Chimera Squad Strategic Analysis: Field Teams

Field Teams are a new mechanic to Chimera Squad. You can broadly compare them to XCOM 2's mechanics of making contact with new regions and building Radio Relays, in terms of being a Geoscape-layer mechanic where you make investments that, among other things, improve your income. I'd argue that's a pretty misleading comparison to make, as it would suggest similarities that simply don't exist (Chimera Squad lacks anything comparable to Continent Bonuses, for example), but I do suspect that broadly Field Teams are developmentally traceable to that whole system.

But before I talk about Field Teams, I should give context, as Chimera Squad's approach to the Geoscape is notably different from either of the prior systems.

First and most obvious is the passage of time: in the prior two games, time passing on the Geoscape was visibly tracked in units of minutes. Most scheduling was built around a number of days passing, but the game modeled and tracked the time more continuously than that, and this mattered for a number of reasons. In Chimera Squad, instead the Geoscape is just as 'turn-based' as the tactical layer, with a day being the equivalent of a turn; you complete a mission or Situation, the day ends, and all scheduling tasks increment one day forward and now you're in the next day. It's a much simpler, clearer system, among other points lending itself more readily to rapidly understanding that there are various consistent rules about scheduling, and in turn working out what many of those rules are without any need for the game to explain it. I'm not sure it's actually better than the prior systems, but the clarity advantage is certainly nice for several reasons.

The second difference is of course the map. Where the prior two games both had the Geoscape cover the entirety of the Earth, Chimera Squad restricts itself to City 31. City 31 is itself divided into 9 Districts, which can be loosely compared to countries in Enemy Unknown/Within or the regional divisions of XCOM 2. The Districts themselves each have a specific name and in-universe lore stuff related to them, but while I suspect which District a mission generates in has an influence on its range of possible maps, in most regards (Or, if my prior suspicion is incorrect, all regards) the Districts are mechanically indistinguishable from each other.

Three Geoscape mechanics are tied to Districts: missions+Situations, Unrest, and Field Teams, all of which intersect with one another. Unrest is essentially a refined version of the Avatar Project in XCOM 2 -or more accurately the Anarchy meter is, but Anarchy is tied to Unrest. If the Anarchy meter hits full, that's it, your campaign ends, you've lost; why this is so from an in-universe standpoint is about as murky as XCOM 2's Avatar Project meter automatically defeating you if it fills, unfortunately, though overall it's a bit easier to fill in with a reasonable explanation. (eg 'the Chimera Squad is disbanded because of how horrible a job they're doing')

Anarchy points themselves are generated by virtue of a day ending with a District having max Unrest, 1 Anarchy point per District at max Unrest. Unrest itself starts from 0 in all Districts, and the cap is 5 points of Unrest for a given District. Do note that Unrest doesn't do anything below 5 points; you might intuitively expect 4 Unrest to, say, result in civilians in that District being unfriendly to your squad, or something of the sort, but no. Either a District is at 5 points, and so is generating Anarchy and intermittently generating an Anarchy! or Outbreak mission, or it's below 5 points and everything is fine.

Unrest generation itself is surprisingly complicated, because it's influenced by a combination of what difficulty you're on and how many Investigations you've completed. That said, there are exactly four ways for Unrest to generate, and two of them are consistent across difficulties and no matter how many Investigations you've completed, so I'll start with those.

First of all is civilian deaths when doing a mission. This works basically exactly like Intel generation for KOed enemies; if one civilian dies while you're doing a mission, there's a 20% chance the District's Unrest will increase by 1, if two civilians die there's a 40% chance, and so on, all the way up to 5 or more civilians dying guaranteeing that Unrest will go up 1 point. I actually like this overall; video games with the possibility of civilian deaths as a mechanic have long struggled with making civilian deaths an undesirable thing to allow to happen, or more precisely with doing so without creating other design problems. (eg plenty of games have gone with 'any civilian dying is an instant game over', and this always has all kinds of really serious problems) My main complaint is that it's pretty ignorable; I kind of wish it had been a 50% chance per civilian death, and 'rolled over' when above 100% to produce more Unrest points. (ie 3 deaths would be a 50% chance of 1 Unrest and a 50% chance of 2 Unrest) It's sufficiently minor the only reason you're liable to realize it's a mechanic is because the game explicitly mentions it in the mission summary screen if any civilians go down.

Second is 'hidden mission targets', which requires a bit of explanation; every Investigation has a series of fixed plot missions, which the game paces out by making most of them initially generate as a 'hidden mission target'. A hidden mission target generates in a specific District, blocks other missions and Situations from generating in that District until completed, and so long as it remains in place adds 1 Unrest to the District per day that passes. Upon completion, either a new hidden mission target will generate, or you've finished that Investigation and it's time to move on to the next stage of the game. Straightforward enough, and honestly probably most players who played the game exactly once figured all this out on their own even though the game doesn't explain it.

Third is that ignoring a Situation can generate Unrest. I say 'can', because this is the first thing affected by difficulty setting/how far into a run you are; below the highest difficulty, this won't happen until you're somewhere past your first Investigation. I suspect it will in fact never happen on the lowest difficulty, but I've never tested it so don't take my word for it. Regardless, note that Situations almost always generate in pairs (If you stall on hitting a revealed 'hidden mission target', you can get a day where only 1 Situation generates, but that's it), and by default you can only deal with 1 Situation per day, so this reliably adds a bit of pressure to Unrest management when it's relevant.

Fourth is that ignoring a mission generates Unrest. Unlike ignoring a Situation, this happens on every difficulty at every point in a run, but the amount of Unrest goes up based on those factors, starting from just 1 Unrest and being allowed to rise as high as 3 Unrest for an ignored mission. Like Situations, missions mostly generate in pairs, and you can never deal with both at once, so this is very much the primary source of Unrest pressure in any run throughout the run. Exacerbating this is that you'll occasionally get three missions generating; two regular random generation missions, plus an optional plot mission which, if completed, will reduce how many days it takes for the current hidden mission target to become targetable. So that's additional Unrest pressure.

Nicely enough, even though the game doesn't really explain these mechanics, it has UI elements that show how much Unrest will generate in a given District if you don't do anything to prevent the Unrest, so you don't need to understand the rules to account for them reasonably well, and probably most players who have played through the game even once figured out most of the rules accurately enough on their own.

Now, I laid out all this in this post partly because Field Teams are tied up pretty heavily in not only the Geoscape layer in general but more specifically in Unrest management; among other points, 2 of your 3 Field Team types can directly fight Unrest, and there's another Geoscape set of mechanics I'll be getting to later that are focused on fighting Unrest and partially tied up in Field Teams.

Field Teams themselves are something you pay Intel to install into a District, and from there you can potentially spend more Intel to upgrade the Field Team, ultimately being able to do this a maximum of two times. (ie max Rank on Field Teams is 3) At Rank 1, all a Field Team does is provide some resources once per in-game week, every Friday, while at Rank 2 a Field Team provides additional benefits for doing missions in their District (And also provides more resources on Friday), and at Rank 3 they provide another new benefit. (Which I can't provide a global summary for because they don't all three hold to a pattern)

Field Team costs are one of the more poorly-explained elements of the game (Though you do at least reliably get an accurate preview of current costs), and easy to be confused as to what the rules are, unfortunately. The base costs work like so:

50/80/120 Intel for Rank 1/2/3

However, you'll normally only ever see those exact numbers three times per run, as Field Team costs increase based on how many copies you already have of a given Field Team type that are at least your target Rank. Normally this increase is 15 Intel per such Field Team, but it's only 10 more Intel on the lowest difficulty.

Now, I used such a cumbersome wording because the system is surprisingly specific. Say you build a Rank 1 Security Team. If you want to build a second Security Team, it will cost 65 Intel, but if you decide to build a Finance or Technology Team instead, you'll just pay the normal 50 Intel. Similarly, if you build three Rank 1 Security Teams and are considering upgrading any of them, the first one you upgrade will cost the base 80 Intel; you won't have to pay more Intel until you're trying to get a second Security Team to Rank 2.

All of which means you're encouraged to diversify a bit, where it's easier to afford installing one Security Team, one Technology Team, and one Finance Team than it is to build three copies of your favorite, and so two is spreading upgrades across types easier than focusing on upgrading one type. It's a surprisingly nice system; given what I usually see with games, I'd have expected a system whose rules were less specific, and more precisely I'd have expected the game to have optimal play look radically different from dev intentions due to not thinking through the implications of the rules. eg if all costs on all Field Team types went up for each Field Team built while upgrades did not affect costs, you wouldn't be encouraged to diversify and would in fact be encouraged to 'build tall', fully upgrading each Field Team before installing a new one to minimize wasted Intel. (And given my usual experiences with games, such a thing would be paired with the tutorial elements actively exhorting the player to diversify or otherwise trying to get the player to play in a way that is actively contrary to the incentives the game actually has)

Something worth noting is that it's possible to get a 'free Field Team' reward. This lets you perform one Field Team purchase -whether installing one into a District or upgrading an existing one- at no Intel cost. Such free Field Teams are optimally spent on upgrading an existing Field Team, preferably to Rank 3, and preferably of whatever Field Team type you have the highest number of copies at Rank 3; the Intel cost negation applies in full no matter what the price you'd otherwise be paying is, so best to use it on whatever would be most expensive.

Anyway, it's worth pointing out that Field Team upgrading is instant, and more precisely the implications in the context of their bonuses: the first Rank of a given Field Team should generally be bought specifically on Thursdays, as there's no benefit to doing so earlier unless you're trying to unlock something. (eg if you have three Field Teams up and want Quarantine today, you should just go ahead and build that fourth Field Team) Similarly, every Field Team's second Rank specifically bolsters mission rewards, and so it's a good idea to hold onto Intel to opportunistically upgrade Field Teams to Rank 2 when you happen to want to do a mission in their District that day, though it's also slightly worth considering making such upgrades on Thursdays since they also provide a small increase to the weekly income.

Rank 3 actually varies by Field Team type more significantly, though in practice these just-in-time behaviors aren't terribly important to Rank 3. It takes too much Intel to hit Rank 3 to reasonably take a District from nothing to Rank 3 in response to an opportunity, and only Security's Rank 3 benefit is big enough to potentially be worth pursuing in such a targeted manner.

Otherwise, this build-and-upgrade-just-in-time behavior is pretty favored unless you're playing specifically on the lowest difficulty: on Impossible, the immediate cash payout added to the mission will take two Fridays for just building two Field Teams to exceed, while the Intel cost difference is pretty minor. (If we say these are your first Finance teams, building two Rank 1 cases is 115 Intel, while building and upgrading to Rank 2 just one is 130 Intel; only 15 more) It's actually even more favored on Expert, since the mission payout goes up with no other changes!

Also, a mechanic I have no idea the details of: it's possible to have a Situation generate that will lower the Rank of the Field Team in that District if ignored, where the only reward for doing it is preventing the Rank drop.

I've literally only seen this Situation once, ever, so I honestly couldn't tell you what the rules on this being allowed to generate are. (I assume they're such it doesn't generate readily given I've only seen the Situation the one time, but that's not terribly helpful) Just keep in mind it's a thing that can happen.

As for the specifics of Field Teams...

Finance

Rank 1: 30/20/15/15 (Difficulty-based) Credits every Friday.

Rank 2: 5 more Credits every Friday. Additionally, missions completed in this district provide 65/55/50/40 (Difficulty-based) Credits on top of their own rewards.

Rank 3: 5 more credits every Friday. Additionally, Situations completed in this District lower its Unrest by 1.

The middle-of-the-road Field Team type, neither the best nor the worst. The Situation-based Unrest reduction at Rank 3 is unique to Finance Field Teams, and on the highest difficulty is honestly probably a better reason to decide which Situation to take than what the actual rewards offered by the Situations; Unrest management is genuinely difficult on the highest difficulty, and being able to get a free bit of Unrest reduction intermittently is quite valuable.

Finance is, unsurprisingly, nice for helping you keep up with the expenses in kitting out your squad. Armor and weapon upgrades are pretty Credit-intensive, and most other worthwhile purchases aren't actually all that cheap. Crucially, building Finance teams is the only fully reliable way to drag up your Credit income: you can pick missions and Situations that offer Credits, of course, but any given set of mission or Situation offerings doesn't necessarily include Credits, and furthermore you have to juggle Unrest management and compare against the alternative rewards, and grabbing Credits tends to lose out in such choices simply because you'll definitely get more Credits eventually. Whereas if, for example, you get two missions, one of which has a Credit reward while the other has Caustic Rounds... you'll probably go for the Caustic Rounds, since they're extremely useful, can only be acquired as mission rewards, and can't be counted on to generate again at some later point.

I generally only build 2-3 Finance teams, personally, but firstly I try to target them for maximum effect (eg building and upgrading a Finance team in the District I'm about to launch a mission in anyway), and secondly I tend to prioritize them a bit for upgrades, which is notable given I prefer to play only on the highest difficulties. (The top two difficulties' ratios make each upgrade add a third of the base weekly income, where down at Story upgrades are adding a sixth of the base weekly income) 

On a different note, your first Rank 3 Finance team also unlocks the Assembly Project for upgrading your Training facility with a second agent slot... AKA the least valuable of your facility upgrades, by far. Unless you're regularly getting people heavily Scarred-up, there's really no time you're liable to particularly care about having two slots in Training: you don't want to cycle out too much of your main team in the first place, your agents tend to end up with staggered levels from cycling through Basic Training at the beginning of the game, and you just don't have enough demand for Training program time: it's trivial to get everyone to their maximum Training off of the one Training slot.

I really wish upgrading Training had done something like accelerate Training time of individual agents. It would still have been pretty low-value, but getting an agent back into action faster would be something you'd get some benefit out of.

As it is, you probably shouldn't have your first Rank 3 Field Team be a Finance team. It's probably better as a just-in-time upgrade when you're intending to do a Situation in the District and the District has at least one Unrest, honestly. And even that is a pretty small benefit if you're playing below Impossible, as only Impossible really has Unrest as a serious mechanic you have to carefully manage at all times.

Security

Rank 1: 20/15/15/10 (Difficulty-based) Intel every Friday.

Rank 2: 5 more Intel every Friday. Additionally, missions completed in this district provide 40/30/25/20 (Difficulty-based) Intel on top of their own rewards.

Rank 3: 5 more Intel every Friday. Additionally, this district's Unrest lowers by 2 every Friday.

It's worth pointing out that a run always starts on Thursday, with enough Intel to purchase a Field Team right away. It's probably best to always start a run by buying a Security team somewhere, so you'll immediately defray your first Field Team's Intel cost. Even on the highest difficulty, you're immediately refunded 20% of what you spent by doing that.

Security Field Teams are by far the best Field Team type, and overall should be your earliest priority since early Security Field Teams can literally pay for themselves. Their third-tier effect is also great in the late game for helping you with Unrest management, and is generally appreciated a lot on higher difficulties, where Unrest rises faster, more consistently. 2 Unrest canceled each Friday might not sound like much, but it can be what lets you ignore an Outbreak mission without worrying about the effect on the Anarchy meter because the district will be automatically brought below 5 Unrest in a couple days, letting you focus on whichever mission is most useful to developing your squad and all, or what prevents an ignored mission from pushing a district to 5 Unrest in the first place.

As with Finance teams, keep in mind you can do just-in-time upgrades to Rank 2 if you're going to do a mission in that District anyway. This isn't as significant as with Finance teams, as the Intel reward isn't very large, but it does effectively provide a partial refund on the upgrade so it's still worth doing, especially early on when Field Team purchases are at their cheapest. Your first Rank 2 Security team is refunding 25% of its cost on Impossible if you do this, for example.

Similarly, keep in mind the potential for just-in-time upgrades to Rank 3 on Thursdays, if the District has Unrest. This is one reason I tend to prefer a Security-heavy distribution; because jumping on Rank 2 just-in-times gets my Field Teams built up faster in general and then gives me a broad net of existing Rank 2 Security teams that can then do just-in-time upgrades to Rank 3, all while feeding back Intel to fund more Field Teams. And since the Scavenger Market is another Intel dump, getting every District maxed out early doesn't turn ongoing Intel streams worthless.

Your first Rank 3 Security team also unlocks the Assembly Project for upgrading your Spec Ops facility. This isn't urgently important, which is a little unfortunate given how much incentive there is to invest heavily into Security Field Teams early and often, but it's useful to have it eventually, as once you've got a full set of 8 agents you'll end up with two agents who perpetually have nothing better to do than Spec Ops anyway.

Technology

Rank 1: 20/10/10/10 (Difficulty-based) Elerium every Friday.

Rank 2: 5 more Elerium every Friday. Additionally, missions completed in this district provide 35/20/15/15 (Difficulty-based) Elerium on top of their own rewards.

Rank 3: 5 more Elerium every Friday. Additionally, missions completed in this district advance the timer for revealing the current 'hidden mission target' by 1 day on top of their own rewards.

Surprisingly given the usual video game trends when it comes to technology-related mechanics, Technology Field Teams are by far the worst, least useful Field Team type.

First of all, Elerium is actually the lowest-value resource. You only spend it on Assembly Projects, and only on some of them. While this includes the very important weapon and armor upgrades, you still then need to spend Credits on performing the actual upgrades (Meaning that raising your Elerium income doesn't necessarily speed up your technological improvement at all), and there's quite a few Assembly Projects that don't cost Elerium but are still very useful to pursue. Crucially, in the long haul this means Elerium becomes literally worthless: Intel can be spent on the Scavenger Market all the way to the end of the game, and Credits can be spent on Supply items anytime. Yes, they both have clear points past which little benefit is occurring, but Elerium is the only resource where it's completely possible to have literally no use for more of it before you've beaten the game -in fact, this can happen before you've completed your second Investigation! It requires you know what you're doing, yes, but it's entirely possible.

Second, the third-tier reward is anti-useful unless you're just tired of playing Chimera Squad and want to get it over with already. 99% of the time, it's more optimal to drag things out, so you can accumulate more resources and experience and get more time to expend on Training and Assembly Projects before having to take on tough missions -and plot missions (Which is what 'hidden mission targets' are) are almost always the hardest missions, the ones you most want to prepare for. As such, accelerating the reveal of a plot mission is actively counterproductive, to the point that the only reason I'd recommend bothering with a Technology Field Team at all is that building your first third-tier one unlocks the ability to upgrade the Assembly itself, which is one of the best Assembly Projects in the game.

This operation reveal acceleration dynamic touches on a related problematic bit of design, which is that you have Investigation-specific minor plot missions intermittently pop up where the primary reward is accelerating the reveal of the current hidden mission target. This is terrible, because these have a non-trivial fraction of unique plot stuff and character interaction locked behind them, but the optimal way to play the game is to actively avoid these missions! It's frustrating enough that 'advance Investigation progress' is actively a bad thing, but it's so much worse that optimal play fundamentally discourages a player from seeing Floyd Tesseract in person, among other examples. A game with as much focus on its story as Chimera Squad should endeavor to make optimal play seek out such plot bits, not make them fundamentally something optimal play avoids hitting.

Anyway, Technology teams are technically a case where you can do just-in-time upgrading to Rank 2 to bring in more Elerium, but not only is Elerium surprisingly low-value but the Rank 2 payout is pretty low -it's only 50% more than the base weekly payout when up on the higher two difficulties. Furthermore, you really don't want or need lots of Technology teams; even on Impossible, every run I've done ran out of things to spend Elerium on before reaching the third Investigation. It's also not acceptable to just refuse to fully upgrade Field Teams if you're playing up on Impossible, as Major Crimes Task Force has its effectiveness maxed out by getting all Field Teams to Rank 3 and the ability to kick back the city's Anarchy is actually important on Impossible. (Vigilance also scales with Field Team Rank, for that matter...)

So really, you should just build one Technology team, upgrade it to Rank 3 to unlock its associated Assembly Project, and very possibly replace it with a Security or Finance team afterward. (I've never bothered with the replacing, but I have repeatedly done 'only build one' -this is completely viable)

It should also be pointed out that one of the more awkward bits of Chimera Squad's design is that a given team's Elerium needs can vary wildly. The Assembly Projects for armor upgrades are at least fixed and predictable (All teams want both of them to more or less the same extent), but the way weapons are handled is uneven. A team of Blueblood, Torque, Verge, and Godmother will spend a chunk of the early game genuinely Elerium-hungry, because the team needs every weapon upgrade to properly keep up. At the opposite extreme, a team with Zephyr backed by either Torque/Shelter/Terminal or Claymore/Godmother/Axiom only cares about one weapon upgrade chain: SMGs for the first set, Shotguns for the second set. This results in Elerium costs being almost completely irrelevant past the extremely early game. (It also affects the team's Credit needs, for that matter, but this isn't so drastic since you have other things to spend Credits on; Elerium really is spent almost exclusively on unlocking weapon and armor upgrades)

Given how bad Technology Field Teams are, it's frustrating that at Rank 3 they unlock the Assembly Project for upgrading the Assembly itself, as that's by far the best Rank 3 unlock. The Assembly being more time-efficient is incredibly useful, and many of the quicker Projects start from 3 days to complete, drop to 2 if manned by one agent, and drop to 1 day if manned by two agents, which is to say that upgrading the Assembly halves how much time you end up spending on a number of Assembly Projects. Even for the longer ones, though, it's a big deal, and ideally you'll get it really early -I'm of the opinion that optimal play involves beelining to unlocking Rank 3 Field Teams and then using Free Field Teams to quickly unlock the Assembly upgrade, as the dividends are huge.

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Tied to Field Teams is a series of Geoscape abilities. You unlock them through building and upgrading Field Teams, and they should be a priority; every ability is completely free, held back only by a cooldown. This isn't too important on lower difficulties, but on Impossible Unrest management is a big part of mastering the game, and three of these abilities are key to managing Unrest.

The idea of Geoscape-level abilities is an interesting one, and I'm quite curious if XCOM 3 is going to come back to the idea. Chimera Squad's attempt is decent (If a bit simplistic), and one of the flaws with EU/EW and XCOM 2 (and the classic X-COM games, for that matter) was how the Geoscape is pretty low-interactivity while being a relatively major facet of playing the game. It'd be nice if XCOM 3 built on this idea so the Geoscape is engaging in a mainline game.

Vigilance

Effect: Instantly lowers the Unrest of a District of your choice. Unrest reduction is 1/2/3/4, based on the Rank of Field Team installed in that District. (The lowest difficulty raises the Unrest reduction by 1 at all tiers) 4 day cooldown.

Unlock: Build a Field Team.

That's -1 Unrest if no Field Team is installed, -2 if a Level 1 Field Team is installed, -3 for Level 2, and of course -4 for Level 3, all but wiping out Unrest if used on a District with a maxed Field Team.

Vigilance is of course your bread-and-butter city-level ability. In the early game it just kind of exists (Unless you're playing on Impossible), but the deeper a run goes the more significant it gets between Field Team upgrades directly improving its effectiveness and Unrest becoming more of a problem in general. Among other points, with a Rank 3 Field Team it can keep Unrest completely canceled on the hidden mission target's District, since that generates 1 Unrest per day, you'll zap 4 Unrest away, and you can use it every 4 days.

Reminder once again that installing and upgrading Field Teams is completely instant; say you have a District that will end up at exactly 5 Unrest at the end of the day if you target it with Vigilance under current conditions. You can potentially install or upgrade a Field Team in that District to add 1 more point of Unrest reduction, avoiding hitting max Unrest and thus avoiding Anarchy generation.

Vigilance itself starts kind of boring and ends kind of boring, because you largely just apply it to whatever District has the highest Unrest. There's some room to consider putting it off for a day, such as if it comes off cooldown when you happen to have no District with more than 1 Unrest currently in the midgame or late game, but most of the more interesting decision-making exists exclusively in the portion of a run where you have variable Ranks of Field Teams across your Districts and so have to make judgment calls about whether to eg target a District that's at 4 Unrest but has no Field Team installed or target a District that's at 3 Unrest and has a Rank 2 Field Team and so you'll wipe its Unrest entirely.

Vigilance's dynamics are functional enough, mind; the boring-ness aspect mostly just means I don't have much to say about it.

Quarantine

Effect: Prevents Unrest from rising in a chosen District for 2 days. 4 day cooldown.

Unlock: Build Field Teams in four different Districts.

By default, you're going to be perpetually slapping this onto the hidden mission target, so that the District's Unrest going up 1 point every day doesn't inevitably lead to Anarchy points.

It's... not a very interesting mechanic, unfortunately. There really needed to be other multi-day Unrest-raising effects to make Quarantine targeting a meaningful choice. As-is, it's basically a clunky way for the devs to ensure hidden mission targets do, in fact, raise Unrest in their District, without this being insanely oppressive in the context of the small numbers used for Unrest. That is, if Unrest had been tracked as a 25 point system, you could simply multiply most current Unrest values by 5, make hidden mission targets raise Unrest by 1 point per day while getting rid of Quarantine, and the net result would work out to hidden mission targets generating a total amount of Unrest roughly equivalent to 2 Unrest points in the current framework. Or you could make it 2 points per day for a final of 20, equivalent to 4 in the current system. Either way, the point is that Quarantine just gives a way for the devs to effectively have fractional Unrest growth without actually having fractional Unrest growth: if you're perpetually using Quarantine on hidden mission targets (Which you should), that effectively brings hidden mission target Unrest generation down to half a point per day, since they end up spending half their days not generating Unrest.

You can slap Quarantine onto other mission sites, and this becomes actually important to keep in mind up on Impossible where Unrest requires more careful and continuous management, but by default it's not ideal. Among other points, the game alternating missions with Situations means it's not actually possible for a Quarantine used in this way to actually do anything on its second day, at least not until you're far enough along ignored Situations generate a point of Unrest... and it's not like it's likely that a Situation will generate in the District you Quarantined yesterday, so even if you're at the point of ignored Situations generating Unrest it's still unlikely to happen. Since you don't get to see mission/Situation generation even a day in advance, it's not like you can go 'oh, a Situation will generate there tomorrow in addition to today's mission I want to ignore' and drop Quarantine in response.

Overall, in the context of how things worked out, I'm not a fan of Quarantine. It doesn't add much to the design (Again: just increasing the base scale of Unrest numbers would do most of what it does for the design), and it's not something that's interesting to engage with as a player.

It also feels weird on a more narrative level. You quarantine a portion of the city, and that stops the people in that area from getting angry and restless? I'd sooner expect this to cause Unrest to rise over the duration in exchange for some other benefit. Say the game had some kind of mechanic for having Persons Of Interest hanging out in the city; initiating a quarantine in an attempt to pin them in a specific place and let you flush them out would make intuitive sense, and an ability that generates Unrest in exchange for another benefit would also be more mechanically interesting.

I kind of doubt XCOM 3 is going to return to a sufficiently similar framework for this to be liable to be refined in a meaningfully recognizable manner, too, which is maybe unfortunate. Chimera Squad's Geoscape layer is an okay foundation that would really benefit from a second game expanding on it, and it's entirely possible XCOM 3 will take no lessons from this attempt.

Dragnet

Effect: Can only be targeted on a District with an active Situation. Instantly removes the Situation, but you gain only 65/50/40/40% (Based on difficulty) of the rewards you'd have gotten if you'd sent the APC. 4 day cooldown.

Unlock: Get a Field Team to Rank 3.

Dragnet is a pretty good incentive to try to get a Rank 3 Field Team up as early as you can, especially up on Impossible where ignored Situations generate Unrest right in the first Investigation, as Dragnet still counts for preventing Unrest from being generated; you didn't ignore the Situation, after all. More resources for free is also heavily appreciated in the early game since you're perpetually hungry for more. The cooldown means it hits at least half of all your Situations after unlocking it; 'at least' because there are multiple cases where the game will put off Situation generation, so it's possible for things to line up such that you use Dragnet and have its cooldown finish before another Situation gets to generate. (Though it won't happen very often, and might not happen in a given run at all)

It does give me little to talk about, as its usage is very straightforward: use it whenever you can, target whichever Situation you would otherwise ignore, profit. There's an argument for saving it if, for example, the second Situation is offering Elerium and you've reached the point of Elerium being useless, but that's the main extent of its nuance, and in the late game you're often more concerned about the Unrest generation you're negating by using Dragnet than with the resources Situations grant, where you're liable to just use Dragnet whenever you can without regard to whether you care about the resources involved.

One mechanical bit to keep in mind, though: a Rank 3 Finance Team only causes a Situation to lower Unrest if you handle the Situation in the normal 'send the APC' manner. Using Dragnet on the Finance Team's District doesn't count for this.

I would also assume that the Situation that lowers a Field Team's Rank if ignored is unaffected by the reduced reward scaling aspect of Dragnet; certainly, the one time I had that Situation generate I used Dragnet on it without apparent issue. So probably it's optimal to aim Dragnet at that Situation if it happens to generate. I'm reasonably confident that's the only such Situation in the game, though, so that's probably the only case of Dragnet being especially favorable.

Major Crimes Task Force

Effect: Immediately lowers Anarchy by 1/2/3 points, based on what the lowest Rank of Field Team you currently have is. (1 Anarchy for Rank 0/1, 2 Anarchy for Rank 2, 3 Anarchy for Rank 3) 5 day cooldown.

Unlock: Have a Field Team in every District.

I touched on this earlier, but Anarchy is your Game Over meter in Chimera Squad, akin to the Avatar Project bar in XCOM 2, where it filling up is Very Bad. Unlike the Avatar Project bar, it's not a continuously ticking clock advancing at all times, but rather only goes up in a specific circumstance: when a District ends the day at 5 Unrest, Anarchy goes up one point per such District.

Notably, the Anarchy bar is actually pretty limited in your ability to drain it. Major Crimes Task Force is one of only three things that drain it: number two is completing a Take Down (Investigation target) mission, which will reduce Anarchy by 3 points. (4 points on Story difficulty) As the Take Down (Investigation target) missions each only occur once, that's a total of 9 Anarchy you get negated for free; if you generate Anarchy beyond 9, you'll need to use Major Crimes Task Force if you want to make it go away. Either that or option number 3; the Crisis Management Spec Op. (But we'll be talking about that in the next post)

Below Impossible, Major Crimes Task Force isn't terribly important unless you're just very sloppy about Unrest management. You might as well use it once it's unlocked, which you'll do because of course you're going to fill out every District with Field Teams, assuming you generate Anarchy in the first place, but it's entirely possible to get through a run with little or no Anarchy generating.

Up on Impossible, this actually should be something of a priority to unlock and get to its second-tier effect. Unrest generates very aggressively all the way to the beginning of the game on Impossible, where it's actually very difficult to completely prevent Anarchy from rising, and it's actually plausible to end up with quite a lot of Anarchy generating fairly early on because eg three missions generated at once, all in Districts with enough Unrest that the 'ignored mission' Unrest increase will bring them to max, and so two Anarchy!/Outbreak missions generated and you can only pick one. If Vigilance is on cooldown, you'll have to eat Anarchy increases until it isn't on cooldown; Anarchy!/Outbreak missions only generate the first day after a District hits 5 Unrest, rather than continuously generating the way you might intuitively expected. (Exception: if an Anarchy!/Outbreak mission should generate, but the game is demanding you do a plot mission right now, the Anarchy!/Outbreak mission will delay until no such urgent mission is in the way)

Major Crimes Task Force itself is unfortunately probably the most straightforward or boring of these abilities. There's a little room for doing things like waiting a day to get more Intel so you can upgrade one last Field Team to bump up MCTF's effectiveness, or putting it off a day so Anarchy rises to meet MCTF's current level of effectiveness (eg if Anarchy is at 2 and will rise to 3 once the day rolls over, and you have maxed Field Teams in every District), but mostly it's a pretty mindless 'click button if Anarchy still exists and MCTF is off cooldown'.

This is part of why I'd like to see XCOM 3 come back to this concept of abilities for the Geoscape: Chimera Squad's system is an okay first attempt, but it could really use more nuance, something to make it more interesting. If MCTF was instead outside the player's control, applying itself if Anarchy is present with a 5 day cooldown, this would largely result in the same outcome, but without forcing the player to do the clicking to make it happen. That's not ideal design.

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Next time, we move on to another Geoscape-focused mechanic: Spec Ops.

See you then.