Chimera Squad Strategic Analysis: Spec Ops

Broadly speaking, Spec Ops are basically Chimera Squad's version of Covert Ops from War of the Chosen; you assign an agent to do a thing, they go away for a few days, and they come back with goodies.

Unlike Covert Ops, Spec Ops involve no random elements (They always take a specific number of days, the pool is rigid, etc), are not tied to any kind of faction system, are not tied to anything equivalent to the Chosen, carry no risks (Agents can't come back with a Scar or anything of the sort), and... well, even though it's recognizably the same basic framework, the two really are just radically different in practice.

Initially, you have one Spec Ops slot, with three basic options that have no particular requirements. Other Spec Ops have requirements for unlocking them, and furthermore demand the agent assigned to them is a minimum level, which is theoretically another incentive to diversify your agents so you can actually have agents doing the more demanding Spec Ops, though I'd argue it doesn't really work out in practice.

Eventually you can have the Assembly upgrade Spec Ops to have two slots. At this point an odd wrinkle comes into play: a given Spec Op type can only have one agent assigned to it at any given moment. You cannot have two agents performing Gladhanding simultaneously, for example. I'm kind of curious whether this was a deliberate design decision or just an oddity of how they implemented the system that they didn't care enough to fix. Whatever the case, it slightly drags down the utility of performing that Assembly upgrade, taking away options you might find appealing like doubling down on Credit generation or getting Unrest across the city down more or whatever.

Another important difference between Covert Ops and Spec Ops is that Spec Ops do not provide experience to an agent for completing them. So if you're expecting to be able to use Spec Ops to get a new agent a bit caught up; nope. (Well, sort of yes, but not this way)

It's also particularly worth pointing out that you can freely cancel an assignment, even if an agent has already spent multiple days on it. You'll lose any progress toward the reward that Spec Ops provides, but that's it for consequences.

On to specifics, though.

As usual, if I format a number as x/x/x/x, that means it varies by difficulty, working from lowest to highest as you go from left to right.

Gladhanding

Duration: 3 days.

Effect: Provides 100/85/85/75 Credits upon completion.

Unlock: No requirements.

Gladhanding is a straightforward delayed injection of cash, and as such is... kind of mediocre. In the early game, Credits are just not a priority resource; a lot of the most significant purchases are gated behind Assembly Projects that have notable Elerium requirements, where stockpiling cash doesn't necessarily meaningfully hurry access to stuff like armor and weapon upgrades, and the assorted Items you can readily purchase have various reasons they're generally a bit dubious to prioritize purchasing. You also tend to get Credits at a decent clip from missions and Situations; if you're close to purchasing something you want, it's entirely possible that assigning somebody to Gladhanding duty to bump you over will end up obviated by a mission or Situation covering the shortfall before Gladhanding finishes.

In the midgame it can be more worthwhile to perform Gladhanding, as you unlock more stuff that's strongly worth purchasing, especially if you tend to not build Finance Field Teams. Once you have the full 8 agents a run gets, you'll regularly have an agent who would otherwise be idling, for one, and Gladhanding is a safe enough choice for an un-leveled agent to perform to pass the time.

Then in the late game, when your team has solidified, with gear in all their slots and so on, Gladhanding goes back to being difficult to justify doing; what would you spend it on?

It's all a bit awkward, though that's more a commentary on how the general economic details of Chimera Squad could've used refinement than a commentary on Gladhanding itself.

Legwork

Duration: 3 days.

Effect: Provides 80/65/65/60 Intel upon completion.

Unlock: No requirements.

Your best, most crucial early Spec Op, and also a great fallback option if you don't have a clear idea of what to go for on any given day. It does fall off in relevance once all your Field Teams are maxed and you've got more or less everything you strongly care to purchase from the Scavenger Market, but until that late-game point more Intel is always nice to have.

The key thing about Legwork is that Intel is how you buy Field Teams. Legwork can thus be plowed into infrastructure for generating additional resources, making the payoff more than the amount of Intel you initially got out of Legwork. Furthermore, Field Teams are your tech tree equivalent: building and unlocking Field Teams is how you unlock city-level abilities, unlock three of your Spec Ops, and unlock the Assembly Projects for upgrading your Spec Ops, Training, and Assembly facilities, all of which pay dividends in terms of your time efficiency. Most blatant in this regard is Spec Ops upgrading: the Spec Op time spent on Legwork can be 'made back' by it leading to an early Spec Op upgrade, after all.

As such, it's generally smart play to have someone doing Legwork pretty constantly once you've got enough agents that you still have an agent idling even with the Assembly manned and somebody assigned to Training, up until somewhere in the midgame or late game.

Elerium Sting

Duration: 3 days.

Effect: Provides 35/25/20/20 Elerium upon completion.

Unlock: No requirements.

Elerium Sting is a shockingly poor return on your time investment. Certainly, Elerium is also much less in demand than the other resources, but this is literally roughly 1/3rd the Intel payout or 1/4th the Credit payout for your time compared to Gladhanding and Legwork. If you look at Field Teams, Elerium payouts from a Technology team are 75%-100% what a Security team would give in Intel, or 37.5%-66% what a Finance team would provide in Credits.

This is to say that it's generally better to perform Legwork and Recruitment Drives and invest in early Technology Field Teams than to perform an Elerium Sting. You're getting more payout for your time investment that way. Elerium Sting is only specifically worth bothering with if you're just short of the Elerium you need for an Assembly project, preferably early in the campaign when you don't necessarily have Technology Field Teams waiting to cover such a small gap in a few days anyway.

Elerium Sting isn't literally worthless, but it's certainly not something you'll perform often.

It also has an expiration date, since there's only so many Assembly Projects that cost Elerium, and once you've performed them all... Elerium is now worthless, as it can't be spent in any other way or otherwise made use of. (eg you can't sell it for Credits, nor is it ever part of the price of a Supply purchase) Notably, the Assembly Projects that are locked behind completing specific Investigations do not cost Elerium, so there's no 'surprise' late game Elerium sinks; basically, once you're unlocked third-tier armor and weapons, Elerium ceases to be something to care about.

So Elerium Sting is never going to be performed past about the midgame, for one.

Recruitment Drive

Duration: 5 days.

Effect: Provides one Free Field Team upon completion.

Unlock: Requires one or more Finance Field Teams at Rank 2, and requires a Special Agent or higher to perform the Spec Op.

If you unlock Recruitment Drive as fast as possible (That is, build a Finance Field Team, and then upgrade it to Rank 2), it's a dubious investment. The initial purchase price of a new type of Field Team is low enough that Legwork covers the entire cost with Intel to spare, even up on Impossible difficulty, when Legwork takes fewer days to complete and doesn't require you send an experienced agent to handle it. Even once you're looking at adding a second copy of a Field Team type somewhere, Legwork is still able to cover almost the entire cost on Impossible while, again, taking less time.

If you're wanting to upgrade a Field Team to Rank 3, though, Recruitment Drive is great, being effectively worth 120 Intel, +15 for every Field Team of that type that you've already upgraded to Rank 3. Even on the lowest difficulty, that's about as day-to-Intel efficient as Legwork out the box, while auto-scaling with the rising Field Team costs. It's a good idea, if you can, to time things so you complete a Recruitment Drive right as you unlock Rank 3 Field Teams, with a Rank 2 Field Team sitting around that can be immediately upgraded.

As your run progresses and you have Field Teams increasingly filled out -and thus increasingly expensive- Recruitment Drive just keeps getting better... well, aside that once every District has a Rank 3 Field Team there's no more need unless you want to swap one out. (Or get the Situation that lowers Field Team rank and proceed to ignore it) Still, it's very much worth considering arranging to have someone doing Recruitment Drive a few times in the mid-early portion of a run. Conveniently, the Special Agent requirement is something you're liable to meet just from the agent rotating required by Training; that is, even if you have a core team of 4 agents that you prefer to use as much as possible, you're liable to still have a fifth agent who subs in while core agents are Training and thus gets enough experience to reach Special Agent.

So it's not particularly hard to arrange to take advantage!

I'd argue that Recruitment Drive is probably the best of the Spec Ops. Leveraged well, it's a drastic acceleration in your Field Team development, which for one thing makes its benefits even greater than they sound (Faster Field Team development means more income sooner, for example), and especially on the highest difficulty Field Team development is very important for managing Unrest.

Humanitarian Aid

Duration: 5 days.

Effect: Lowers Unrest in each District by 1 upon completion.

Unlock: Requires one or more Security Field Teams at Rank 2, and requires a Special Agent or higher to perform the Spec Op.

Below Impossible difficulty, Humanitarian Aid is difficult to care about unless you're impressively sloppy at Unrest management. Unrest simply isn't difficult to keep adequately under control below Impossible.

Up on Impossible, Humanitarian Aid is... actually still not very good, but gains more of a niche. On Impossible, Unrest builds up fast enough from the very beginning of the game -which is to say when your ability to manage Unrest is at its weakest, it should be emphasized- that staying fully on top of it is genuinely a difficult thing to do, where additional options for pushing Unrest down are actually appreciated.

I say it's 'still not very good' even on Impossible because Unrest buildup simply doesn't tend to work in a particularly synergistic manner with Humanitarian Aid's mechanics. Unrest buildup doesn't tend to spread itself out; for example, the hidden mission target generates 1 Unrest every day, but it all gets concentrated in the one District, not spread around. An ignored mission generates a relatively big spike of Unrest, all of it in a single District. Mission and Situation generation is random such that, when looking over the extreme long haul, Unrest gets roughly evenly distributed across the city, but that's 'on average over the long haul'.

In the mid-term, mission and Situation generation is perfectly happy to be 'streak-y', and the mechanics of the Geoscape abilities give the player incentives to functionally encourage this fact. That is, if three Situation-generating days in a row all drop a Situation in Bugtown, with each of them generating the other Situation in different Districts from each other, ignoring all three Bugtown Situations so the Unrest gets concentrated in one place lets the player wipe it all at once with Vigilance, or from a mission generating in it the player actually takes.

In conjunction with Humanitarian Aid taking five full days to play out, it's actually pretty unlikely a run will ever manage to get the best-case scenario of lowering Unrest in every District by 1. A total of -9 Unrest is a pretty nice best-case scenario, but it's much more typical that you'll end up shaving off 3-5 Unrest with a given Humanitarian Aid. And since Unrest only matters if it reaches 5 points, lowering Unrest a little bit across a wide array of Districts isn't actually that useful anyway -say you have a District at 3 Unrest, and then Humanitarian Aid knocks it down to 2 Unrest, and then a mission generates in that District. If you ignore that mission, the District hits 5 Unrest, and would've hit exactly 5 Unrest even if you hadn't performed Humanitarian Aid, and that's a problem. Or on the flipside for illustrating my point, say you knock a District from 1 Unrest to 0 Unrest via Humanitarian Aid, and then a mission generates in that District; you can freely ignore the mission without Anarchy resulting, but you could've done so even if you hadn't performed Humanitarian Aid. The numbers have to line up exactly for Humanitarian Aid to have clearly done anything of worth.

Since it does take five days to play out, you can't even keep an eye out for such opportunities and perform Humanitarian Aid in response to them occurring. 5 days is long enough that the situation is liable to change before it can complete -as in, you spot a couple of Districts at the right numbers for Humanitarian Aid to be clearly impactful, and then whoops you get missions generating in one or both of those Districts before it actually completes and so it doesn't actually get to prevent Anarchy from happening and was just basically a waste of agent time.

Also awkward is that you can compare it to Rank 3 Security Field Teams, and Humanitarian Aid doesn't make a good showing in the comparison. Humanitarian Aid is -1 Unrest in all Districts a bit faster than once a week if you always perform it again as soon as it completes. A Rank 3 Security Field Team is -2 Unrest in its District once a week; given spamming Security Field Teams is really just the smart thing to do, with other Field Team types mostly worth building for their associated unlocks, it's completely realistic to have 6-7 of your 9 Districts fitted with Rank 3 Security Field Teams. At that point Humanitarian Aid is theoretically 12.6 Unrest reduction per week vs your Security Field Teams being 12 or 14 Unrest reduction per week.

Now, this comparison is misleading on a few different levels, as it's not like the options are meaningfully in competition with each other, but it's a useful illustration of how Humanitarian Aid's payoff feels a bit undertuned for something that requires committing an experienced agent for 5 days to produce. Especially since Security Field Teams are both better able to be done as just-in-time-delivery (Upgrade a District's Security Field Team from Rank 2 to Rank 3 on Thursday precisely because that District has 2+ Unrest) and are also less plagued by timing issues anyway. (If you upgrade a Security Field Team to Rank 3, and then two weeks pass with no Unrest in its District, the upgrade wasn't wasted; they'll still be improving your Intel income and will still be passively ready to reduce Unrest on any later weeks)

Overall, I wish the general idea of Humanitarian Aid had gotten a different mechanical implementation. Say Humanitarian Aid had given every District a point of 'Unrest resistance', where a unit of Unrest generation would be canceled out and the point consumed; this would dodge the current design's potential for you to start Humanitarian Aid in response to multiple Districts having Unrest problems and then only a couple of them actually have Unrest by the time it completes. Alternatively, if Spec Ops had all provided their benefits immediately rather than at the end of the agent's commitment to the job, then Humanitarian Aid would still be a bit niche but at least you'd be able to go 'oh, I've got Unrest in literally every District' and just immediately get maximum value out of Humanitarian Aid without any need for guessing games. (Obviously such a design would require not letting the player pull an agent out of a Spec Op partway through, mind)

It could certainly be worse, but it's not ideal.

Sanctioned Cooperation

Duration: 5 days.

Effect: The next item bought from the Scavenger Market will cost no Intel.

Unlock: Requires one or more Technology Field Teams at Rank 2, and requires a Special Agent or higher to perform the Spec Op.

Sanctioned Cooperation has a somewhat awkward implementation in that its effect is just automatically applied to your next Scavenger Market purchase; you can't spot something you want but feel isn't really expensive enough to blow Sanctioned Cooperation on it, and hold the charge for later except by just... not buying the thing.

That aside, Sanctioned Cooperation is a solid enough Spec Op, especially as you go up in difficulties and as your run progresses. The Scavenger Market's offerings tend to rise in quality as you progress through Investigations, its costs go up as you complete Investigations, and Sanctioned Cooperation isn't directly affected by difficulty whereas Legwork's Intel payout goes down as you go up in difficulty. So later in a run, and as you go up through difficulties, Sanctioned Cooperation gets more and more Intel-efficient than Legwork. Never outrageously so, but enough so it's solidly worth considering performing, especially if you're prone to only going for the more expensive Scavenger Market purchases anyway.

The fact that you ultimately get two Spec Ops slots contributes, too, since you can't double-up. If you're already performing Legwork and would like to effectively further improve your Intel situation, Sanctioned Cooperation -or Recruitment Drive- makes sense to do for that purpose.

It's worth pointing out that Sanctioned Cooperation and Recruitment Drive have mechanics that minimize the problems from the 5-day delay before you get their reward. You can do Sanctioned Cooperation just as a broad bit of preparedness, such as if you have an agent idling anyway and are casting about for something useful for them to do. If the Scavenger Market shows up and nothing appeals, well, you retain the charge for next time, or the time after that. There's no point the benefit times out or anything. (Contrasting with Humanitarian Aid)

I should also emphasize that Assembly duty is easy to pull an agent from. Say you have your fifth agent who subs in when your core agents are Training, and you keep assigning this agent to Assembly duty for any number of reasons; if some other agent is the one idling, you can in fact swap the idling agent onto Assembly duty and Team Member 5 get assigned to Sanctioned Cooperation. (Or some other Spec Op with a rank requirement)

Crisis Management

Duration: 5 days.

Effect: Lowers the city Anarchy rating by 3. (5 on lowest difficulty)

Unlock: Requires a Senior Agent or higher to unlock and perform the Spec Op.

Like Humanitarian Aid, this has very little relevance on the lower difficulties, requiring fairly severe mismanagement of Unrest to have any chance of being useful -among other points, completing an Investigation instantly takes away a bunch of Anarchy, so even if you end up with some Anarchy it'll usually end up wiped without you specifically trying to deal with it.

On the highest difficulty, Crisis Management is very much worth keeping in mind throughout a run, but especially toward the beginning when your Unrest management tools are at their most limited. If the RNG is against you, it's pretty easy for even 'perfect play' to end up with some Anarchy unavoidably generating in the first Investigation, simply due to how limited your ability to manage Unrest initially is. I have, for example, had a run where 3 missions generated, all in Districts high enough on Unrest that ignoring them would push them to max, where I thus had two Anarchy!/Outbreak missions generate and could only deal with one of them, leaving the other District to keep generating Anarchy until Vigilance came off cooldown. As Anarchy maxing out is an instant game over, you of course want to beat it back aggressively.

Contrasting with Humanitarian Aid, the 5-day delay before Crisis Management kicks in isn't really an issue. Anarchy can't build up very fast unless you're basically actively trying to maximize Unrest generation, so it takes very sloppy play to have it be the case that Anarchy maxes out and you lose before Crisis Management completes, and Anarchy lacks anything equivalent to the randomized distribution of Unrest generation to produce any kind of guessing game.

You probably won't need to perform Crisis Management more than a handful of times even up on the highest difficulty, because your ability to combat Unrest does rise so much, but it's genuinely an appreciated tool in the early-mid-game on the highest difficulty.

STAR Initiative

Duration: 5 days.

Effect: All agents gain 20% more experience from missions for the next 5 days. (30% more on lowest difficulty)

Unlock: Requires a Principle Agent to unlock and to perform the Spec Op.

I like the idea of STAR Initiative, but have difficulty imagining actually using it.

First of all, the game has a pretty strict pattern of having days alternate between missions and Situations. Plot missions can break this up (And maybe Anarchy!/Outbreak missions?), but unless you precisely time STAR Initiative to take advantage of this (Which can't even be done fully reliably) you're only going to benefit from STAR Initiative 2-3 times per use, not the 5 times you might intuitively expect.

Second, this isn't War of the Chosen. You don't have over a dozen agents all regularly participating in missions, with more besides waiting in the wings to potentially replace a dead agent: your agents can't die without it forcing a mission restart or, if you have Ironman on, terminating your entire campaign. You end the game with exactly 8 agents, and due to Training's mechanics you'll generally end up with 5-6 of them leveled decently just from cycling people out for Training purposes, not to mention potentially cycling an experienced agent out to cover one of the other Spec Ops that has a level requirement. Taking one of your max-rank agents out of action for five days to try to catch up other agents is basically pointless: the game already naturally pushes you to have secondary agents, and indeed even if you decided to try to maximize STAR Initiative's payout you may well find yourself unable to field a team of people who are all still able to benefit from gaining experience!

Third, 20% more experience is simply too mild. If it eg doubled the experience gained, it might've let you do something like max Zephyr early on, then roll whoever is one of your favorites later and rapidly catch them up via repeatedly assigning Zephyr to STAR Initiative. A 20% boost is practically invisible, given how few ranks there are and how slowly agents progress through the ones past the first two. (Which they instead progress through too quickly for the boost to matter)

The most killer issue, though, is that it's attached to Spec Ops, and therefore competes with actually-useful Spec Ops. If it was attached to eg Training, where you could assign an agent to boost other agent experience, it could potentially be worth bothering in the late game, such as if you managed to clean out the Assembly and so there's no point to assigning agents to it. (Which is entirely possible to do, to be clear) As-is, the only time it's only vaguely worth considering is if you've reached the point of having run out of stuff to buy while having no Unrest or Anarchy problems worth managing...

... which is unlikely to happen even on the lower difficulties, while on the higher ones where more backup decently-leveled agents might be genuinely appreciated it's just plain never going to happen. In the early game, you need resources perpetually. In the late game, Unrest and by extension Anarchy generation is higher, enough so that Humanitarian Aid and/or Crisis Management are more likely to be priorities.

There's basically always better priorities than a minor boost to agent experience.

Which makes it a bit frustrating that it's the apex Spec Op you can't perform until somebody is max level...

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Next time, we do a brief aside about initial settings, including of course difficulty.

See you then.