide any in this case), behind on Squaddies (Because waiting on the Resistance Ring means you don't get to level Rookies via Covert Ops initially), with your initial Resistance soldier behind on experience, with no real benefit in exchange. It's thankfully less dramatic about this than the Tutorial effects, but the trend remains both existent and awkward.

Narratively, I've been over a lot of stuff Lost And Abandoned touches on before, such as how all this 'Lost and Purifiers are new to X-COM' stuff doesn't really make much sense, but there's some stuff worth covering here I haven't gotten into before.

First, a Lost info bit that only gets mentioned in Lost And Abandoned is an implication that the Lost are reproducing or something, where it gets explicitly commented on that ADVENT has been torching Lost populations for years and they somehow keep having huge numbers anyway. I actually like how this bit is handled; nobody proffers a writer-talking-to-the-player theory for how this can be so, it just gets raised as a self-evident fact with a metaphorical shrug. This is good and sensible, in that it's telling the player that the infinite zombie legions in gameplay are in fact supposed to be narratively real, which is a purposeful thing to inform the player of, while simultaneously avoiding breaking immersion (As happens when eg The Scientist Character informs the player of what the devs intend to be going on, never mind The Scientist Character has no way to know this in-universe) and also having the benefit of not committing to any particular explanation as yet.

This latter point is actually very notable in its own right, in that a bizarrely common error for games to perform is to commit to specific explanations for things that aren't yet important to actually explain, which is just broadly a bad practice that creates problems, starting from the point that feeling pressured to come up with an answer lends itself to coming up with bad answers that don't really make sense or are contrary to one's needs (Or both), and continuing into the issue that it unnecessarily risks putting later games into an awkward position where staying consistent with what's come before means not being able to take options that would otherwise make sense and be interesting, leading to later games having to pick between staying consistent and coherent vs making something locally good and interesting, not because of any inherent tension but due to problematic decisions made at earlier points.

Notably, this is also consistent with War of the Chosen's handling of the Spectre, where Tygan jumping to a specific theory right away is not the devs talking directly to the audience, and ultimately the game leaves what exactly is going on with Spectres uncertain. Thus, XCOM 3 (Or XCOM Legends, or whatever) can come back to the Spectre later with a specific explanation, whether it's one that fits nicely into the new game's new context or just a broadly good explanation that had time to be rolled over and checked for flaws well before it got committed to. This gives me some hope that this kind of decision-making (Leaving options open when it's not necessary to commit yet, keeping in-universe knowledge believable, etc) might actually be the norm for future games in the series.

Second, I've mentioned Skirmisher-with-Grenade-Launcher before, and it's specifically seen if you have Lost And Abandoned enabled, in a cinema leading up to the mission spawning. It's easy to overlook because it's only on-screen briefly and is presented in this blue filter, but there they are on the left. Even easier to overlook -as in, I only noticed it with gathering screenshots and scrutinizing them- is what appears to be a Cannon on the table on the right there. I'm really curious what the background on this image is; were there ever plans for the Skirmishers to come in a heavier weapons variant, or something? Or is this just an image of Skirmishers with weaponry and ammo and all, where it has no deeper meaning? Modders have run with the Skirmisher Grenadier, but of course that's not the actual devs...

Third, an element I'm unsure of the actual intent of that feels a bit weird in presentation is the details of Elena's hostility to Mox -that she talks about him having lead death squads to murder 'her people' back in the early days of the occupation. So firstly this seems to indicate ADVENT hybrids were a thing quite quickly, which is certainly how the Tactical Legacy Pack missions handle things as well; that feels a little odd to me personally, but it's a little difficult to judge the intent here given this and the larger thing with the Skirmishers is a pretty clear example of the devs changing their mind, where the base game is firmly premised under the nature of hybrid soldiers being a well-kept secret vs War of the Chosen clearly deciding that's not true.

The other, odder thing is Elena talking about 'my people', in that this seems to imply the Reapers were a recognizable social group from quite early in the occupation, especially in conjunction with Elena's other dialogue where she says things like 'Reapers have long memories'. It's not entirely clear if this is meant to be a relatively factual (If emotionally-charged) statement or an example of retrofitting history to fit one's narrative, though; I would readily buy that the Reapers didn't recognizably exist when Mox The Butcher was a thing, but that Elena is retroactively remembering things as 'Mox targeted a united social group I am part of'. Among other points, groups being targeted often leads to them banding together, including that this often leads to people generating narratives that explicitly present it as if they were a united group before they were targeted even though the uniting was caused by being targeted.

In conjunction with War of the Chosen having a much greater willingness to have even ally characters say or believe things that the narrative makes clear are not, in fact, objectively correct, I'm not sure what the true nature of this oddness is. That's a good thing, though; what I'm driving at here is that if it was clearly the case that the devs were telling us The Objective In-Universe Truth via Elena, this would be a lot more likely to be a writing error, where dubious worldbuilding has been committed to. As-is, though, I totally buy Elena saying these things, even though I'm a little skeptical some of the implications of what she's saying are really true. This is one of the ways War of the Chosen is a big improvement: lots more character-driven writing, where people say and do things that would make sense for them as people to do, instead of saying or doing things because the plot demands it, or because the writer is trying to explain their cool idea to you via an in-universe character, or otherwise for distortive out-of-universe reasons.

I've also not really talked about the visual direction of ADVENT hybrids, which I actually find pretty interesting, even if some bits are confusing. (Why do hybrids have metal bolts or whatever in their heads? What's that supposed to be for?)

Thing is, War of the Chosen actually pretty significantly retcons the appearance of hybrids. In the base game, they look like this:

Now, broadly the hybrid design keeps core qualities. Both designs have a large recessed area around the eyes that is noticeably darker than the rest of their skin, odd ridging on the forehead, and a general skin tone I'm pretty sure is meant to be subtly off.

However, the base-game hybrids have this odd thing where the forehead is oversized such that they lack a distinct visual nose (It's just sort of at the bottom of their enlarged forehead, not its own distinct structure), where War of the Chosen's new hybrid visuals get rid of that in favor of more normal human proportions on that end...

... but the interesting thing is that this is the only example of War of the Chosen's redesign making hybrids less odd-looking. Mox's eyes have the 'whites' be a very dark color, possibly black outright, while the color portion is huge, a yellow I don't think naturally occurs in humans, and other differences I have a harder time describing; even considering artistic flair it's very obvious Mox's eyes are meant to be inhuman and I suspect a lot of people find them creepy outright. (At least, out of people who got a good enough look to see how different they are) Hybrids in general have noticeably rougher hands, with their fingernails in particular being more like claws; this is very visible if you have a Skirmisher perform a Hack, as you'll get an up-close look at their fingers in the process of the game zooming in on their Hacking pad. Their skin tone effects are noticeably different from your human soldiers -this is easy to overlook if you don't mess with customization, as Resistance troops have the default random generation of appearances noticeably more constricted than X-COM troops, in particular they're much more insistent on wearing their helmets (Hooray!), so you tend to not get a good look at Skirmisher skin unless you're fond of soldier customization. But if you do mess around with appearance, you can pretty readily see Skirmisher skin is noticeably different from the skin of your other troops.

This is all interesting because War of the Chosen is giving us hybrid allies simultaneous to reworking their design to mark them as more clearly, significantly alien. Usually when I see fiction taking an existing enemy type (Note that I'm not just talking games here; I mean any case of 'these aliens or whoever start out always being Bad Guys or otherwise our opposition') and deciding to make them friendly, what happens with the visual direction is our once-enemies are made less alien-looking, less 'ugly', and more cuddly; sharp elements like claws or fangs get removed or made less menacing-looking, dark colors are generally lightened, the once-enemies are either given a fairly human face (If they lacked one) or have their existing face changed to make it closer to regular human all-around, if their eyes glowed red or similar they get shunted to something more like what is in the regular human range or at least in the area people are comfortable giving regular appealing human characters even if it's unreal. (ie anime and whatnot will give regular human characters we're supposed to like silver eyes, even though that's not a real eye color; once-enemies whose eyes were Creepy Silver similarly might stay silver but drop the Eerie Glow or something)

This is one reason I have a pretty strong personal fondness for War of the Chosen above and beyond its mechanical improvements and whatnot: it is, as yet, the only example I've personally seen of fiction taking once-enemies, making them allies, and not only failing to 'soften' their appearance but actually increasing the visual alienness of our now-allies! Even Chimera Squad unfortunately falls into this trend in spite of being the immediately-following XCOM game, though I'll be getting into that when we get to Chimera Squad.

Point is, I wish this was more normal, and I do hope XCOM 3, if it gives you alien allies, will stick to this instead of 'softening' the alien appearances like Chimera Squad did.

(To be clear, Chimera Squad is much less aggressive about this 'softening' than most cases I've seen; I have issues with it and will get into that when we get there, but it's still better than average on this topic, just... an unfortunate reversal from War of the Chosen)

Fourth, an odd thing is that Lost And Abandoned has exclusive dialogue where Tygan repeatedly claims the Lost are actually coordinating with each other, with some of his dialogue suggesting he thinks they're being coordinated by some manner of hivemind. I'm... really not sure what to make of this, given these ideas occur nowhere else in the game, and the uncertainty is further compounded by how this could just be a clunky attempt to give some kind of context on Lost pods having every member animate simultaneously. Quite a lot of the dialogue around Lost is trying to be fairly direct allusions to gameplay elements, and quite a lot of it is actually not at all obvious about this. This could be more of the same.

It'd certainly be interesting if a later game comes back to the Lost and builds on this hivemind thing. I'm not sure it'd be good for the series/setting... but it'd definitely be interesting. Zombie apocalypse stories are pretty prone to stubbornly insisting all zombies are mindless and don't communicate and so on even as they depict situations that are difficult to explain without some kind of non-obvious cooperation occurring; it'd be neat to see something deliberately reconcile this inconsistency.

Fifth, it's interesting -and a little amusing- that the cinema leading up to the mission depicts the meetup point as occurring in northern South America. The amusing element is straightforward enough: the game doesn't de-randomize your starting position in Lost And Abandoned runs, and it is in fact always forbidden for you to start in South America. As Lost And Abandoned occurs so early in a run, it's completely impossible for the mission to actually generate where it's being depicted as occurring; it always will spawn in the vicinity of your starting region, after all.

The interesting-ness is that I'd have expected, if we were going to get a cinema indicating a specific location at all, that'd be in North America; the Reaper backstory places them in North America, and even if it didn't this is an American company making this game. Usually people, when there's no clear reason to place something in a specific part of the world, unthinkingly default to their part of the world. (Or more accurately, whatever they think of as their part of the world) As the Skirmishers are rogue ADVENT and ADVENT is global, it's not like the Skirmishers are clearly tied to any particular location -but here we have this cinema implying they're based primarily out of South America.

It's worth noting that a base-game cinema also ends up focusing on South America when zooming in on the Hologlobe. So the game actually does this twice. I wonder what the story there is?

Though honestly I mostly mention it because the subtle impossibility amuses me, and I imagine most players don't realize it is impossible for the cinema to line up with their run.

Sixth, something I've never really talked about is that the green growths on Lost seem to be intended to ultimately be the rapidly-hardening fluid abduction pods use to detain people in the prior game, with War of the Chosen presenting it as if the stuff grows like a plant and burrows into human flesh to ultimately produce the Lost. I'm unsure what to really make of this suggestion; it's certainly an interesting direction to take abduction pods, but it's unclear what the context here is. Is the capture goo supposed to be a natural or engineered lifeform? Is the behavior of growing and seeking things out known and intended on the part of the Ethereals? Is this supposed to connect to the 'Lost hivemind' thing Tygan pushes, where the Lost are extensions of the will of weird space plants?

I have doubts this particular topic will ever be properly explored by the series, unfortunately; it seems likely to remain an intriguing mystery and nothing more.

Seventh and last, a tidbit I like is that Volk's room recycles the Alien Hunters 'trophy' models used to represent kill-counts. The Reapers-as-hunters thing fits to it, and it's nice to see those models getting reused in a context they make sense in.

Moving on to...

Chosen Stronghold

Chosen Strongholds I've touched on the strategic end of indirectly, but to reiterate: you do a Covert Op chain to ultimately unlock a given Chosen's Stronghold, and successfully completing this mission will take the Chosen out of the fight permanently, as well as give you the option to research their loot to unlock it for your own use.

The mission itself is broken up into two maps, and in a probably-accidental imitation of Terror From The Deep's two-part missions you'll loot bodies from the second map but not the first. This is not only able to be annoying in the moment but has the awkward point that Turrets can actually show up in Strongholds but it's actually completely impossible for you to loot their wrecks because they only ever show up in the first part. Admittedly Turrets aren't terribly common in Strongholds, but still. Awkward, given how rare lootable Turrets are overall. Though why they're rare requires discussing the non-standard map generation of Strongholds, so let's get into that.

The second map for Strongholds is straightforward: fixed, predefined maps, with each Chosen having their own version. I'll be getting into the details later, though. The first map instead uses procedural generation, but of a rather different sort from the rest of the game. This first map is a square that is divided into a grid of equally-sized squares, where most rooms are plugged into a given 'room socket' -I say most because there's a few rooms that eat a 1x2 block of squares.

Room designs themselves are fairly rigid, where once you've hit Strongholds a few times you'll start seeing part of a room and correctly IDing it as a specific room you've seen before. I can specify that one room is apparently for manufacturing or maintaining Heavy Mecs, for example, and I imagine many players know exactly the room I'm talking about without me providing a screenshot or anything. The primary element of variation is actually the connecting paths; all rooms in a Stronghold are sealed containers by default where you can't see from one room into another room without opening a door first, with all these doors starting out closed, but a given instance of a room may have as few as 1 door or as many as 4 for a 1-socket room and potentially even more than that for the 1x2 rooms. (Six at most, specifically)

The door stuff itself is relatively straightforward. First of all, a room that is in contact with the edges of the map won't have a door at such an edge. Second, the game has a clear start point and a clear endpoint, and the game must draw a path through other rooms between these guaranteed rooms, which defines door placement. Third, any rooms not in the path still must have a door to another room, so they can be accessed. Also, an easy to overlook point is that the game randomly assigns door type for most rooms: one door variant is a single large vertical door, while the other variant is a pair of single-tile doors. When I'm saying there's a door at any given point, it would probably more accurate to say an 'entrance' or something, as frequently it'll be two doors per se.

Anyway, the procedural generation is a little more complicated in practice because some rooms are not actually designed so they can go anywhere. Your starting room is usually in a corner, and if it's not in a corner it's directly adjacent to a room that is in a corner, and it only has two possible door locations; a 'front' door and a 'back' door, with the other walls invalid to have doors. Annoyingly, if your starting room generates with both front and back doors, the camera tends to be pointing you toward the dead end; it's good to get in the habit of checking behind your squad before you do anything, instead of wasting time going into the dead end.

Similarly, your destination room is also usually in a corner, and it has only a front door valid. There's some other cases, like a 'T-shaped' room that isn't guaranteed to appear but if it does appear it specifically has the left 'arm' connect to the destination room while the right 'arm' connects to a dead-end storage room and the 'trunk' is where you have to enter from. I've not exhaustively documented all the possibilities or worked out the game's exact internal process for deciding room placement; most of it is irrelevant from a player perspective. The T-shaped room is the only room I'm aware of where understanding how it fits into the game's map generation is useful information for getting through the mission. (To wit: if you find this room, you know you're almost there, and you also know that your destination is to the left)

This is the destination room, and it's particularly blatant about being rigid -for example, toward the bottom-center of this image you can see an Acid container object. It is in fact the case that there's always an Acid container in that exact spot. It's not placed semi-randomly or something, even though you'd expect it to be randomized.

Your actual goal is to get all your soldiers to the glowing bit in front of the back-most Ethereal statue. It's a teleporter, and once you initiate the teleportation you go straight to a loading screen followed by the second map. Note that any soldiers not in the teleport zone will actually automatically evacuate to the Avenger -among other points, if you have someone start Bleeding Out in this first map, it's okay to Stabilize them and then just leave them behind. They'll somehow wake up and get back to the Avenger on their own when you initiate the teleportation.

Yeah, it's ridiculous, but I prefer it to the obvious alternatives.

Adding to the weirdness is the point that you're not allowed to Evac or otherwise abort the mission. You can't place an Evac point, and no Evac point is on the map. Again, I absolutely prefer this final outcome to a lot of the alternate possibilities, but it's certainly clunky.

The destination room itself is always occupied by a pod, and this pod will refuse to move until activated. Furthermore, other pods are unwilling to patrol into this room. This means the door is (almost) always closed until you open it; I've had a handful of occasions where a pod's patrol routine ended up with a secondary member wanting to stand just inside the room and thus opened the door, but this is rare, something I've seen happen twice across dozens of Stronghold assaults.

Said pod clearly has routines for trying to make it a 'boss' pod. If you've got Andromedons in rotation, it's almost always an Andromedon-led pod, and if you're earlier than that it will still usually be the latest and greatest enemy leading the pod. (eg an Archon) It's not perfect of a routine, but the intent is pretty clear, and it's best to plan around the idea that this will be the toughest fight you deal with in this map, because it often is.

'But wait', some of you might be thinking to yourselves. 'Shouldn't you be talking about Sectopods or Gatekeepers or Alien Rulers when talking about a boss routine?' Those are the standard boss slot enemies after all.

Chosen Strongholds have a non-standard enemy list, is the thing. Sectopods, Gatekeepers, and Alien Rulers are all forbidden from showing up in them. (Which is probably very much for the best with the Alien Rulers; I suspect if you modded the game to let them appear here and then killed one in this first part that you'd fail to loot the body) And of course Chosen are also forbidden from doing their usual ambush routine here. Conversely, Berserkers and Chryssalids are actually allowed in Strongholds -note that this is yet another mission in which loner Burrow-pods are not a thing, though.

This all extends into the second part, too, to be clear.

Also unusual -and specific to this first part- is that Strongholds have pods normally be made out of 4 members instead of the usual 3. You still get a specific designated pod leader, so for example you're not going to see a pod contain multiple Officers or Andromedons, but you'll see stuff like four Codices, or an Officer leading a Trooper, a Shieldbearer, and a Stun Lancer. Area of effect is often really useful here as a result, and more esoteric crowd control like Reaper-the-skill is more likely to get a chance to shine. It also makes it that bit more important to not be careless about pulling pods, since their damage output averages that bit higher.

Returning to Turrets at last, I say they're rare because there's a limited array of rooms they're allowed to generate in, and then they're not even all that common to spawn when you get one of the handful of rooms they can generate in. I'm pretty sure the full list is: the two different 1x2 rooms (One looks to be a prisoner area, with multiple cells; the Turrets are placed atop the cells. The other is, bizarrely, an area containing aerial troop transports, where you can see a couple Turrets toward the center, with no high ground benefit) and a storage unit room. (This one gets Turrets placed atop storage racks, you know, sometimes) Interestingly, the game seems to decide this as a fairly binary thing, where a given room will either be completely empty of Turrets or have every Turret slot filled in. Also unusual is that these rooms do not have Turret sockets by default, unlike most maps that can have Turrets.

It's worth pointing out that Stronghold Turrets are a little more intrusively relevant than normal simply because circling around them is often not an option. You can still potentially ignore them, such as by having soldiers that are moving through their rooms always end in spots no Turret has sight to, but it's not nearly so trivial as it is in most maps. It's a neat little sign of improvement and gives me some hope that if XCOM 3 brings back Turrets it will do so with a clearer idea of how to construct maps so Turrets matter.

Anyway, something interesting and important about Chosen Stronghold assaults is that you don't start with squad Concealment, but you mostly don't actually miss it. (Assuming you play to the map design, anyway) The 'room socket' size is such that with most rooms a soldier will see the entire room if they just stand next to and open a door accessing the room -the 1x2 rooms are an awkward exception, and certain specific 1-socket rooms have line of sight obstructions large enough for entire pods to be hidden behind them, but broadly speaking you can pile up the squad near a door, end turn, then on the following turn open the door and either be confident you're free to charge toward the next door because no pod activated or get to the fighting with a full set of action points.

By a similar token, your ability to ambush enemies by Overwatching and having them patrol into your Overwatch to get in free damage is very limited. It's not impossible to do, but it's much less practical than in most missions; simply scouting ahead with a Reaper is not a reliable way to set such up, and indeed this is another War of the Chosen mission Reapers are actually a bit dubious on. After all, the primary purpose of Concealment is to avoid enemy pods getting the drop on your squad, and the map design does a lot to avoid that all by itself so long as you aren't careless.

It's not perfect at this; in addition to the 1x2 rooms and the rooms that have hiding spots for pods, most pods patrol about, opening doors in the process. It's possible to open a door, see no enemies, then in the process of piling through activate a pod in another room because the door was open. But it's still an interesting change of pace and, interestingly, is very comparable to Chimera Squad's Breach system in its approach to resolving the problems posed by the pod activation mechanic.

Another way the mission is a little clunky is that you're clearly intended to search for the teleporter room; unlike most mission objectives, the game doesn't mark out your destination, and this mission uses a non-standard version of the 'hide things the squad has never seen' effects that's clearly trying to be more thorough. I call this 'clunky' because often you can see the edges of a room through its walls well enough to correctly ID which room it is; the destination room in particular is actually really easy to pick out reliably, because so much about it is particular to it; if you spot an Ethereal statue, you've found the destination room. If you recognize the green 'scale' pattern on the walls, you've found the destination room. If you recognize the guardrail shape, you've found the destination room. And so on.

This is a little less exploitable than you might expect due to another bit of clunkiness: the walls separating rooms are sealing away an eldritch nothingness, where blasting the wall doesn't give you line of sight or line of fire on the area and your soldiers are unable to walk through the infinite blackness therein, even though visually these walls are completely destructible. (As in, you can hit them with a rocket, and they don't get replaced with a graphic of dirt or concrete or whatever) Note that 'walls' here is a little more generous than you might be assuming; this can also happen with the pillars, where some of them are technically destructible but it's less useful than you might expect because the square the pillar was occupying is now an inviolate pit of darkness.

That's all visually ugly of course, but it does at least mean you can't ID the destination room through a wall, blast it open, and skip 80% of the map. Though this see-it-through-walls nonsense is still mildly exploitable, letting you ignore rooms that can't possibly be on the path to your destination even though you're really not supposed to know they aren't.

Also note that strictly speaking you don't actually have to kill anything to get through this part. Even the guard pod isn't actually necessary to kill; the pod doesn't prevent you from using the teleporter!

But it's generally not practical to avoid killing enemies except to the extent of not bothering to sweep the entire map.

That's enough about the first part, though: on to the second part!

The second part has an odd start. Initially, there will be exactly one pod lurking somewhere in the room, patrolling about; once you've taken out that pod nothing further will happen until you have somebody advance far enough in the room. It's a bit janky, as it gives a player some opportunities to get themselves in trouble from not understanding the framework, but is very unlikely to pose a real problem if you know how the map works and have an adequately-prepared team. Among other points, there's really no reason to not have everyone reload, maybe do some healing if anyone is hurt, and take your time to optimally set up for the real fight. (Aside all this eating into your real time, of course)

Once somebody has advanced far enough, you'll get a cinema of the Chosen showing up and delivering a speech, and now the actual point of the mission starts: taking out the Chosen. The Chosen works basically as usual, but once taken out two things happen: their Sarcophagus becomes vulnerable, and two one-person pods will spawn in each enemy turn until the Chosen respawns. The respawning itself is presented as the Sarcophagus healing the Chosen in percentage form, where each turn that passes raises a listed percent of HP, and when it hits 100% the Chosen respawns at full health. This percentage is meaningfully real, in that when you do finally smash the Sarcophagus the Chosen will respawn on the next enemy turn at roughly the stated percentage of HP.

The actual percent value added per 'tick' depends on your difficulty, with it being added each time your turn ends while the Sarcophagus survives but also when they die with the Sarcophagus intact one 'tick' is immediately added, presumably so the game can't end up spawning a Chosen with 0 HP. On Commander, each tick is 25%, while on Legendary each tick is 33%; this means on Legendary you have only two turns to shoot at the Sarcophagus, and a more generous three on Commander.

This all encourages you to arrange to kill the Chosen with as many unit turns (And, less consistently, as many action points) remaining as possible, so you can then pour fire into the Sarcophagus. That first turn in particular is precious since that's your only opportunity to attack the Sarcophagus without getting distracted by the reinforcements. As the mission doesn't end until you've killed the Chosen after they respawned after you've smashed the Sarcophagus, and they don't respawn until your turn ends, it's not possible to simply ignore the reinforcements and end the mission -they will get at least one turn to attack if you leave them alive and unimpaired. The absolute ideal is in fact to finish the Chosen with reaction fire in their turn, so you have a full turn of unit actions to work with; done properly, it's often possible for a team to take out the Sarcophagus in one turn, even up on Legendary, thus preventing reinforcements from arriving at all.

(I haven't gotten around to working out the Sarcophagus HP's full range, but on Commander it's 60, and it's higher on Legendary and lower on lower difficulties. I'd guesstimate it at 80 on Legendary, but still need to actually confirm it)

Of course, that's not possible if the Chosen has Shadowstep, and one of them will eventually, and arranging a reliable reaction fire kill is difficult in the first place; only Templar Bladestorm and Katana Bladestorm are naturally fully reliable reaction fire options, and you can't count on the former, can't use the latter on the Assassin, and if the Chosen has Immune To Melee they're both useless anyway. Similarly, Stock damage is low, enough so that getting the Chosen down to a low enough HP to be finished by Stocks for sure is difficult to do, and has the further issue that the Chosen will pretty reliably summon reinforcements before moving on their first turn after a (re)spawn, as the reinforcements will probably absorb that fire instead.

You can instead use a Proximity Mine to bait them into blowing theirself up, but that's not an option against a Blast Shield Chosen, and it has further hurdles; the Hunter can just Grapple out without triggering the Mine, and the Warlock is often perfectly happy to stay still if you don't have him flanked. You can use it as a reliable finisher on their first post-(re)spawn turn since they'll basically always open with summoning reinforcements, which only Mechlord summons might fail to move and trigger the Mine, but the reinforcements will survive, somewhat undermining the point of trying to kill the Chosen during their turn.

In some sense the most reliable way to kill the Chosen in their turn is to afflict them with Poison and/or Burn and/or Acid Burn and then get them low enough on HP they'll die the second their turn starts, but these all can roll as low as 1 damage; if you can inflict all three on them, then 3 HP is acceptable for ensuring a kill, but that's still a pretty tight range (1-3 HP) that you can't necessarily count on getting them to. It's only 'most reliable' in the sense that no Strength provides immunity to take the option off the table entirely.

Note that once the Sarcophagus is smashed, killing the Chosen again will trigger a cinema of their death and promptly end the mission, regardless of whether any regular enemies are about. If you want maximum experience and/or maximum corpse looting, kill regular enemies before finishing the Chosen. If things are coming apart and your squad is going to start losing people if the enemy gets even one more turn, hurry up and focus down the Chosen.

The regular enemy reinforcements themselves require discussing the layout, which requires discussing the Chosen-specific maps. So first...

... the Assassin's layout.

Brief aside; the images I'm using for the Chosen rooms are actually from the files, but as far as I'm aware you'll never see these images in-game. They're standard mission loading screen images, but when loading up the second map the game goes to the loading screen set normally used when first loading a save. (ie random ADVENT propaganda images plus images of the Chosen) So I'm pretty sure they're unused.

Anyway, first note the two platforms with pillars on the left and right sides of the image. Every Chosen room has four such platforms spread around roughly evenly, and when a Chosen is regenerating the game will spawn two enemies, randomly picking platforms to appear from, with them appearing in the middle of the platform chosen. Similarly, while the Chosen first spawns in front of their Sarcophagus, respawns all occur from the platforms in the same way as the regular reinforcements do.

As such, ideally your squad is positioned toward the front of the middle of the room: this both gives them easy access to the Sarcophagus and the Chosen's initial spawn area while also leaving your squad able to readily turn back and hit enemies that spawned in back, including the Chosen theirself.

The Assassin's room in particular is unique for having no high ground whatsoever. (Which is yet another reason I'm not a fan of Groundling; if the Assassin gets it, she effectively has only the Resistance soldier weakness in her final fight, which really shouldn't have been allowed to happen) All the rooms have a broadly recognizable framework, enough so I imagine a lot of players think the Chosen all have the same room outright, but there's substantive differences like this.

Those big braziers or whatever they're supposed to be, with the purple smoky goo, are a pretty convenient demarcation; if you travel past them, that will trigger the Assassin to spawn, but you can huddle up right behind the braziers without triggering her. The Assassin herself will basically always either huddle up against one of the pillars near her Sarcophagus or lurk among the rows of Low Cover in front of her Sarcophagus when she first spawns, though a couple times I've seen her hide up against one of the teleporter platforms. (The left one both times I've seen it; I don't have any particular reason to believe she can't go to the right one, but I haven't had it happen yet for whatever reason)

They're not very visible in this image, but the Assassin's room is also broken up a bit by trenches of bottomless pits non-fliers can't pass over without a Grapple. This can make it quite difficult to get a flank on a target in a key moment, and can foul up your own melee, preventing them from reaching a target that would otherwise be within their running reach. The Assassin is unlikely to be meaningfully hindered by these; she's simply too fast.

Also, it's worth noting that Chosen rooms have a rather shocking amount of terrain destructibility; fixed maps in XCOM 2 tend to have a lot of the Cover indestructible, so this is a bit surprising from these maps. The Assassin's room in particular is the most consistent about destructibility, with only the pillars and the Low Cover offered by hugging platforms being indestructible; you might expect the braziers to be invincible, but while they're prone to surviving a grenade they absolutely can be destroyed. As such, the Assassin is (Assuming she doesn't have Blast Shield) the Chosen who offers the most opportunity for Grenadiers and SPARKs to shine, and more generally Heavy Weapons and Plasma Grenades are more worth considering bringing.

The Hunter's room is a lot less destructible; all its high ground offers indestructible Cover at ground level, and it has more relevantly-placed shallow pools whose edges offer indestructible Low Cover. Note that these pools include Low Cover along their edges, which functions as High Cover from inside the pool; these Cover objects can be destroyed, and so you can at least degrade the tier of Cover the Hunter or a regular enemy is leaning up against.

The central bit of high ground is another reasonably convenient demarcation for triggering the fight proper, as running up to the edge of it closest to the Sarcophagus will trigger the Hunter to spawn. You can't see them in this shot, but opposite the visible ladders are more ladders, and these ladders are all High Cover objects, and indeed the only Cover available at the bottom of the raised platform; the Hunter is quite prone to running up to one of the ladders nearest his Sarcophagus after he spawns, which can be inconvenient if you're not ready for it since they're indestructible High Cover bits.

Also, running up to the front-most edge of this high ground is close enough to have line of fire on the Sarcophagus when it's not invincible, so that's another reason to consider putting some people there; so they can contribute against the Sarcophagus without having to move. Skirmishers really appreciate that strip of ground, for example -it also will usually result in line of fire on enemies that teleport in via the platforms closest to the Sarcophagus, for one. Just remember that the Hunter's tendency to lean up against a ladder puts him out of sight of anyone in that strip.

There's also still some impassable bottomless holes, but they're much less consistently relevant than with the Assassin's room. They're something to keep in mind in the initial phase of dealing with that initial pod, as it's not unusual for the pod to end up with one or more members awkward to get at because they're sheltering a bit behind one of the gaps, but once you've started the fight against the Hunter it's usually pretty irrelevant. (Especially if you make a point of putting most of your squad on the high ground, as the pits aren't positioned to meaningfully inhibit travel from up there to anywhere in particular)

Also note the corners having high ground segments. These are more sections of indestructible High Cover, though not very useful segments given only the corner of each actually lets you get line of fire on enemies while in said High Cover. These corner zones are primarily significant for the Hunter's tendency to Grapple up into them if he gets a turn. He'll often then sit behind the indestructible pillar unless and until you flank him, which can be a nuisance.

Of course, Skirmishers can potentially put the corner high ground to good use. Just keep in mind that while you can get line of fire on the Sarcophagus from the corner spots closest to the Sarcophagus, the line of sight is broken up in awkward, non-obvious ways, and the target preview functionality won't give you predictions on the Sarcophagus if it's currently invulnerable, even if it's been rendered vulnerable earlier in the battle. It's easy to end up with someone in a position that looks like it will have line of fire on the Sarcophagus once the Hunter is downed and then nope.

Lastly, the Warlock's version.

I'm going to immediately note that the red lighting used in the image, though striking, is not actually accurate to what his room looks like in-game. Which is a bit of a shame; the Chosen each having distinctive color schemes would've more readily communicated that they have distinctive room designs as well as made them feel less same-y. Though I'm not sure whether the rooms being rigid per-Chosen was the actual plan or yet another result of the game being rushed, so it's hard to say what would've made internal sense for the devs to choose...

Regardless, it's broadly pretty similar to the Hunter's layout, with a central raised area whose ladders are indestructible High Cover, more high ground in the corners, and bits of bottomless pit forking off from the central high ground.

Unlike the Hunter's room, there is no part of the central high ground that is close enough to the Sarcophagus to trigger the fight: somebody will have to hop down to get things started. By a similar token, only Sharpshooters (Or a Reaper you took Squadsight on, I guess, but why?) can shoot at the Sarcophagus while standing on that central platform, making it much less useful to huddle up on it. It's still worth considering having some of the squad waiting there when you do kick off the fight, just... less great a payoff.

As the central platform doesn't extend out so far toward the Sarcophagus, you won't see the Warlock taking cover against a ladder when initially spawning. Instead, he tends to sidle up to one of the tall whatever-those-are that are close to the corner high ground spots. Whatever those are, they're surprisingly frail; a single Plasma Grenade is enough to expose the Warlock.

If you let him get a turn, he'll often run up to one of the corner high ground spots, whether to use the pillar for its indestructible High Cover or to hide all the way in the corner of the map while he uses Spectral Army. This latter bit can be really inconvenient if you've been keeping the squad near the central area -it's actually quite hard to get a line of fire on that back corner, so if you don't have really fast melee or well-placed Grapplers you may find you simply can't get at the Warlock at all when he does this.

By a similar token, when he respawns, he tends to end up using one of the indestructible pillars as his High Cover object of choice. Relying on being able to smash his Cover past the first spawn is a shaky plan; better to be able to reliably get at him with melee (Assuming he doesn't have Immune to Melee...) or Hail of Bullets or the like.

As an aside, I actually quite like the way Spectral Army interacts with this mission. In most missions, the Warlock using Spectral Army is prone to being a bit of a dud action that primarily serves to waste the player's time, which isn't even a threat in standard timed missions since if he's in a position to use Spectral Army he's by definition stopped the clock and won't let it resume until you've killed him. When it does manage to be something more significant, it's usually by virtue of the janky behavior of a Spectral Lancer ending up somewhere your squad can't see, with you having not gotten to see it because the camera was focused on the Warlock; a bit of a 'cheap trick' where you can't find an enemy not because the game meant for it to be hard to find but because everything happened to line up so they were hidden, basically on accident.

In the Stronghold confrontation, well, right away we have the point that the map doesn't offer much ability for Spectral Lancers to end up out of sight after spawning. I'm not willing to declare with certainty that it's impossible, but it's certainly highly improbable at minimum. Even better, it intersects in an interesting way with the pressure to maximize squad actions available for shooting the Sarcophagus, where the Warlock generates a bunch of bullet sponges and the straightforward thing of taking them out and immediately finishing him off will almost certainly leave you with barely any actions left to hit the Sarcophagus with. This naturally leads to mini-puzzles of trying to figure out how to either kill all the Spectral Lancers and then arrange to finish the Warlock in his turn, or arranging to kill the last Spectral Lancer in his turn and then finish him efficiently in your turn while most of your actions get spent on busting the Sarcophagus.

I'm pretty sure this outcome is basically a happy accident, but I still like it.

Something worth noting that's particularly pertinent to the Warlock but also applies to the Hunter and, less relevantly, to the Assassin, is that the Chosen don't do their normal 'inactive' behavior in their Strongholds. Even when they respawn out of your squad's sight, the music goes straight to their confrontation tune, and more importantly you'll never see the Warlock use Spectral Zombies. (I've never seen the Hunter use Tracking Shot, but remain uncertain if that's an actual limitation or if it's just the map's cramped nature and the pressure to chase after him ensuring he's never ended up in a position to consider doing so)

The music thing itself is kind of funny and probably should've been handled slightly differently, as the game simply does all its usual routines aside skipping the 'Chosen lurking somewhere' music, including stopping their personal music and playing the little triumphant sting each time you kill them again. Ideally you'll only have to kill them twice, but it's entirely possible to end up killing them four or more times, especially up on Legendary where they respawn very quickly. It ends up accidentally-comedic, and they probably should've done something like switch to their lurking tune while reviving, or never left their confrontation tune until dead for the final time, or something. (The ideal would probably be giving them each a tune specific for the Stronghold confrontation that plays once they spawn until dead for good, but given the game's rushed nature that was probably never a realistic option)

Returning to gameplay, it should be emphasized that when the Chosen respawn they're always fresh, with all abilities off cooldown or having their charges set to base value, including that they can summon reinforcements right away. This is particularly important to keep in mind with the charge-based abilities, where the Assassin can use Mountain Mist repeatedly, and the Hunter can use Concussion Grenade repeatedly; it's easy to get used to the one-use nature of those abilities and stop being vigilant for them after one use, and then end up in a bad situation because they respawned and then used an ability you were thinking was unavailable to them.

But even with the cooldown abilities, it's important to keep in mind, particularly when you've destroyed the Sarcophagus, as this can result in them using cooldown abilities two turns in a row.

Fortunately, the Chosen overall don't have their balance lean very hard into powerful or dangerous abilities held back primarily by limited charges or long cooldowns. It could've been very bad if, say, any of the Chosen had been given a no-questions-asked move to knock a single soldier Unconscious with one charge, and then you get to the final confrontation and two respawns later half your squad is out of the fight with not a lot you could do about it. So thankfully this resetting is not something you need to be hyper-vigilant against, especially if you're successfully doing the optimal thing of taking them out without them getting turns and smash the Sarcophagus without them respawning at full even once; managing such makes it all a moot point.

Narratively, there's bits and pieces I could poke at as weird or silly or the like, such as how it's slightly arbitrary you can't find a Chosen's Stronghold except by working with their adversary who starts out not knowing the location, but given it's a very good fit for the game and it's not got any meaningfully problematic artificiality attached to it (ie there is no 'why can't I do this other, much less annoying option I should realistically have access to?' to the setup), I don't see much point to poking at such bits. There's clunkiness and unanswered questions here, but the closest to a problem is that it's never explicitly addressed why the Chosen don't teleport away once their Sarcophagus is broken and death is a real possibility.

Which... there's a lot of possible answers there. For example, they might not be able to; maybe their form of teleportation is tied up in their Sarcophagi, such that smashing it takes that ability away from them. Or we could focus on how absolutely awful the Ethereals are; I would readily buy that the Chosen are completely convinced the Ethereals would murder a Chosen whose Sarcophagus was smashed and then ran away, instead of getting them set up with a new Sarcophagus. (And would readily buy the Chosen are correct in such a belief, for that matter) The Chosen death cinemas also make a point of having every Chosen look very ragged, and it's not entirely clear how we're meant to take this; you can just go to the obvious thing of them looking ragged because you just finished shooting them to death for the final time, but it's possible that it's meant to be showing how much being killed, regenerated, and killed again back-to-back has screwed them up, where all the deaths and revivals have left them too exhausted to teleport out of here.

This isn't even getting into stuff like the Warlock clearly having emotionally-rooted reasons, where I doubt he'd think to flee even if the option is available to him.

I'd sooner criticize the framing of you only having one shot to hit the Stronghold, which is never really given a clear explanation. Are we supposed to assume the Stronghold will be relocated, or that this is a specific access teleporter that will have its connection to their Sarcophagus cut? Even then, my issue isn't 'this is difficult to reasonably explain', but rather 'this doesn't seem immediately, obviously sensible, and we're just told it's so without a reason provided'. And... War of the Chosen got blatantly rushed! So it's entirely possible this is another casualty of that and nothing more.

So overall, the Chosen Strongholds, though they could certainly have had their narrative design stronger, they're not remotely bad on that point. It's some of the better stuff in War of the Chosen as far as that goes, honestly. To the point I don't actually have a lot to say about them in this regard -they're essentially competent, and it's difficult to say a lot about solid competency.

So on to another Chosen-related mission.

Avenger Defense, Chosen edition

The mission that happens when a Chosen hits max Knowledge and attacks the Avenger itself.

Unlike the UFO form of Avenger Defense, nothing happens at the Geoscape layer to ostensibly represent forces closing in on the Avenger. The game simply launches into a cinematic when the designated day occurs. (Qualifier: the game isn't willing to launch the mission if the Avenger is mid-flight, though this is only ever a minor delay)

The cinematic comes in three different forms -one per Chosen- but the visuals are largely the same across versions. The bits depicting the Chosen are different in that regard, of course, but the primary difference is dialogue, with the Chosen delivering a speech -apparently over the Avenger's own comms- that is of course different with each Chosen. (Including that they actually say different things, appropriate to their different personalities) Among other points, no matter which Chosen is attacking, they apparently teleport an artillery piece in.

Of course, you can't turn down or put off the mission, and failure is a game over. Try to be ready, or to not let the mission get a chance to happen in the first place.

Tactically, this mission technically uses the Wilderness plot type (With all biomes possible), but in practice it uses a small pool of pretty rigid maps that are exclusive to it and don't really overlap with general Wilderness map generation. The curious thing is...

... there's a series of mission images -which the game doesn't actually use, instead having its loading screen use that image of a couple Troopers and the cannon I lead this section with- that don't actually line up with how the mission gets laid out. You can see in the left side of this image that there's an ADVENT compound, like an Avatar Project Facility, not far behind the artillery piece, and such ADVENT architecture simply doesn't show up in this mission.

For that matter, even the cliffs-and-trees being depicted in this shot isn't something that happens; every single time I've gotten this mission, the only high ground even vaguely nearby the cannon was a power station building, with the back edge of the map being demarcated by ocean cliffs. I wonder what happened in development that these images are so disconnected from the actual map design?

In any event, much like the UFO attack form of Avenger Defense, your starting area is particularly predictable, though actually in a larger area than the UFO version; the Avenger has apparently always landed atop a raised area, as your starting area is consistently higher ground than the majority of the map. This raised ground region is fairly large, and always starts enemy-free; you have to get to the cliff's edge to start seeing pods. If you're expecting this, it somewhat makes up for the fact that your squad doesn't start Concealed in this mission, in that you can get everyone bunched up near the cliff's edge but without line of sight beyond its edge on one turn and be maximally ready for whatever pods you wake up on the next turn. If you're not expecting it, it's easy to proceed overly-cautious over the completely safe raised ground, making the mission's time pressure effectively tighter.

In spite of this predictability, a Reaper is still really good to bring into this mission, as coming up to the cliff's edge can give you line of sight on multiple pods very easily. I've had up to four pods pulled at once this way, and while this mission gives you a supersized squad -you get to deploy ten soldiers instead of at most six- it's not so supersized as to be reasonable to stomp four full pods flat. A Reaper can let you get a handle on where to approach to draw what you think your team can handle and no more.

Crucially, it's not really acceptable to take things slow, as there's pretty harsh time pressure. The Avenger has HP in this mission, displayed in the upper-right, starting from 400, with you having to destroy enemy siege weapons before they reduce its HP to 0. This takes the form of one big gun toward the back of the map, plus two pairs of smaller guns just past the cliff edge; the smaller guns remove 1 HP apiece every turn that passes, which is honestly largely irrelevant, while the big gun fires every three turns for 80 HP. As such, if you haven't taken out the biggest gun by turn 15, you're dead, and if for some reason you break the big gun first while ignoring the little guns, you can still lose through the Avenger hitting 0 HP.

The game actually reveals all five of these targets in the fog right away. For the smaller guns, this takes the form of two circles of revealed terrain that are each placed between a pair of guns, with the vehicles the guns are mounted on at roughly the edge of this circle. Much like the revealed spots in Haven Assaults, these spots will actually let you see enemies inside of them, and there's usually at least one pod standing partially inside one of these spots. I'm pretty sure this isn't really intended behavior...

The biggest gun is instead handled by destroying its power supply, which just gets an objective marker on it, no terrain reveal happening. As such, it won't give you advance warning of whatever is in the area.

In both cases, your target is a destructible object in mechanical terms. Among other points, this opens up the option of reliable Squadsight shooting no matter the distance, including that if you have a Defense Matrix built and manned your Turrets can potentially contribute quite a bit! That said, the right-side Turrets usually can't get a line of fire on any of the guns, and the left-side Turrets are erratic, often only having one able to fire on the biggest gun's generator, and no guarantee that either can hit any of the smaller guns. But it's still worth checking the Turrets, not to mention considering bringing at least one Sharpshooter.

The smaller guns offer one of the most blatant bits of evidence of War of the Chosen being rushed, as they're High Cover objects that, when destroyed, always leave the graphic still standing but don't always retain the object existing in mechanical terms. As in, you'll be able to walk right through them after they're destroyed, and they won't offer High Cover, but the graphic remains regardless. As such, you should plan as if they won't be worth Cover, and should double-check for the High Cover symbol if you're considering moving someone next to one after smashing it.

Also, all these guns explode when destroyed, damaging everything adjacent to them. Don't be meleeing them except with Fortress Templar, for example. And due to the whole vanishing thing, even Fortress folks shouldn't be standing against them if you're expecting to break them that turn. In the big gun's case, the gun per se doesn't explode, but the power supply you're shooting does explode; fortunately, there's much less reason to be close enough to be caught in that. A less obvious hazard with the big gun's power supply is that blowing it up can give you line of sight on pods that are on the other side of it, as the power supply also vanishes when blown up, going from a very large High Cover object to just a flatbed truck. This is another reason to consider spotting the power supply with a Reaper and then sniping it with Sharpshooters and/or any Turrets that can draw a bead on it.

Critically, the big gun's zone is where 'boss' pods will get assigned if any apply, meaning that such a revealed pod is very likely to include a Sectopod or Gatekeeper. If you're really unlucky, you can pull two such pods this way -and it's worth noting that, like Chosen Strongholds, this mission runs with pods being extra-large at four members per pod rather than three, making pulling pods unexpectedly that bit more dangerous even when it's not specifically including the biggest threats.

If it's not the Assassin leading the assault, the power supply is also very close to where the Chosen is likely lurking -all three Chosen spawn by the big gun (Which is of course fairly close to its power supply) and the Hunter and the Warlock are both very prone to refusing to wander very far from the gun until your squad is in range. Thus, smashing the power supply can end up pulling a Sectopod and/or Gatekeeper, and as soon as they're done working over your squad the Hunter or Warlock wanders in to make things even worse. So you should be cautious around the power supply in general.

Once you've smashed the power supply and all four lesser guns, the mission reverts to being a no-time-pressure kill-'em-all mission, contrasting pretty sharply with the UFO Avenger Defense where smashing the spike can actually up the time pressure if you did it fast enough. Nor are there alternate fail conditions: enemies don't try to board the Avenger here or anything like that. You'll still lose if the squad wipes, of course, but nothing actually specific to this mission.

Mind, while getting the guns off your back removes the time pressure, you shouldn't necessarily relax. The mission's large quantity of extra-large pods makes it easy to slightly slip up and end up with people dead, and there's usually two 'boss' pods in the back area. (In my experience, this seems to happen even if you're otherwise too early to be seeing two different Sectopod pods) As such, if you get sloppy after taking out the big gun's power supply, you're quite likely to end up giving a Sectopod or Gatekeeper free reign to mess up people. The fact that you have an extra-large squad does less to alleviate this danger than you might expect, both because sloppy play of this sort can mean 'you pulled the pod when nobody had a turn left', but also because it's easy to end up pulling a pod with most of your squad simply too far away to move up and contribute that turn, limiting how helpful an extra-large squad is in resolving this issue.

The Hunter and Warlock hanging out back there also means it's easy to end up focused on handling them and then in the process of getting a flank or meleeing them or whatever whoops you end up pulling a 'boss' pod. If you're really unlucky, it's possible to end up pulling both 'boss' pods like this! Since a slow Overwatch crawl isn't particularly helpful against Chosen, there's also a bit of opposing pressures here, especially with the Warlock since getting in range will get him to stop spamming Spectral Zombies; once you're near the Chosen, it's better to just walk in reach and start attacking, rather than trying to get them to come to you, but if there's an inactive 'boss' pod in the area this behavior risks activating them and forcing you to focus on them instead.

All of this is another reason a Reaper is a really good idea to bring along; even once the time pressure is gone, they do a lot to make cleanup safer. (Not to mention faster) If for some reason you don't have a Reaper available (Your only Reaper is Shaken when this mission hits, say), a Phantom is actually an okay backup plan; committing a tenth of your squad to scouting, refusing to fight directly, isn't nearly as bad as committing one-sixth to one-fourth of your squad to not fighting.

But while caution is warranted, the mission does fundamentally revert to being a fairly normal mission where general rules work fine once you've busted the cannons.

A couple things I'm unsure about; firstly, I've never seen an Alien Ruler here and they are supposed to avoid sharing space with Chosen, but I don't have a strong body of evidence to suggest they're properly forbidden from popping in, so I'm not willing to firmly declare they're impossible here. Second, I'm unsure if the Chosen are willing to use Extract Knowledge or Kidnap in this mission; I've yet to have either happen and it would be rather off for them to be willing to do so in this mission, but I rarely give them the opportunity, they don't always go for such when the opportunity is available in general, and it wouldn't actually break the mission or anything for them to be willing. (Whereas I'd be quite surprised if they're willing to do so in their Strongholds or in the Alien Fortress) If it were me designing the game, I would want those actions disabled in this mission, but I have no idea if that's what the devs did here or not.

Narratively, I've already been over the unfortunate point that the two Avenger Defenses really make more sense swapped around, since the Chosen need the Commander alive (And thus should prefer to disable the Avenger rather than punching great big holes in it) while blowing up X-COM in response to them poking their noses too effectively into the Avatar Project makes a lot more sense than trying to recapture a not-terribly-important spaceship. It's too bad there's absolutely no way we're going to see, say, a redone version of XCOM 2 that performs that swap...

Moving on from that bit of awkwardness, I'm otherwise pretty okay with this mission's narrative framework. It's tempting to complain about the Chosen successfully jumping the Avenger with a bunch of not-very-mobile heavy weapons and a legion of troops, or to complain about them using teleportation to haul all those things in since you could ask 'if they can do that, why don't they teleport more troops in when attacking my squads?' or some similar formulation, but the Knowledge framework comes to the rescue as a somewhat abstract answer: they're jumping the Avenger like this because they finally got enough info to know where the Avenger plans to go next, or to get an idea of the Avenger's usual routines and then they successfully guessed where it would be going when, or otherwise translated info into a plan.

Thus, one can assume that, for example, teleporting in the cannon and the horde of troops requires specialized preparations and/or has notable limitations, where they're able to dump this all atop the Avenger because they worked out where it would be days ahead of time, set up a heavy-duty teleporter that has limited range in roughly the right area, shipped the guns and troops to the teleporter by more conventional methods, and once the Avenger landed in roughly the expected spot triggered the trap. There you go, there's a natural-in-context answer for why they can do this at all if they know where you're going and all, but can't just spontaneously jump your squad wherever and teleport in forty additional enemies in one turn.

Furthermore, the primary abstraction at work is the need to work around the player's unpredictable behavior. That is, you, the player, might get jumped by this mission after you did something that was a huge break in your usual routine, where a hypothetical scenario of a human opponent somehow playing as the Chosen would have their plans fail because you behaved unexpectedly; that can feel 'wrong', but what's the game supposed to do? Force you to commit to a rigid schedule at the start of the month? There's games that work that way, but XCOM 2 isn't such a one, and allowing the player more freedom to play dynamically necessarily means any example of an enemy predicting the player has to deal with this kind of problem. This is at least a less ugly solution than, say, when you get an RPG demanding the party walk into a blindingly obvious trap, where the player walks into it because they know the plot won't advance until they do, not because they failed to see it ahead of time.

So this whole 'Chosen predicting you and ambushing you' thing being a bit clunky and relying on abstraction to function is totally understandable and honestly one of the best solutions I've seen in a game for resolving this particular problem.

I do wish the game offered an explanation for why blowing off one assault knocks all Chosen Knowledge back a fair amount. It's good for the gameplay so I'm fine with it, and there's room to assume things like 'X-COM changes their routines after the attack', or 'Knowledge also represents things like the Chosen consolidating resources for the assault', or the like, but it is a little odd that no attempt is made at all to explain it.

But mostly this is surprisingly functional, the only major issue being the 'we have a mission type where enemies are trying to board the Avenger, why is it the Chosen are blowing it up when they want the Commander alive?' jank.

Emergency Extraction Of Covert Operatives

AKA 'the mission you get when a Covert Op is Ambushed'.

This is another mission you're not allowed to decline or put off. The second you get told your Covert Op has been ambushed, you're stuck clicking through to a loading screen and then the mission itself. You can't even save and quit until you're in the mission itself, which can be frustrating if you, say, had wanted to advance time just a little bit and then save and quit.

Being tied to Covert Ops, you will of course have 2 or 3 soldiers; the soldiers who were assigned to the Covert Op that's being ambushed. (But not the Scientist or Engineer, in the event you assigned one of those to the Covert Op) The game is actually fairly cautious with this mission to make up for how tiny your squad is, with Stun Lancers, Vipers, Spectres, Chryssalids, Berserkers, Sectopods, Gatekeepers, Alien Rulers, and Chosen all forbidden from showing up. (So almost all the enemies that can disable or KO someone effortlessly, for one) I've personally also never seen Sectoids, ADVENT Shieldbearers, ADVENT Priests, ADVENT Mecs, or Archons, even though the config files don't mention them being forbidden, but it's possible that's just luck of the draw on my part. I've also never seen an Officer just wandering around, though you're guaranteed to fight an Officer regardless.

Furthermore, these missions lag behind other missions in Force Level, where it's possible to be encountering Basic Troopers quite a while after regular missions have upgraded them to Advanced Troopers, and you literally can't see the newest enemy types until later than in normal missions.

On top of all that, the map always has exactly three pods on it, with each of these pods being restricted to one enemy per pod. At the start of your second turn, a reinforcement flare will drop, and when it arrives it will bring an Officer and a Trooper (Legendary adds a second Trooper), which means you can usually kill them without them having a chance to act between catching them with Overwatch and then mopping up on your own turn. So even this reinforcement batch is the game being cautious.

Similarly, this mission has Lost presence, but it's very constricted: no Lost start on the map at all so by extension Brutes aren't a concern, and when Lost waves spawn they'll never include Dashers, leaving only the weak basic Lost to be a concern. They're very unlikely to be a problem at all.

Of course, guaranteed Lost presence normally means the Abandoned City plot type, and this is no exception... though it's a pretty non-standard map, and unfortunately is one of the least variable mission types to use the Abandoned City plot type. The basic shape of the map is pretty predictable, with your troops starting on a boat, advancing through shipping containers in the dock area, passing through a fence to reach the urban infrastructure, and then the building layouts on your way to the Evac zone are very consistent. It's all sufficiently repetitive I imagine many players think it has only the one map -certainly, I spent a few months thinking that!

But it does have some randomness to the map. Immediately next to the boat can be a warehouse, or some shipping containers, or a small building, all of which offer high ground to ambush the reinforcements from... or you can get the variation that has no high ground in that initial area. So don't be too quick to think you've got the map memorized just because your first three times all seemed basically identical.

The actual objective is to just Evac the squad, though of course this requires getting from one end of the map to the other. The three enemy pods are also all placed to be roughly in the way -though note that they will never start in or patrol into the docks area, so you can advance pretty fearlessly for more than a full screen. It's also often possible to bypass most, sometimes even all the pods by taking to the high ground inside the urban infrastructure; the pods will not patrol up there on their own, and are slow to patrol up there even when they're cheat-ily going there in express pursuit of your squad, and if you can do that it'll take you to very close to the Evac point without having activated any pods. You'll probably be able to Dash straight from inside a building to the Evac point if you manage this, at which point it doesn't really matter if you activate a pod in the process. (Which you probably will: one of the pods is specifically assigned to the Evac point's area)

I personally prefer to take out all the enemies, partly because that's where XCOM 2's gameplay is focused, but also because an attempt at sneaking that goes wrong can go really wrong.

Anyway, these missions can be rough for a learning player, as the mission's parameters aren't completely obvious and working with such a tiny squad is a big shift in mentality, but once you've got a handle on them they're one of the easiest mission types in the game. The enemy types largely exclude really dangerous enemies (Andromedons are the only really dangerous enemy allowed in these ambushes, with so much durability it's unreasonable to reliably kill them before they act when you've got 2-3 people, and they take forever to be allowed in ambushes. Mutons do need to be taken seriously, mind, but so long as you don't let them melee your squad they're not too bad), the fact that the patrolling pods are each made of one enemy apiece means you largely don't have to worry about enemy synergies, said solo pods are usually spaced widely enough you don't really have to worry about pulling multiple of them, and the lagging Force Level means you can actually afford to send lower-level troops to be ambushed because they'll be on level or ahead of the curve in practice, while benefitting from superior technology to boot.

A more subtle factor is the consideration of the game engaging in misleading presentation: Bradford pressures you to hurry, among other signals this is a mission with time pressure, and... this is actually bad advice. There is no serious time pressure in this mission: if you want to spend a full turn on consolidating and reloading, that's fine. If you want to inch forward carefully and try to catch each solo pod with Overwatch, that's fine too. A learning player is liable to run into trouble from trying to hurry, as the game is pushing them to do, while an experienced player who knows they have all the time in the world simply won't make mistakes rooted in trying to hurry.

One nice thing about ambushes is that they aren't particularly favorable or hostile to any given class. This is important since you're liable to be throwing together not-very-optimized mini-teams based on qualities like 'who has a level 2 Bond?' It would be janky and problematic if, say, Grenadiers were heavily favored by these missions, as that would create a weird pressure to only send Grenadiers on any Covert Op with the Ambushed Risk.

This isn't to say there's no differentiation of that sort, of course. The initial reinforcement pod is most readily, reliably dealt with by Rangers, while Sharpshooters tend to contribute poorly at that step because there's not enough time to get set up in a high ground spot far enough away that their Sniper Rifle avoids accuracy penalties; they'll often be forced to fall back on Pistol Overwatch, which is weak, and then are liable to be forced to go for a flank and use their Pistol... while probably being lower-level and so possibly not having Lightning Hands and certainly not having Fan Fire.

On the other hand, a Sharpshooter gets to clean up Lost waves pretty efficiently without worrying about unpleasant scenarios like running out of ammo while missing a Lost and then a solo pod patrolling in while you're out of ammo. Rangers having their powerful melee is often pretty great for dealing with the solo pods, but Purifiers and Mutons are both legal (And Purifiers are actually quite common in the mid-early game) and very risky to melee. As the game doesn't give you Shadow Chamber predictions until the ambush actually happens, it's entirely possible to send a Ranger only to be dismayed by them unexpectedly having to deal with two Mutons and an Advanced Purifier. Notably, ambushes always have exactly two enemy types for the solo pods, with two of one of them and one of the other; this both means the solo pods are allowed to be made entirely of Ranger-hostile types (Where a 3-varieties-minimum would prevent that) and means it can easily be stacked toward Ranger-hostility. (In the sense that if Mutons are in the list, it can be two Mutons and one enemy that's more Ranger-friendly, leaving your Ranger in an awkward place)

Similarly, Grenadiers are a bit awkward when it comes to cleaning up Lost waves and ambushing the initial reinforcements, but their ability to efficiently pack in a lot of explosives can be really appreciated when dealing with Mutons or Andromedons, and even to an extent stuff like regular Troopers.

So like I said: every core class is reasonably okay in ambushes. It's nice.

The Resistance classes are more notably uneven. Templar dominate past the initial reinforcement wave, since solo pods mean a Parry Templar can completely reliably solo anything that's actually legal on the map (No Vipers to Bind you, for example) by simply Rend+Parrying. Their Autopistols make them efficient at cleaning up Lost by themselves, and Focus plus Momentum lets them cover large amounts of ground readily. They're probably the best class for this mission by a wide margin -especially if yours got Bladestorm, since that lets them devastate the initial reinforcements and literally ignore the Lost.

Reapers, meanwhile, are either gamebreakers or awful. If you assigned two Reapers to a Covert Op, and it got Ambushed, they can casually waltz to the Evac zone without ever being in the slightest bit of danger, breaking the mission entirely. Even one Reaper can at least ensure somebody gets through the mission fine... but a Reaper can't catch the initial reinforcements with Overwatch reliably (It's possible to set them near the flare and hope an enemy runs next to them as it activates, but if you set them on top of the flare you're risking the Reaper being immediately shot), and their toolkit is really designed to be powerful in support to a larger squad. Picking off weakened enemies with Silent Killer is great when it's six soldiers facing three enemies! It's profoundly unhelpful when the Reaper is supporting one other soldier against lone enemies, not to mention that initial round of reinforcements.

Skirmishers are okay. They're solid at handling that initial reinforcement wave (Especially a high level Skirmisher, who can sit inside the pod for Retribution and/or set up for Waylay), they clean up Lost well enough, their built-in Grapple is almost always relevantly useful... but they don't particularly excel here. If your highest level soldier is a Skirmisher you're okay with not having for regular missions, sure, why not have them babysit, but core classes tend to perform about as well.

Fortunately, you're somewhat discouraged from sending Resistance classes into Covert Ops since that means not taking them into regular missions, so this unevenness isn't too big a deal. It does mean that Templar are worth considering sending if you feel a Covert Op is essential, has a high Ambush Risk, and you're not comfortable with a couple regular soldiers handling the Ambush (Maybe you only have one high-level core class soldier ready and it's late enough you're worried about Andromedons), but often the Resistance classes just aren't going to be going in the first place. So that works out decently.

Note that you don't loot bodies from ambushes. This is reasonably natural from a narrative standpoint, and very sensible from a game design standpoint -Ambush Risk is supposed to be a bad thing, after all. It would be very janky if players had reason to deliberately seek out the highest Ambush Risks in an attempt to get more loot.

Crucially, this of course includes that if somebody dies and you don't grab their body on the way out, you'll lose anything they were carrying. As you'll only have 2-3 soldiers, this is a much more pressing concern than in most missions; if you only sent two people, one of them going down means that bringing the body involves you having zero combat-capable soldiers. It is possible to potentially clear the map of non-Lost, then retrieve the body and either just run such that the Lost can't get hits in (eg fleeing up a fire escape instead of through the Lost mob) or set the body down, chain Headshots, and then pick the body back up and resume running... but it's a huge pain, and depending on how early the soldier went down and how powerful the survivor is relative to what's running around the map, it can be very risky to try.

This all means Ambushes introduce a non-obvious balancing act: on the one hand, you don't really want to be passing out losable stuff to soldiers going on such a Covert Op, because the gear will definitely be unavailable for any regular mission(s) that occur while the Op is ongoing and then if they die in the mission you may feel forced to abandon their body, losing it forever... but on the other hand losable stuff is where a notable chunk of your ability to spike their power is, and thus where your ability to minimize the odds of them dying is placed. In the mid-late game, this can get especially noticeable; say you take out the Warlock for good while you're in the middle of researching Elerium, and so you unlock the Disruptor Rifle before you even have Plasma Rifles. In that case, passing out the Disruptor Rifle to a Specialist, Psi Operative, or Ranger will be outright spiking their general damage, above and beyond the benefits of it having four Weapon Attachments and auto-critting against psionic enemies... but of course it's completely irreplaceable if lost, where a Mag Rifle you slotted a Superior Scope and Superior Expanded Magazine into would be merely unreliable to replace in a timely manner.

Having the Alien Hunters DLC also contributes to this balancing act, of course. The Bolt Caster is terrible to bring to an Ambush and the Frost Bomb dubious, but the Hunter's Axe is a significant upgrade over a regular Sword and the Shadowkeeper is a more accurate Pistol with a free ability that can be a lifesaver if things line up right. Early Ambushes are generally so weak there's no real need to bother, but in the midgame you can find yourself agonizing over whether to send a Ranger with the Hunter's Axe for its sizable edges or leave it behind so you can't lose it.

This is one of my favorite subtle things War of the Chosen does; the base game always had mechanics for losing stuff if a body was left behind with the stuff, but nothing about its design really did anything with these mechanics. In the context of the initial release, this is kind of whatever, but then Alien Hunters adds super-gear whose primary flaw or disadvantage is that it's irreplaceable if lost, at which point it becomes a more glaring issue; there's no context in the base game where you should hesitate to take one of your one-of-a-kind pieces of gear. Among other points, the most likely scenario for losing gear to a mission is that an Alien Ruler jumped you in a VIP mission, and the Alien Hunters gear is all especially significant against the Alien Rulers: you're supposed to bring them into such a situation, not leave them behind so they can't be lost. And then the base game expects you to not really do duplicate classes much; who cares that you have only one Hunter's Axe if you're only fielding one Ranger anyway?

War of the Chosen adding this mission type makes one-of-a-kind gear more fundamentally meaningful in a direct and obvious way (Fatigue does so as well, but less obviously, through forcing you to chaotically field unpredictable exact lineups), including creating an interesting question connecting to the potential to lose said gear: do you bring the unique and extra-powerful gear to improve the odds of survival for your soldiers, or do you leave it behind so you can cut and run with a minimum of damage to your long-term prospects?

And, crucially, War of the Chosen adds some more irreplaceable gear to acquire so you don't actually need the Alien Hunters DLC purchased for any of this to matter. (Indeed, I really wish War of the Chosen had added a few more such unique bits, and specifically provided access to a few from early in the game)

It also adds a lot more nuance to the Weapon Attachment system; instead of getting a Cannon set up with a Superior Scope and Superior Expanded Magazine in the mid-early game boiling down to a peak in power for your Grenadiers with nothing further to say, you'll intermittently be presented with the question of whether to send it off on a Covert Op that might be Ambushed. By extension, it makes Weapon Attachments stay relevant as loot for longer -in the base game, once you had twelve Superior Weapon Attachments (Or eighteen if you had the right Continent Bonus), it was entirely possible all further Weapon Attachments were worthless to you. In War of the Chosen, you may find yourself with more than an individual squad needs and appreciate the spares anyway because they can be passed off to soldiers wandering off into a possible Ambush, letting you boost their chances without having to tie up and risk losing your best stuff. 

The one unfortunate thing in all this is that Ambushes start out rare and are ultimately wiped away entirely by taking out the Chosen; I've absolutely had runs that felt none of this design benefit because they never dealt with Ambushes at all, or only took on an Ambush Risk one time early on before the run had anything significant to lose.

This is actually another way I feel Legendary difficulty is the 'true' War of the Chosen experience; the cleanest fix to the problem I just laid out is for the campaign to be longer, and especially for it to take longer to be allowed to finish off the Chosen. The stuff Legendary difficulty does, you might notice.

I do hope XCOM 3, if it retains any of these elements in a recognizable form, manages to recapture the value here while sidestepping the clunkiness of Ambush being possible to simply not matter at all.

Rescue Operative From ADVENT Compound

This of course is the mission type for rescuing a Captured soldier, and by extension has extremely non-standard mission generation, requiring a soldier be Captured, then a Covert Op generate to rescue the soldier (Which is random and can't remotely be counted on to happen in a run), and then you actually do the Covert Op. Once the Covert Op finishes, the mission actually generates and it's time to build a squad. (Note that if an Ambush occurs, you'll have to do it before the rescue)

Your squad size is capped at 3 soldiers no matter how many squad size expansions you've purchased. Fortunately, the mission itself is very non-standard, making this understrength squad much less problematic than it might first seem. First of all, most enemies have a tiny detection radius in this mission; they literally only detect two tiles out, which is barely any more radius than Reapers have to deal with! (Turrets still have their personal standard detection radius, which is larger than everything else in this mission but is still smaller than the standard enemy detection radius, and they don't move anyway) Second, all the pods that start on the map are loners made of one individual wandering around; attacking a pod isn't your three troops fighting a pod of three enemies, it's a three-on-one, which is actually more favorable than the 2-to-1 ratio you expect to see late in a run in standard missions.

Furthermore, this mission suspends the usual AI cheating regarding patrols; instead of the game attempting to make sure a pod patrols between you and the objective at all times, enemies just have rigid patrol paths, often just walking back and forth between exactly two points. This is because this mission type, and only this mission type, actually expects you to legitimately stealth the mission; you should not be killing your way through the compound, but rather should be trying to skirt past patrols to get to the Unconscious soldier who was Captured, grab them, and then Evac.

This gets hammered by a mechanic unique to this mission that unfortunately the game doesn't really explain: when you start the mission, there's an 'alert level' in the upper-right that starts out at 1. This alert level goes up by 1 point per each of your soldiers first spotted by the enemy, and also goes up by 1 point for each enemy that dies. As the alert level rises, enemy reinforcements start being allowed to trigger; once it hits 10, it stops rising, and a reinforcement pod will trigger every single turn forever. This is not something your poor squad of three troops can sustainably handle while also handling the objective, and really emphasizes that the goal is to stealth the mission with a minimum of fighting. It's a really unique experience, and it's a bit unfortunate it's easy to go entire runs without it ever happening if you haven't enabled Lost And Abandoned. (Which replaces the 'Locate The Skirmishers' Covert Op with rescuing Mox, and thus you'll do this rescue mission at least once in a Lost And Abandoned run)

The captive you're rescuing is always in a prison cell inside a larger ADVENT building, The cell door needs to be Hacked to open it, and this Hack is non-standard, in that by default performing it will force the alert level to 10, break squad Concealment, and cause an Evac zone to spawn at an uncontrolled point nearby. I say 'by default' because it has a unique Hack reward that's guaranteed to be one of its options, which if picked and successfully grabbed prevents those consequences.

I quite like the idea of that, but unfortunately in practice it's a bit pointless for two reasons: first of all, picking up the body kicks the alert level to 10 and breaks Concealment regardless. Second of all, even if the Evac point gets generated, you're actually allowed to place a new Evac point anywhere you like regardless! This is clearly not intended behavior, including that if you do so the Evac point the game itself placed won't vanish the way normally happens with Evac points being placed while one already exists. Another example of War of the Chosen blatantly not getting enough polish, ouch.

Point being, you can just have one soldier Hack the door, then another soldier grab the body, and then leave the very next turn via an Evac point you set, not caring that reinforcements dropped in between turns, making this special Hack reward pointless. Just go for the other option.

Annoyingly, the game is willing to generate timed loot on one of the initial pods, even though you're really intended to minimize fighting in this mission. It's an odd oversight given the game is clearly perfectly capable of broadly declaring timed loot is forbidden in a mission. More evidence of War of the Chosen being rushed, I guess. At least the reinforcements don't get timed loot assigned, so there's less incentive to try to harvest reinforcements.

Enemies-wise, the mission can't have Chosen drop in, and I'm reasonably certain Alien Rulers are forbidden. I've never seen the usual Retaliation enemies (ie Faceless, Berserkers, and Chryssalids), but beyond those I'm unsure if the mission has any constrictions on what enemies are allowed. I wouldn't be surprised if Gatekeepers and Sectopods are forbidden, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if they're allowed; in any event, I haven't done the mission enough to be sure of any such limitations and haven't found any clear allusions in the files to such limitations, so I don't actually know.

The map itself uses the Wilderness plot type and is allowed to have any biome, though it has a pretty non-standard approach, with the map dominated by an ADVENT compound and only a relatively small amount of the map around the compound being wilderness. I haven't gotten it very often so I'm not sure how much variety to its maps it has, but I suspect it's low, given how this is a recurring thing with War of the Chosen content.

Overall, so long as you approach the mission as a stealth mission, it's generally a really easy mission. The tiny detection radii on enemies make it really easy to sneak around, especially because patrols don't travel very far and tend to have reasonably intuitive routes. (eg you'll see a Trooper patrolling back and forth inside a 'road' delineated by Low Cover walls, refusing to hop over the walls) The mechanics conspire to make Evaccing with the Captured soldier really easy to do without any chance for enemies to do anything. The alert level mechanic actually has a decent amount of wiggle room, where it's fine to kill an enemy or two in the process of getting to the prisoner, so you can be a bit sloppy about the stealthing. There's zero time pressure until you do things to raise the alert level, so you can be very slow and careful if you feel the need.

If you approach it the way you're supposed to approach most missions of just jumping the first set of enemies you encounter and killing everything as you go, it can rapidly turn into a nightmare where enemies are being added to the field faster than you can kill them, you're running through limited resources like grenades in trying to keep up, and you're not managing to get to the prisoner, let alone rescue them. Don't do that!

It's pretty unfortunate the game doesn't have a tutorial popup explicitly telling you this is a mission you're meant to stealth. I suspect quite a few experienced XCOM 2 players doing this mission for the first time just went right to combat and were unpleasantly surprised by the mission punishing such behavior. Probably yet more evidence of the game being rushed, given how many merely mildly non-standard missions the game does make a point of explaining.

Narratively, this works fine. There's an argument that it's a little odd the Chosen don't show up in this mission, but there's multiple good game design reasons for this (Imagine a version of War of the Chosen where you could produce more Chosen-involving missions by getting people Kidnapped, where people deliberately did this to harvest them for Ability Points), and honestly even purely narratively it's perfectly sensible that they're busy, or don't actually care enough, or some such. They're supposed to be the Ethereals' troubleshooters who are pretty constantly busy; it makes perfect sense for them to not be reliably jumping X-COM in general simply because they have multiple duties and can't be everywhere personally, so them not showing up for this is fine.

There's some maybe awkward elements like how there's other cells with bodies inside them and they're entirely unacknowledged, which means X-COM hits the compound and only rescues exactly their own personal individual, and that could be taken badly... on the other hand, being an enemy of a brutal police state does not, in fact, automatically make you a righteous hero who can be trusted by other enemies of the state. So personally I don't really feel that's a big problem -I'd sooner complain about how the bodies are desiccated and don't animate, making it look like ADVENT is just storing corpses in fancy cells, which is eyebrow-raising. And given how rushed War of the Chosen is, I'm honestly skeptical that's particularly meaningful.

So overall this mission works quite well on the narrative level.

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Another mission icon that as far as I'm aware is never seen in-game, labeled Alert_Advent_Ops_Appear. I'm curious what it was meant for. Maybe this was the Guerrilla Op icon at some point?

It looks cool, anyway.

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Next time, we start talking about Hacking in detail, starting with objectives and security towers.

See you then.