XCOM 2 Analysis: Hacking ADVENT Units

Last post, we covered Hacking environmental objects. This post we get into Hacking enemy units, whether with the Skulljack or the Specialist's Haywire Protocol skill.

Skulljacking-Specific Effects

As in, the effects that only apply to using the Skulljack to perform the Skulljack action, as opposed to the Skullmine action.

This really could've been handled in a less confusing way by XCOM 2...

Access Network Codex: Unrestricted Access

Spawns a Codex in response to Skulljacking an ADVENT Officer.

The name for this is pretty odd, given nobody knows about Codices when you initiate the Skulljacking. In conjunction with one of Tygan's lines having him go 'oh, that must be the Codex' like he already knows what it is, this rather suggests that plans changed in development and stuff got lost in the shuffle.

Notably...

... this graphic exists in the files but goes unused, as yet more evidence of changed plans.

In any event, this is the first thing you're liable to do with a Skulljack. You might expect to be frustrated by RNG in the sense of Officers not showing up now that you need them to, but in the base game this is very unlikely, and in War of the Chosen it's only somewhat more likely -I've never worked out the exact initiator conditions (Whether it's building the Skulljack or being issued the Skulljacking objective or what), but broadly speaking the game endeavors to force an ADVENT Officer to generate in each mission until after you've pulled this off.

I say 'endeavors' because this forced Officer generation is given a lower priority by the game than, for example, Sitreps that change the enemy composition. I'm similarly pretty sure that the game forcing previously-unseen enemies to generate if possible gets priority. As such, in the base game you'll occasionally bring the Skulljack into a mission and have no Officer generate, and in War of the Chosen this can readily happen 2-3 missions in a row. Among other points, I suspect Chosen and Alien Rulers replacing a pod messes with the routine, based on my experiences, and I know that Haven Assaults blatantly have a weird generation routine that produces less variety than their pod counts might lead you to expect, which can crowd out Officer generation.

But in the base game you'll generally get your Skulljacking opportunity immediately, and even in War of the Chosen it's rarely pushed back for long.

I'd suggest this concern is a reason to not put off Skulljacking until the last second of Avatar Project bar progress, but honestly, what are you doing that the Avatar Project bar is nearly full and you still haven't managed a Skulljacking?

Anyway, I've already been over most of the relevant stuff between the Codex post and to a much lesser extent the general Items post, but there's a few points I didn't cover. (Not explicitly, at least)

First of all, it should be noted that a Codex is enough of a challenge for an early squad you should be careful about whether you do it at all in a given mission. Since the game tries to shove Officers at you until you pull off the Skulljacking, it's entirely possible that putting it off for a mission or two won't harm your strategic plans at all. This is especially important in the base game where double Stun Lancer pods are common early on; an Officer and two Stun Lancers is already a big problem, and trading the Officer for a Codex can easily make things much worse.

By a similar token, Skulljacking is a melee action and so carries the usual hazards of melee actions, by which I mostly mean the possibility of activating a pod you didn't know was nearby and aren't ready to fight. Say you kill both podmates in one action apiece and now have three soldiers ready, one carrying the Skulljack: that's pretty good if Skulljacking is going to just sub in the Codex, but isn't really adequate if you also pull another full pod. In conjunction with the prior point, it's generally best to treat an Officer at the edge of your vision as not worth trying to Skulljack: there's always next time.

Note that you can try to flank the Officer to stall for a turn, including blowing up their Cover so they're in the open. An Officer will normally react to being flanked or being in the open by moving to better Cover and Marking a Target, which is of course completely harmless if no other active enemies are about and you're just going to Skulljack them first thing next turn. Or there's more obvious, direct stalling tools, like Stasis on Psi Operatives. Either way, stalling tools and tactics can help you get the drop on the Codex while properly prepared and all. Even just backing off is an option in some contexts, like most Supply Raids, such as if only your soldiers with action points remaining have sight on the Officer.

Also, you should generally endeavor to give the Skulljack to a Specialist. It's not necessary, but a Specialist will have far better odds of producing a bonus reward of Intel or maybe a Facility Lead. This is another reason I prefer to put off this Skulljacking until later in the base game: because you need Predator Armor to be able to have a Medical Specialist carrying a Skulljack while still carrying a Medikit. (For assorted reasons, Medical Specialists are less important in War of the Chosen, and in conjunction with the Blacksite being rougher I'm okay with just having someone commit their one Item slot to an early Skulljack)

Next and final out of Skulljacking-exclusive Hack stuff is...

Access Avatar Project

Spawn an Avatar in response to Skulljacking a Codex.

This is the only time a Codex's Tech score matters, since you can't Skullmine them nor Haywire Protocol them.

The game also won't let you do it right away, requiring you to complete the longer Codex-related Shadow Project to enable the Skulljack to work on a Codex.

Unsurprisingly, this repeats the forced-enemy-generation point until completed, which is to say you'll see Codices a lot until you've Skulljacked one. This is particularly noticeable in the base game, because it's really prone to causing you to have mission after mission contain a pod of nothing but Codices. (War of the Chosen tends to gives you mixed Spectre/Codex pods instead, which already happen a decent amount) It's so blatant I'm completely clear on its trigger condition -completing that second Codex Shadow Project. As groups of Codices can be quite rough to deal with, you may wish to put off completing that particular Shadow Project if you're already having trouble with missions. On the other hand, killing the Avatar that results is (potentially) the single biggest hit to the Avatar Project bar, so if you're worried about how full it is you may wish to prioritize it anyway.

That said, it's trickier to set things up so you're ready to jump on the Avatar with full force the same turn you Skulljack the Codex than to do the same when you're Skulljacking an Officer. Letting a Codex toss out a Psionic Bomb isn't necessarily particularly harmful, depending on team composition, whether you're spreading around Auto-Loaders, etc. Letting an Avatar act is a lot less acceptable, especially if you're running at least one SPARK: while Avatars strongly prefer to go for Mind Control, if they end up only having sight on a SPARK they're going to fire their weapon or use one of their area-of-effect psi skills, and in the latter case they'll do the usual AI thing of aiming the effect to maximize targets without regard to whether they personally see those targets. Thus, having a SPARK along can lead to an Avatar blasting your entire team with unavoidable damage if things work out horribly right.

Even aside that, though, Mind Control is very dangerous, and the fact that it's coming from an Avatar makes this especially true; they're immune to Flashbangs, for one, and for two their reactive teleport and good durability means they may survive a full turn of you trying to take them out if you've not got a good set of tools and/or get unlucky. (On your hit chance rolls, or on reactive teleport positions, or both) Even with this Avatar showing up injured, if you're not properly prepared for the Avatar it can prove difficult to finish after a Mind Control, especially if you triggered it without properly clearing the field.

In the distressing event they remember their firearm or decide to blast your entire squad psionically before going for Mind Control, they also hit quite hard, where a Codex... well, they have one of the stronger weapons when comparing them to early-game enemies, but by midgame they're average or below-average, where an Avatar is always one of the more lethal attackers. So that's another reason why it's a lot more important to properly prepare for the Avatar.

The need to Skulljack a Codex instead of an Officer also contributes to the increased difficulty in prepping to fall on your target with a full squad turn; an Officer moving and Marking Target just before you Skulljack them accomplished nothing if no ally of theirs followed up on the Mark. A Codex tossing out a Psionic Bomb followed by you Skulljacking them is still probably forcing people to reload, and is at minimum forcing people to move whether you want them to or not. Of course, you can prepare for this with Autoloaders if you like, and melee doesn't care; for one thing, this means War of the Chosen runs tend to have an easier time powering through a Psionic Bomb to take out the Avatar cleanly, since Templar don't care at all and Skirmishers increasingly pick up ways to fight without needing ammo, two of which double as free movement. (And also Skirmishers desperately want an Autoloader no matter what, to an extent no base-game class cares; a player is liable to have an Autoloader on their Skirmisher anyway, even if they otherwise don't like Autoloaders)

A high-level Sharpshooter is also very capable of shrugging off the Psionic Bomb, and a Grenadier who's got explosives to spare can still do their job without ammo. Psi Operatives are focused on their abilities, and SPARKs can have a few good options too. As such, depending on your squad composition and how widespread you've got Autoloaders, you may be able to get away with just letting a Codex toss out Psionic Bomb, then Skulljacking it on the following turn. Keep in mind that whoever does the Skulljacking will have their turn over anyway (If they're not a Skirmisher with Total Combat, at least), and so it doesn't really matter whether their ammo got drained or not, not for purposes of deciding whether to trigger the Avatar yet.

Overall, though, this is broadly similar to its Codex-spawning equivalent earlier, just with greater demands on you as a player.

Which I actually like, I should emphasize! One-off challenges of any kind tend to suffer from a tuning issue; if they're designed to be challenging-but-doable for a first-time player, this tends to result in something that's very easy (Read: boring) once the player has even a fairly basic grasp of how to play the game and how that one-off challenge in particular works. If they're designed to be challenging for someone who does have a solid grasp of the game as a whole and the one-off challenge in particular, then they're liable to be utterly unreasonable for a first-time player, possibly driving them away from the game for good.

Having a relatively easy first encounter and then a harder version that occurs later is a pretty neat solution to this problem: a first-time player is liable to Skulljack an Officer, be caught off guard by the Codex spawning, have a rough time but pull through, and when the game later asks them to Skulljack a Codex be assuming something is going to spawn this time too and prep appropriately. Thus, even though the Avatar is a notable step up in threat, they may well find it actually easier than that first Codex, simply because they had an idea of what to prep for.

This is even layered, since this first encounter with an Avatar gives the player a sneak peek at the endgame, giving them a better idea of what to prep for. This is nice; on the one hand, games generally prefer the final challenge to be a unique experience, unlike what's come before, and there's a lot of good reasons for wanting to do this. On the other hand, this can readily lend itself to players experiencing the endgame as an unpleasant surprise, because their approach to the game is a serious mismatch with what the endgame expects of the player and short of looking stuff up online there's no way for them to know this ahead of time. This problem could've been particularly disastrous for XCOM 2, where a player would spend over an hour working through the final two missions, encounter the Avatars, and realize they built their team wrong and have to at minimum load back to before they launched the mission, or worse yet conclude they need to restart the campaign in its entirety.

Since there's this first fight against an Avatar, though, players are far less likely to experience such a problem; they'll get the opportunity to learn about the reactive teleporting, see that Avatars use Cover, probably see they have Mind Control, etc, and get to make mental notes about relevant tools when they're getting ready for endgame and the narrative has heavily hinted that the final fight is going to be against Avatars. As XCOM 2 conveniently has a retraining function, a player can do things like decide they'd rather their Sharpshooter has Fan Fire in time for the final mission and just... retrain their current one instead of needing to raise a new Colonel. (That, for one thing, probably won't have your current one's bonus skill{s})

This is all nice and compact a way to improve the learning curve, and is particularly impressive for how naturally it flows; usually when games try to solve this kind of problem, it's done either by giving up and making the endgame incredibly easy so even an awful build can get through (Which generally ends up boring and unsatisfying, often even for the people it's meant to benefit), or by really blatantly stepping outside the normal flow of gameplay and storytelling to directly warn the player of what they need to be prepared for. As a bonus, jarring the player out of the normal flow of gameplay like this rarely works; a textual warning that This Is The Final Mission And You Will Be Dealing With X Weird Gimmick is almost never able to actually convey to the player the nature of what they need to prepare for. There will be crucial details the devs didn't think to explicate, implications of statements plenty of players will not recognize as being there (Except perhaps in retrospect, where it's too late), and even if the devs did their job perfectly there will inevitably be players who are coming from a context and perspective that doesn't get the intended meaning out of the warning. (eg players who have played games that gave them such warnings, where their experience was always that these warnings were the games overhyping their final challenge, and so they won't take a new such warning seriously)

It's unfortunate the narrative elements are clunky here, but I've been over that before, so I won't reiterate it here.

Moving on to...

Skullmining

As I've been over before, Skullmining and Skulljacking are actually mechanically distinct, among other points not sharing a charge... though they actually share the same reward pool.

Neural Feedback
Does 4 Armor-bypassing damage to the soldier that failed the Skullmine Hack test.

Neural Feedback is the, well, Feedback for Skullmining: if your unit fails the Hack portion of the Skullmine attempt, they take 4 damage. Reminder that Skullmining still kills the target even if you fail the Hack, which can be worth sacrificing 4 HP for. Conversely, don't forget that Skullmining, unlike regular Skulljacking, always has a 30% chance to not connect to the target in the first place; don't be treating it as a 100% reliable way to kill a Skullmine-susceptible target, because it isn't.

Also, all Skullmine-valid targets have a high enough Tech score it's extremely unlikely a given run will manage to reach 100% success rates on even the easier reward, so if you're going to make use of Skullmining you're just going to have to accept a certain rate of soldiers ending up injured, even if no enemy ever gets an attack in. This is particularly important in the base game; Fatigue in War of the Chosen already means you largely can't assume a given soldier will be available after any given mission, but in the base game perfect play ensures perfect turnaround by default, where self-injury is reliably interfering with squad usability.

This is all compounded by the fact that you can't see your Hack success rate until you're already committed to the Skullmining (Unless you use an informational mod, of course), as unlike other Hacks you can't just back out without consequence if you don't like your odds. You're stuck just eating the Feedback.

Note that you shouldn't bother to Skullmine with non-Specialists unless you're okay with treating it like an (unreliable) instant kill that costs some HP to use, as non-Specialists are basically guaranteed to fail the Hack and thus take damage. Since Feedback ignores Armor, you can't even do anything to try to minimize that consequence, and even for an endgame character 4 HP stings enough to be a real problem.

Narratively, Feedback is pretty confusing. What is even supposed to be happening that a failed Skullmining attempt injures the soldier attempting the Skullmining? The game itself seems to have no answer -there is no animation of electricity popping out of the victim to zap your soldier or anything, the game simply playing out the full Skullmining animation and then having your soldier play their all-purpose 'ow that hurts' animation while the damage popup occurs. If this were a little more cyberpunk and Skullmining involved a relatively direct brain-to-brain connection, I'd assume this was the stock cyberpunk thing of 'bad things happening to your cyberself hurts your physical self', or 'your implants react badly to your errors and this does some brain damage', but XCOM 2 never suggests the Skulljack is such a thing, not with text, not with audio, not with visuals.

In practice, I suspect this boils down to the devs feeling a need to include a failure state on Skullmining, failing to come up with something that is design-purposeful and in-universe sensible, and falling back on HP damage for lack of better ideas. Given Skullmining is an instant kill, it probably did need some sort of limitation or punishment, even considering Skullmine-susceptible enemies are largely not particularly durable... though I think this particular solution was not particularly ideal. In addition to the narrative problems, it's pretty clunky as a pure gameplay solution; trading 4 HP to kill an enemy who almost certainly would've done at least 4 damage if they successfully attacked is not some difficult decision, and in practice Skullmining is mostly held back from being seriously abusable by being a point-blank turn-ending attack that always has a notable chance to miss. (With this latter bit being particularly crucial given Implacable neuters most of the problems with an instant-kill attack being melee-only)

Skullmining (And Skulljacking) has only three possible rewards, making it pretty predictable, though still a little random. First is...

Small Intel Cache

Provides some Intel.

Intel is something runs will usually spend a long time wanting still more of, particularly on higher difficulties, so rushing for Skullmining and making regular use of it is worth considering. It's not necessary by any stretch -most of my runs I don't bother to buy Skullmining at all, nowadays- but it's an option, especially if you like buying from the Black Market.

In any event, this is going to be your default choice when Skullmining or Skulljacking (Unless you're fond of gambling big, I guess), as it will always be your left-side choice and thus the option that is more likely to actually succeed. Thanks to Skulljack usage always having a bit of an uphill battle by virtue of the targets having shockingly high Tech scores (A Sectopod has the same Tech Defense score as a Trooper below Commander difficulty, and only 25 more points on higher difficulties! Reminder that the Sectopod is the robot with the highest Tech score; ADVENT soldiers have ridiculously high Tech Defense), where even a high level Specialist who's been boosted by Enemy Protocol once or twice isn't strongly expecting to get the right-side option. Since failure injures the soldier in addition to netting you no loot, it's better to play it safe by default.

It's usually, but not always, paired with...

Large Intel Cache

More Intel than prior.

I basically already covered this; yeah, it's more Intel, but Skullmineable targets uniformly have high enough Tech Defense you're unlikely to get a very high success rate. This is particularly true in War of the Chosen, between slower overall leveling and the vastly reduced probability of you managing to stack multiple Enemy Protocol grabs onto one Specialist. (I'd say 'or some other class', but they're so far behind Specialists at Hacking you'd have to get an absolutely ludicrous number of Enemy Protocol opportunities generating, specifically on objective Hacks, and then get lucky when trying to grab them, for this to happen, which I'd honestly be surprised if this has happened to an actual player in an unmodded run)

But even in the base game, you're probably best off going for Small Intel Cache by default. Among other points, the time it takes to reach that kind of ludicrously high Hack means that you're very likely to be in the phase of the game where Intel is becoming less crucial a resource if you're at the point you actually expect to get Large Intel Cache successfully.

The one exception to all this is if you need a lot of Intel urgently, such as because the Avatar Project bar is dangerously full and you don't have enough Intel to contact a region containing an Avatar Project Facility or plot mission... where said Intel shortage is fairly substantial, of course. If you're just a little short, then you definitely want the Small Intel Cache instead.

Third and last is...

Alien Facility Lead

Provides a Facility Lead object after the mission, which can be Researched to unlock access to a random Avatar Project Facility in a region you don't currently have access to.

Sometimes Skullmining subs in Alien Facility Lead as one of the possible rewards to choose. Usually a Skullmining -or Skulljacking- will offer the two Intel caches, but not always.

I've previously been over my opinion of Facility Leads; they're dubious, and only extremely rarely particularly useful. If you're Skullmining a lot just for the instant-kill aspect and all anyway, then I suppose managing to grab one Facility Lead at some point could be a useful safety net, but generally the Intel is going to be better. If you're late enough in the run that the Intel is dropping off in utility, Facility Leads are even worse off; the Avatar Project is easily knocked down to nothing in the late game just by advancing the plot, and knocking it back is the only payoff to hitting Avatar Project Facilities. By the time Intel is becoming really low in value, you've probably already hit the point of the Avatar Project not being a concern, or at least are in a position to hit it whenever you feel like launching the Psi Gate and/or Forge missions and/or Skulljacking a Codex.

I appreciate the thematics here -it makes sense for hacking the brains of enemy soldiers to provide info. It's just too bad Facility Leads are so niche.

I'm unsure if both the icons presented are actually used in-game. The usual Hack rule for non-paired rewards like this would be that the green arrows version would be used if it spawned in the right-hand slot and the plain one if it spawned in the left-hand slot, but I've only ever seen it in the right-hand slot and haven't noticed its graphic varying. It's possible I've just overlooked it, though.

Haywire protocol

Now we cover the possibilities when trying to Hack enemy robots with a Specialist's Haywire Protocol.

Unlike other Hack possibilities, your options aren't randomized. You always get the Stun-inducing option on the left, and the harder option of taking temporary control on the right, aside one specific exception we'll get to when we get to it. This is probably for the best overall, though the exact choices and tuning does mean that the consistency ends up contributing to Haywire Protocol being kind of whatever, which is a bit unfortunate.

Supercharge

Boosts the Hacked robot's Aim and Defense by +10 forever

This is actually the feedback effect for Haywire Protocol, in spite of not using the red backdrop normally used for feedback icons. Indeed, it's a direct variation on the icon used for taking control of a non-Turret, just adding the up-arrows effect normally used for Hack effects that are the better version of a different Hack effect. It's not particularly important or confusing in actual play, but I suspect this is a low-key example of even base XCOM 2 being rushed a bit; it seems likely this was intended to have a custom icon in line with the visual style of other Feedback effects.

Anyway, Supercharge gets used for both Turrets and non-Turrets. This is worth pointing out because otherwise Turrets are separated off from other robot types in terms of the visual presentation of their Hack options -though the actual options are the same between Turrets and non-Turrets. It's all a bit weird and makes me wonder if Turrets were supposed to be more different at some point.

In any event, Supercharge's boosts last forever, but it won't stack if you trigger it again. As such, once you've failed a Haywire Protocol, the only risk in using Haywire Protocol on that robot again is the potential for wasting another soldier's turn. While realistic play shouldn't leave an enemy alive long enough for Haywire Protocol's cooldown to finish, you could always have two (Or more) Specialists with Haywire Protocol on the team; if you really want to Hack that robot, the second Specialist failing after the first won't make things any worse aside that you'll now have had two soldiers waste their turns instead of one.

As a punishment, Supercharge is pretty effective. +10 Aim and Defense isn't much, but the Defense can easily turn a guaranteed hit into a chance to miss, especially on Heavy Mecs and Sectopods where they already have some Defense; sure, a 90% chance to hit will probably work out, but that it should work out is cold comfort to the 10% who take the shot and miss. The +10 Aim is less obvious -you're not going to regularly push enemy hit chance to 0% only for this to boost it back up- but it's still tilting things against you, further discouraging going for risky Haywire Protocols.

Mind, it can all be rendered moot by having reliable follow-ups that don't care about accuracy, but still.

Supercharge is pretty weird from a narrative perspective, though. I can rationalize up some kind-of-sensible explanations, but they're all silly or the like; like yes it would be physically plausible for someone tinkering with a robot's internals to accidentally improve the thing while trying to sabotage it, but I doubt such a comedic scenario is remotely intended. Ultimately Haywire Protocol is a sufficiently narrow part of the game that I don't care that much, but it's still... silly.

On to the actual rewards, though.

Shutdown

Stuns the Hacked robot for 2 action points.

This is the main use for Haywire Protocol you can expect to see hit 100% success in actual play, especially in the base game where soldiers level faster overall and it's more realistic to stack Enemy Protocol boosts.

Stunning a robot is of course just as good as destroying it in the immediate sense of ensuring it won't cause trouble for anyone in the next enemy turn. As robots are tilted toward being tough, this is legitimately useful to keep in mind; if you take out most of a pod and then the last one standing is an undamaged Heavy Mec, with you having one Specialist still able to act... yeah, go for Shutdown. The Specialist probably can't kill it, after all.

It's still worse than actually killing the robot, though; Shutdown is better as a fallback option for when your squad ends up unable to take out everything currently active than as a first choice for helping against robots, because spending a soldier's turn to put off a threat can actively cost you mission objectives or even get soldiers killed or otherwise lost thanks to time pressure being a standard part of XCOM 2.

It's more okay to go to it early in missions that don't have time pressure, or that have 'soft' time pressure, or once the time pressure has been removed in missions this possibility applies to, of course. But it shouldn't be a default.

It is of course (almost) always paired with...

Control Enemy

Takes control of the Hacked robot for 4 turns.

Closer to 3 turns in practice, as they won't have any action points when you Hack them.

Also, this ticks over at the start of the enemy's turn. As such, if the robot is still functioning when the time is up, it will immediately turn around and resume fighting you. So you only have 2 turns in which you have real control over it and it's okay to not kill it.

This all contributes to me not being a fan of Control Enemy; even if it succeeds, it's easy to forget exactly when the robot is going to turn on you and end up with it killing (Or at least maiming) someone.

Personal skill is a significant factor in a somewhat subtle way; as I've emphasized repeatedly, optimal play is to not let enemies get turns in the first place, with it being realistic to pretty consistently achieve this. For a player who is not able to manage that, Control Enemy is actually pretty appealing, immediately taking an enemy out of the fight for a bit and likely leading to other enemies taking shots at it, both doing your work for you in destroying the Hacked robot and meaning they're not shooting at your actual soldiers who you don't want getting shot. For a player who is fairly new to the game, it's entirely possible that the robot is going to be destroyed by enemy fire before Control Enemy can time out, rendering the issue of forgetting when it will turn on you a bit moot.

Conversely, for a player who is able to pretty consistently hit the bar of 'enemies don't get turns', Control Enemy tends to result in you still needing to spend soldier turns on killing the robot yourself, with the stolen robot's firepower probably not being particularly helpful and the potential for it to draw fire from your soldiers being largely theoretical. At that point, spending a soldier action on Control Enemy tends to just put you in the hole, all while being usually a risky action to go for in the first place.

This skill factor element is somewhat awkward, because a learning player is less likely to accurately judge when Control Enemy is worth going for. They're also less likely to be on the ball when it comes to Hack boosts, what with not knowing what Autopsies unlock better Gremlins, possibly missing Enemy Protocol opportunities that generated because they don't know security towers can have those/can be Hacked at all/etc, and in War of the Chosen not knowing how to best leverage Covert Ops boosting the Hack stat; an experienced player is far more likely to have a Specialist hitting 100% on Control Enemy, and then not care precisely because they're an experienced and skilled player.

This is one capability I hope either doesn't return in XCOM 3, or that gets substantially reworked, given this awkwardness. On the plus side, Chimera Squad has its own variation on this which does escape most of these issues, so that's promising.

Moving on to the Turret versions...

Shutdown

Stuns the Hacked Turret for 2 action points.

This is the only Hack icon to use this visual style in the entire game. It looks like more like a feedback effect than anything else, but nope, it's your easier beneficial possibility for Hacking a Turret. The bizarre thing is...

... there's an unused icon labeled 'shutDown_Turret' that has the correct visual style!

I'm really curious what happened here. It seems extremely unlikely this was an intentional choice to give this one Hack reward a unique visual style. Notably, the Turret in the actually-used icon appears to be a screenshot of the actual Turret model with filter effects applied; it makes me wonder if this was meant to be a placeholder icon that would've been swapped out for the unused icon, and then it got missed that its replacement hadn't been properly swapped in. Certainly, War of the Chosen -the more blatantly rushed portion of XCOM 2- has stuff like multiple Dark Events whose icons were very obviously made via screenshotting existing 3D assets, making a quick generic background, and then reusing an existing skill icon.

Moving on to gameplay, though...

... on the one hand, Turrets have a bad enough Tech Defense score this is entirely possible to get to 100% success rate. On the other hand, it's only rarely all that worth considering, especially in War of the Chosen; why Stun the Turret if you can instantly delete it with a grenade taking out the floor under it? If a Turret isn't on destructible high ground, this tends to mean they're on equal ground with you and so have atrocious accuracy; a Superheavy Turret only has a 10% chance to hit soldiers in High Cover if it's not backed by the high ground Aim bonus. This is easy to reduce to 0% if you've got eg Smoke Grenades or Aid Protocol, and is relatively safe to just ignore if you need to focus on other things.

Sometimes, you can instead just... walk away. Why bother Stunning the Turret if it can't chase your squad and isn't in the way? This can crop up readily in the Blacksite and Forge missions, for example, which have no time pressure, and can both place Turrets early in the map in locations you can easily skirt around. Since you don't loot bodies in those missions, it's not like body-looting is a reason to attack them. Even on missions with time pressure, it's often still possible to just not bother to engage some or all Turrets; the game clearly does try to have Turrets placed in the player's way when they spawn at all, but it's only really Turrets sitting directly atop the objective that are hard to ignore entirely...

... which are particularly consistent about being placed on destructible high ground, returning to the point that you can just blow up their tile to instant-kill them.

So overall Shutdown is pretty difficult to care about. I like the idea of being able to deal with an automated turret by turning it off instead of blowing it up, but in practice this doesn't work out well.

It is of course always paired with...

Control Turret

Takes control of the Hacked Turret for 4 turns.

This works exactly like with taking control of non-Turret robots, it just has a different icon.

Even more so than Shutdown, Control Turret is generally much more difficult to justify going for than its non-Turret counterpart. Turret immobility is a big part of why; you can't grab a Turret and haul it with you to help fight another pod, and even if it's already in reach of a pod the pod's members will just move to Cover before it gets a chance to act and the Turret can't move to flank any of them, limiting its ability to contribute. This all being exacerbated by their nature as a boring stat block enemy; some kind of immobile (And Hackable) Viper would be able to spit Poison at enemies to contribute without regard to Cover, but a Turret is stuck just spamming bullets and praying they actually hit something.

Control Turret also suffers from the danger of it potentially pulling pods you're not ready for. Enemies thankfully won't activate the instant you have control of a unit in their range, waiting until their turn starts to somehow realize the Turret that's done nothing is nonetheless hostile, but it's still problematic, especially since you likely Hacked the Turret to try to have it help in an ongoing combat rather than it just being a pod activating by itself when you're not fully ready for it.

This is always a risk when taking control of an enemy, of course, but Turrets are particularly prone to triggering it, especially if you're early in a non-Legendary run; XCOM 2 is reasonably consistent about spacing out the pods on the map if there's a mere three pods, but the routines the game employs to achieve this result don't apply to Turrets at all. Thus, if you Haywire Protocol an early ADVENT Mec, it is very unlikely to pull a pod before you're ready. Using Haywire Protocol on a Turret is not so protected by the game's design, and in fact my experience is that Turrets are fairly prone to spawning in locations that end up halfway between two pods so you pull a second pod while trying to coopt the Turret to fight the first pod.

All of these problems are also skill-independent; Control Turret is always a dubious tool, whether you're new to the game or a highly experienced player who reliably stomps pods flat before they can act. Indeed, I'm not sure it's even clearly worse for one than the other; a highly skilled player probably has no use for a coopted Turret, but an inexperienced player is far more likely to end up pulling pods unintentionally or wasting their time entirely because they eg didn't realize the Turret was in a bad spot for contributing against the pod they're currently fighting. The only real qualifier to all this is that in Lost Towers you might as well have Shen stealing Decaying Turrets after you've activated the SPARK, because its unusual mission design makes it uniquely worthwhile.

On the plus side, it is at least okay to let the control time out if you don't care to spend effort on killing the Turret and have the squad out of reach by the time the Hack wears off. That's some kind of edge over other Haywire Protocol targets.

But overall I'd argue that the ability to control Turrets is actually something of a trap. Even more so than general robot-stealing, Turret-stealing is something I hope either doesn't return in XCOM 3 or gets overhauled heavily.

A couple of asides;

Here's a variation on the Control Turret icon that, as far as I'm aware, is unused by the game. I suspect some artist just made an up-arrow variation Just In Case, since Hack icons coming in two such variations is standard. It's possible this is evidence of some kind of meaningful cut content, but I'd be surprised.

Slightly more interesting is this pair of icons:

As far as I'm aware, these are also unused. Internally, they're labeled 'xcom turret', which may or may not mean anything.

My first impulse is honestly to guess these are just placeholder graphics. The Turret in these icons looks to be literally a screenshot of an in-game Turret, the Vigilo Confido icon is a simplified version of itself that's missing the text, stars, and Earth, and these icons lack the visuals on the right side that are presumably meant to represent circuitry or something in that vein. I wouldn't be surprised if this is essentially the prototype for all Hack reward graphics, a first draft to illustrate one model for the setup, which then just... got missed and never removed from the files.

But the name does make me wonder if this is something slightly more interesting. It could just be 'xcom turret' as in 'I, the graphic artist, made this little placeholder graphic depicting a turret for the xcom game we're working on', but... it could be that, say, at some point this would've had something to do with the XCOM Turrets you can get in an Avenger Defense.

It's probably just a first draft and/or placeholder graphic, though.

Lastly, we have a DLC-exclusive Haywire Protocol option:

Mass Intrusion

Takes control of all currently-present Derelict Mecs on the map.

This is exclusive to Julian the Prototype Sectopod in Lost Towers of the Shen's Last Gift DLC, and specifically replaces the standard Control Enemy option when attempting to hit him with Haywire Protocol.

If you're doing things optimally and the RNG is roughly on target, going for this is a waste, because you'll be ready to finish Julian before there's anything worth stealing: Mass Intrusion only takes any Derelict Mecs on the map at the time, after all. If it stole Derelict Mecs as they spawned in for a couple turns, or stopped them from spawning for its duration, then it would be worth gambling on it right away, but it doesn't do anything like that.

If you're either unlucky (Particularly with SPARK-001's shots; missing with all three means Julian holds onto all of his considerable Armor, crippling your following damage) or not playing sufficiently optimally, you may wish to gamble on this after a couple waves of Derelict Mecs have spawned. You can afford to wait that long, as they're pretty consistent about the first wave setting up to explode for their first turn, and four exploding Derelict Mecs can do a lot to help in taking Julian down, not to mention potentially distracting him for a turn or two.

Of course, if you fail the Hack you'll have made Julian permanently harder to hit and more reliable at hitting your troops, and the numbers are tuned so it is a gamble; Shen will always have a roughly 50% chance to pull off Mass Intrusion. It may be better to just shut Julian down and have the squad shoot Derelict Mecs to try to salvage the situation.

I'm overall not a fan of this option existing, but I'm sympathetic to the fact that Julian really needed two Hack options and the standard second option was obviously unacceptable. Plus, the Lost Towers are wholly optional even if you have the DLC; ultimately the mission having rough edges is limited in its damage by the fact that if you run it once and don't like it you can just skip it in future.

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Next time, we wrap up XCOM 2 (for the moment, anyway) with covering Rumors.

See you then.