Chimera Squad Analysis: Androids

Chimera Squad's Androids are of course yet another variation on the SHIV/Mec/SPARK concept, in the sense of being a manufactured squadmate to supplement your merely human fully organic mostly-organic squad members. Like SHIVs, they don't gain experience, improving solely through you doing technological-type things. Unlike all three of their predecessors, Androids actually function largely like their organic counterparts: they make use of Cover, equip the same weaponry as most of your agents (They specifically have the unique behavior of being able to freely choose between SMGs, Rifles, and Shotguns; your regular agents are all locked to a specific weapon type, so this is striking), can make full use of the full range of standard gear slots (eg the vest slot), can Subdue enemies, and so on.

On the other hand, the way they fit into mission design is completely different. Where a SHIV/Mec/SPARK took a standard squad slot, Androids in Chimera Squad are automatically set up as reserve units: they will only be brought into a mission if an agent goes down and the mission still has at least one Encounter remaining, in which case you pick one of your two Androids and they deploy. (Or if two agents go down, you deploy both Androids)

It's a little frustrating that the game doesn't give you the option to sub in an Android over a still-active agent. I'll be getting into this more over the course of this post, but Androids are a clunky, limited concept in practice, and a notable part of why is the fact that they only see use if an agent outright goes down; if you're reliably playing well, it's literally impossible to get use out of Androids. It would've been nice to be able to go 'ouch, Cherub is down to 2 HP, I think I'll swap in an Android for the next Encounter', given them more relevancy.

That said, Androids are interesting in terms of Chimera Squad experimenting with the squad size in an unusual way; the prior two games both have wonkiness resulting from starting from a squad size of 4 and letting the player upgrade to 6, where squad expansion upgrades are really centralizing and the game has to assume the player grabs both of them basically as soon as possible and in turn a player has to in fact grab both of them as soon as possible or else they won't be able to keep up with mission difficulty, resulting in squad expansion upgrades being more of a Red Queen effect than a genuine improvement to the squad. Chimera Squad also starts you from a squad size of 4 and end on entering a mission with 6 units, but since Androids are reserve units, it escapes all the Red Queen effect wonkiness I just laid out; the game can build every part of it around the idea that the player is bringing in exactly 4 units, because that's all they'll ever have, but the player gets to build up a bit of a buffer where an agent going down in a mission isn't quite so catastrophic, thus getting some of the benefits that expanding the squad in prior games provided.

It's an experiment that didn't work out that well in practice, but it's interesting that Chimera Squad tried this radically different approach to a familiar framework. It makes me wonder if XCOM 3 is going to more significantly shakeup the core squad framework -given the significant clunkiness of the framework the first two games used, that would make sense, honestly.

Anyway, note that your first Android is free: you must complete the Android Personnel Assembly Project to unlock literally every other Assembly Project, and it automatically adds an Android to Supply when completed. If you want a second Android, you'll need to buy one directly for the rather steep price of 150 Credits. Same if you lose your first one and want a replacement. Also note that you can't have more than two Androids at any given moment: the game simply takes away the ability to purchase Androids if you already have two. This isn't too big a deal given you have to do quite badly to need more than two backup agents within a single mission (Frankly, you need to do quite badly to need even two backup agents), but do keep it in mind.

Conversely, Android purchases are actually instant; while the Assembly Project that gives you your first Android takes time to finish, any further Androids are available the instant you drop the cash on them. So for one thing you can in fact hold off on purchasing an Android until the very day you think you might want one more... not that this is particularly significant given there's not a clear 'you'll want to purchase an Android here' moment or metric, but hey, maybe you prefer to buy the second Android specifically for Take Down (Investigation target). In any event, this can be a surprise if you're expecting Androids to work like SPARKs, who also had the 'first one is free' effect but had further SPARKs also take time to build, especially since Chimera Squad frames your Androids as being manufactured by your squad rather than purchased from some kind of Android store... which is actually a bit weird given some of the maps are, in fact, depictions of stores that sell Androids.

You also only actually spend Credits on Android purchases, which somewhat contributes to the weirdness of 'you're not conceptually purchasing Androids from a store', but this is something of a side effect of Chimera Squad's economic rework in general; it simply doesn't have a resource equivalent to Alien Alloys in the prior two games. Credits are all you spend on all Supply purchases!

This broadly makes sense given the narrative situation is such that it would be weird to still be treating Alien Alloys as a precious, limited resource. This was honestly already a little eyebrow-raising in XCOM 2, but at least then you were the underdog guerrilla forces and the dominant regime was in fact trying to keep even its most widespread valuables out of the hands of dissidents like yourself. In Chimera Squad's context, though, it really would be expected that Alien Alloys would be sufficiently widespread that even if they were still relatively valuable it would be in the sense of 'you can expect the price tag on something made of Alien Alloys to be higher than a similar thing made of steel', not 'we need to go loot more Alien Alloys to incorporate them into the thing ourself, because we're completely out'.

I kind of doubt this particular overhaul of Chimera Squad's is going to carry forward into XCOM 3, though; just as Terror From the Deep swapped out 'Alien Alloys' for 'Aqua Plastics' but maintained the same gameplay function of being your more common looted-from-aliens-resource, I suspect XCOM 3 will phase out Alien Alloys as a resource you manage conceptually but just swap in psionic crystals or whatever is thematically appropriate to the new alien invasion.

But back to talking about Chimera Squad's Androids.

Base Stats

8 HP (10 on easiest difficulty)
65 Aim (75 on easiest difficulty)
10 Mobility
50 Will (60 on easiest difficulty)

Additionally, the easiest difficulty provides +15 passive crit chance, raises the crit chance bonus from a flank to +40 instead of +33, and provides a passive +5 Defense.

Except for Will, Androids have the Baseline Agent Statline of Chimera Squad. As agents tend to either have favorable tradeoffs or straight-up get 'free' stats beyond the baseline, this means Androids are largely inferior to your proper agents in practice.

It's a little odd they have extra Will -I'm not sure any Will-testing mechanic in Chimera Squad even can be used on them, in addition to it running contrary to the series' trend of robots tending to have horrendous Will. It makes me wonder if Chimera Squad depressed agent Will by 10 points relatively late in development and Androids got missed, or something of the sort.

Not that it would really matter regardless given how rare Will-testing mechanics are in Chimera Squad, mind.

Mechanical Chassis

Passive: Immune to Poison and Fire, but susceptible to anti-robot effects and cannot be healed by Medikits or Nanomedikits. Cannot be rendered Unconscious, and dies instantly instead of Bleeding Out when HP is reduced to 0.

This is the only explicitly listed special quality on Androids, and indeed they will never gain additional abilities unless you equip them with an Epic Weapon.

The immunity to Poison and Fire might lead one to worry that Androids might be situationally superior to your main agents, which would certainly be quite frustrating given you can't manually choose to deploy Androids, but fortunately this isn't really a thing. There's exactly one enemy in the entire game that can set units on fire, restricted to one Investigation, and Poison is only somewhat more common, and you can just pass out Medikits if you're concerned about Poison. I wouldn't be surprised if an actual player has at some point had a situation come up where they would've liked to deploy an Android where the immunity would've been an important advantage, but the overwhelming majority of the time it really doesn't matter.

It does mean you can be a bit more aggressive about using Gas Grenades, Incendiary Grenades, or Torque's Poison Spit if you've ended up with an agent or two going down, I guess.

The susceptibility to anti-robot effects is, just as in XCOM 2, true but rarely relevant, as no enemies have innate access to a specifically anti-robot effect; no Bluescreen Rounds enemies, no hacker enemies. It can come up due to Mind Control or careless use of some of your own indiscriminate tools, mostly.

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As I've already implied, Androids don't gain experience, don't gain levels, and otherwise don't improve just for participating in combat, much like SHIVs back in Enemy Unknown/Within. Unlike SHIVs, Androids can not only use most standard equipment, but -like Long War 1 SHIVs, actually- have access to proprietary equipment to try to act as a replacement for the benefits of leveling and thus let them stay relevant longer.

It... works poorly, but first let's go over the specifics.

Upgrades

The Modular Androids Assembly Project must be completed to be able to apply upgrades, in addition to being needed to build them. This first piece is less meaningful than on other gear slot types: Android Upgrades never show up as mission rewards or Scavenger Market purchases. You have to build them, period. As such, you can never have an Upgrade while being unable to actually install it.

Upgrades themselves come in four slot types: Chassis, Motor, Processor, and Vision. You can only have one Upgrade slotted into a given slot type, and of course it must actually match the slot type. Upgrades themselves can be freely installed, removed, and swapped between your two Androids if you like, though there's not really a lot of utility to this; in general, the Android Upgrades feel like a sketch of a framework that could be interesting and meaningful, but didn't get enough attention in Chimera Squad itself.

Which is a bit unfortunate, as I suspect the series is never going to come back to this model. Oh well.

Anyway, specifics, starting with...

Chassis Upgrades

Ballistic Foam Lining

+2 HP

Acquisition: Complete Modular Androids Assembly Project.

Cost: 20

In theory, this is appreciated for making your Androids a bit less frail. In practice, it's pretty baffling it exists, because if you're going to bother...

Polymer Sheathing

+2 HP and +2 Armor

Acquisition: Complete Modular Androids Assembly Project.

Cost: 40

... you'd rather build Polymer Sheathing.

Yes, Polymer Sheathing is twice as expensive as Ballistic Foam Lining, but it has the same unlock condition as Polymer Sheathing and paying an extra 20 Credits is simply not a break-the-bank expense. If you're considering spending money on Androids at all, Polymer Sheathing is simply too massive an advantage: Shred is rare, and enemy damage is tuned so that -2 damage on every shot does a lot to extend Android survivability, especially in the early game. Among other points, this directly defrays Android costs by minimizing the odds of the Android dying and needing to be replaced; better to spend 40 Credits now than 150 later.

Anyway, there's two more Chassis upgrades;

Impact Gel Lining

+2 HP and +1 Armor

Acquisition: Complete Perfected Android Mechanics Assembly Project.

Cost: 35

Yes, this is worse than the Polymer Sheathing you can buy the instant you have Android Upgrades available, aside being slightly cheaper. I suspect they intended Impact Gel Lining to be the more basic of the two, and missed that they didn't actually organize it that way; in general, it's clear that the Android Upgrades didn't get scrutinized particularly closely, in spite of uniformly having unique graphics.

Fortunately, there is an actual improvement available from this Assembly Project, specifically...


Titanium Sheathing

+2 HP and +3 Armor

Acquisition: Complete Perfected Android Mechanics Assembly Project.

Cost: 50

... this.

+3 Armor is a lot, especially since it stacks with the +1 Armor from Mastercrafted Armor, and if you get a Plated Vest you can get an Android to a full 5 Armor. 4-5 Armor is a shocking amount of damage reduction given enemy damage in Chimera Squad has a noticeably lower roof than in XCOM 2. 5-7-ish is a pretty typical damage value for enemies in the endgame, so an Android with Titanium Sheathing can absorb a ludicrous amount of punishment if none of the tiny handful of Shred sources is around. Axiom will still be a better tank if you build him that way, but he's the only agent that genuinely has better tanking ability than an appropriately-kitted Android.

Also, I find it funny that the ultimate in armoring up your Androids isn't to coat them with Alien Alloys or use any kind of fancy space-age gel lining or anything like that, but rather is to just use titanium, the real material that already exists and is widely used. Androids are sufficiently off to the side and underdeveloped I have difficulty getting worked up over it, but it's pretty odd if you actually think about it, both from a realism standpoint and from a 'video game memes' standpoint. Of these four, I'd really expect the Impact Gel Lining to be the apex in Android durability.

Moving on to...

Motor Upgrades

Servoharness Mk I

+1 Mobility

Acquisition: Complete Modular Androids Assembly Project.

Cost: 25

There's zero competition until you unlock its straight replacement, so... you okay with spending the Credits? If yes, buy it and install it. If no, don't.

That said, I should point out that Chimera Squad has nothing like a sell function, or a way to convert existing Upgrades to superior counterparts, or anything along those lines. As such, any early Android Upgrades you buy that will inevitably be displaced are in some sense a waste of money, where a Servoharness Mk I you purchase toward the beginning of the game will still be sitting in your inventory at the end of the game even though there's zero chance you'll actually use it at that point. So don't be too quick to kit out your Androids; you'll get more value overall out of spending money on your regular agents.

Servoharness Mk II

+2 Mobility

Acquisition: Complete Perfected Android Mechanics Assembly Project.

Cost: 35

This is of course a straight upgrade over the prior, aside a minor cost increase. If nothing else, you might as well buy a couple once you're solidly in the late game with money to burn and your essentials long-since done being purchased; more Mobility is useful, of course, and 12 Mobility is in fact better than several of your regular agents.

Processor Upgrades

Tactical ASIC Mk I

+1 Dodge

Acquisition: Complete Enhanced Android Processing Assembly Project.

Cost: 25

Yes, that's +1 Dodge. As in, the Dodge stat. As in, a 1% chance to turn an enemy's attack into a Graze.

I assume this was meant to be a 10, something went awry invisibly, and nobody on the dev team noticed because even they didn't use Androids enough to catch obvious errors like this.

Don't bother buying it. If you are going to purchase something unlocked by Enhanced Android Processing, it should be...

Quadcore GPU

+10 crit chance

Acquisition: Complete Enhanced Android Processing Assembly Project.

Cost: 25

... this hunk of junk.

Crit chance is underwhelming, as I've noted previously, but 10 more crit chance is still better than 1 more Dodge. 1 Dodge is so tiny there is a very real chance it will literally never do anything across your entire campaign, and this would be true even if you could actually deploy Androids directly and insisted on bringing both Androids into every mission. 10 crit chance is meh, but it at least has okay odds of doing something of use.

Tactical ASIC Mk II

+2 Dodge

Acquisition: Complete Perfected Android Processing Assembly Project.

Cost: 35

Perfected Android Processing doesn't really help; 2 Dodge? Really? Once again, I assume this was meant to be +20 Dodge and something went wrong. So just like the basic counterparts, you instead go to the alternative unlocked by the same Assembly Project of...

Octacore GPU

+18 crit chance

Acquisition: Complete Perfected Android Processing Assembly Project.

Cost: 40

... this.

Also still junk, but vastly less junk, simply because you expect to actually see it do something sometimes.

I'm not really sure why it only provides +18 instead of +20. This is the kind of deviation in numbers I usually see from games that had a noticeable focus on balance after release, where it turned out that in real play some thing was a little too strong at the preferred multiple of 5 or 10 or whatever but also too weak if it went down one 'step' in that framework. Sometimes I see it because a game is making some kind of number allusion, like giving something 108 damage as a Buddhism reference instead of 110 damage. I have difficulty believing this is an example of the former, and I can't think of anything it could work as referencing for the latter. So... this is just confusing.

In any event, the Processor Upgrades are the one and only example of the Upgrade system making a stab at something other than a pretty linear progression system. I kind of suspect Chassis having four upgrades as well was meant to be another case of choosing between two different options, like there was supposed to be an Armor line and an HP line instead of just a clear hierarchy of worst to best, but Processor Upgrades are the only case of the final game actually doing so. Not that it actually works given the bizarrely tiny Dodge stat on the Tactical ASICs, but I've already been over how that's probably an error.

This kind of thing is part of why I said earlier that Android Upgrades feel like a sketch of a framework; they frankly appear to have been thought up, implemented, and then sufficiently ignored that the devs overlooked some pretty obvious errors. Not that the rest of Chimera Squad is perfect or anything, but most parts of it aren't so obviously incomplete.

Vision Upgrades

Lidar Mk I

+8 Aim

Acquisition: Complete Enhanced Android Processing Assembly Project.

Cost: 25

This is literally your only Vision option until you get its replacement, so all that matters here is whether you think 25 Credits is an acceptable expenditure for the benefit.

Keep in mind Androids don't level, and so don't gain Aim on their own. +8 Aim isn't a lot, but if you're spending money on Androids you might as well stack the odds in favor of them actually contributing damage successfully.

Lidar Mk II

+15 Aim

Acquisition: Complete Perfected Android Processing Assembly Project.

Cost: 40

See previous: there's no meaningful competition, and Aim is important if you want your Androids actually hitting things, so if you're spending money on Androids at all this should be bought eventually.

On the plus side, 15 Aim is a pretty respectable boost, and it doesn't cost many Credits.

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Perfect Android statline

10 HP (Not counting Mastercrafted Armor)

3 Armor (Not counting Mastercrafted Armor)
80 Aim
12 Mobility

18 crit chance

80 Aim is actually a little better than any agent except Blueblood reaches, and 10 HP+4 Armor is absurd, with only Axiom being arguably tougher... if you've specifically built him for durability in your run. If you haven't, late-game Androids rule the roost in durability, and also rule the roost for Aim if you don't have Blueblood. This is appreciated, given they don't have abilities -and honestly, they'll still underperform compared to your proper agents by the time you're at this point simply because of how much of a gap is produced by them not having abilities.

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Androids are an interesting experiment overall, but within Chimera Squad itself they don't work very well.

The entire Upgrade system pretty well encapsulates the dynamic: on the one hand, it is a nice stab at resolving the issues with SHIVs, where they fall behind hard because human soldiers automatically improve in several ways SHIVs largely don't even try to match. On the other hand, the Upgrade system intersects with several other decisions to produce severe wonkiness.

The coremost issues are the twin points that Upgrades cost cash and that Androids are restricted purely to being backups for when your primary agents go down. These two points together mean that actually getting a hold of Upgrades to keep Androids relevant is not something that makes sense to do initially; money spent on improving your primary agents will reliably benefit you, and in fact will reduce the odds of needing to leverage an Android's services, a point exacerbated by how multiple ways to spend money on improving your primary agents actually incidentally benefit Androids anyway. (eg upgrading body armor increases all agent HP, Androids included)

This is further exacerbated by the inability to sell or update Upgrades you no longer have use for; instead of trying to upgrade your Androids to keep them relevant as a campaign progresses, what you really ought to be doing is ignoring them entirely (Aside throwing regular gear on them when you have more options for a slot than you have slots to fill on your core agents) until you've finished upgrading and unlocking basically everything of relevance to your core agents, at which point you rapidly unlock all the best Upgrades and start buying them as you run out of other things to spend cash on.

This is obviously wonky and only gets wonkier when you consider what's happening with your core agents, where they start a run at their most vulnerable and end it rather unlikely to actually go down. If you ever do have agents end up Bleeding Out and so end up subbing in an Android, it's almost certainly going to happen in your first Investigation, and you probably haven't unlocked or bought any Upgrades at all. Once you have all those Upgrades that make Androids less anemic, your squad's overall power and especially survivability has gone up enough that you're very unlikely to end up deploying an apex Android. For that matter, your maxed-out agents having a bunch of abilities also means your apex Androids tend to be functionally more of a drop in squad power than when you were subbing in an Android with no Upgrades over an agent who had maybe one level under their belt.

The overall result is that the entire Upgrades system is largely irrelevant to real play, and Androids more broadly are only slightly more prone to getting a chance to matter.

To be fair, this is to a certain extent a commentary on the fact that Chimera Squad is better than its predecessors about tuning itself so a good grasp of the mechanics and so on will fairly reliably get you through every mission; Chimera Squad simply doesn't have the kind of RNG-screw potential of its predecessors, where even late in a run with high-level soldiers in good equipment it was still possible for several different kinds of RNG (And/or other wonkiness like line of sight not making sense) to conspire to get a soldier killed where a player didn't really do anything wrong. If Chimera Squad's core gameplay was more like Enemy Unknown/Within in terms of how readily the RNG can murder someone out of nowhere, the 'Androids are almost never going to see use outside the early game, if at all' problem wouldn't be so reliably true.

But a lot of this is wonky incentive structures and whatnot, where there's pretty clearly this idea that Androids will 'level up' alongside your primary agents via the Upgrade system, but since Upgrades demand you spend valuable Assembly time on unlocking them and valuable Credits on purchasing them, you have to divert valuable resources away from your core agents to improve these backliners you don't expect to see use for them to 'level up'. If Upgrades had been possible to acquire as mission rewards or otherwise in a manner not necessarily competing with improving your core agents, this 'level up' effect might've actually held true, but as-is Androids tend to spend a long time falling behind, then suddenly catapult to their apex late in the game.

If XCOM 3 returns to something along these lines -which seems likely, given it's very obviously a continuation of SHIVs and SPARKs- hopefully it will recognize this point and make an effort to avoid this competition aspect.

I should also comment on an aspect where I'm not sure if it's a philosophical point or just more evidence that Chimera Squad ended up giving Androids little attention in general -that the Upgrade system wasn't used to give Androids access to special abilities of their own. Chimera Squad not only can pass out abilities via equipment, but absolutely does do so, with the most player-visible example being Epic Weapons outright passing out familiar abilities from XCOM 2. It would've made a lot of sense to do something like have the Processor Upgrade set provide an array of possible abilities instead of Dodge and crit chance boosts, both from a raw gameplay standpoint and honestly also from a lore standpoint; the computer components providing specialized skills instead of just raw stat boosts would be pretty natural.

I suspect this is, unfortunately, something of a philosophy issue, as Upgrades have notable design overlap with PCSes in XCOM 2, and I've commented before that it's pretty bizarre that brainchips provide stat boosts (Including stuff like HP and Mobility that are particularly bizarre to be coming from brainchips) instead of specific skills... but given how Upgrades have multiple cases of probably having made an error and totally overlooked it, it could be that they meant to do more with Upgrades than they did and the lack of stuff like Upgrades providing abilities is more about that incompleteness than about a disinterest in such a design.

I sure hope it's the 'ran out of time or whatever' scenario instead of the 'philosophically committed to not doing this' scenario, especially if XCOM 3 does come back to this general framework. SPARKs sidestepped the issue of abilities being a lot of a unit's power by virtue of just leveling normally, but it would be nice if XCOM 3 actually got the robot soldier concept to be both valid and not so similar to your human soldiers.

Androids are least an interesting experiment, however poorly they worked out in Chimera Squad itself.

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Next time, we move on to core weapons.

See you then.