Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Progeny Brute
HP: 7 (+2/+4)
Armor: 1Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 4-5 (+1/+1. Crit adds +1)
Will: 50 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 30
Notice that Brutes are actually more accurate than Thralls. As the AI doesn't use distance-based Aim modification, Brutes are prone to landing nasty long-range shots in spite of wielding a Shotgun. As they also hit harder than even Shotgun-wielding Thralls, it's really important to prioritize not letting Brutes get turns. Which can be a bit rough given how they're one of the more durable Progeny units.
Fortunately, their terrible Initiative means you can often prioritize other targets first anyway, and of course tools like Stuns work just fine.
It's also mildly interesting to note that their Will isn't actually poor by Chimera Squad's standards. Mutons in the prior two games consistently had poor Will, but Chimera Squad doesn't carry this trend forward for whatever reason. I'm curious as to whether this was more 'pure game design' or if any narrative aspects were in fact intended.
Alert Actions: Melee Stance.
I have never seen a Brute move to a different position or Hunker Down. It's possible they just have a really strong preference for Melee Stance over those other options and I've just had a mildly improbabble streak of RNG, but I suspect they really do only use Melee Stance.
So let's talk about Melee Stance.
Melee StancePassive, sort of: At the end of every turn, if not disabled, the Brute enters a special form of Overwatch where it will perform a melee attack on the first enemy to move through a tile adjacent to it.
Mechanically, Melee Stance is incredibly janky, as what's actually going on is that Melee Stance is a turn-ending action that doesn't require action points and has no cooldown, which is to say it can be activated at any time during the controlling team's turn. The AI restricts itself to activating it immediately after the Brute's turn is over (Which you can't actually do yourself...) but if you Puppeteer a Brute you'll find you can select the Brute and activate Melee Stance during any of your other unit's turns, and can indeed activate it over and over. (To no further benefit, mind) Conversely, if you activate Melee Stance during the Puppeteered Brute's own turn, it'll end its turn prematurely, whoops!
Hence why I labeled it 'passive, sort of'. It's not actually a passive effect at all, but the AI utilizes it in a manner that makes it functionally a passive.
Melee Stance itself is mostly not actually particularly relevant, especially once you've got a reasonably strong mastery of the game overall. Thanks to the low Initiative of Brutes, unless they were Alert in the Breach Phase (And then survive and so on) they usually won't get the opportunity to function as area denial until most of the first Round is over; when you're good at the game, plenty of Encounters don't even make it through the first Round, and plenty of the ones that do make it that far still don't last much longer.
Even when an Encounter either lasts long enough or a Brute is Alert in the Breach Phase, Melee Stance still tends to not matter. The radius of 1 tile out from the Brute is very, very unlikely to actually blockade any tiles you want to pass through unless you're specifically wanting to melee the Brute, and since Overwatch can be trivially ended with any damage and Chimera Squad is generous with action point efficiency in general and has activated Items outright free to use, even if a Brute is meaningfully in the way this often just means you chip it (Or Stupor it, say) and proceed with your plan minimally impacted.
Exacerbating this is the previously-covered point that damage to your agents doesn't necessarily impose a strategic cost. You can easily shrug and just walk an agent through the Melee Stance zone, not caring that it probably takes off some HP, because if it isn't going to down the agent and you'll finish the mission before any follow-up can happen, probably the damage doesn't matter at all. The only significant caveat to this is the janky point I've covered before that if Axiom has Counterattack there's a risk he'll interrupt his action and end his turn via Counterattack triggering, which itself has the caveat that if you were having Axiom end his turn attempting to melee them then this is all to the good.
I like the idea of Melee Stance and actually hope XCOM 3 comes back to the general idea, but within Chimera Squad itself it's not terribly effectual.
Devastating BlowTurn-ending action: A move-and-melee attack that does 4-5 (+1/+2) damage.
Brutes are surprisingly reluctant to use Devastating Blow, far preferring to move up and fire their shotgun, which is a surprising contrast with XCOM 2 where melee-capable enemies uniformly preferred to charge into melee if it was possible at all. I'm honestly not sure what prompts Brutes to decide that now is a sensible time to break out the melee attack.
In any event, it should be pointed out that Melee Stance's hit is basically an Overwatch version of Devastating Blow, which... means it's basically just a Devastating Blow, as for some reason Chimera Squad has all melee attacks classed as Overwatch in some sense, where melee simply isn't allowed to crit. It's one of the strangest non-obvious decisions in Chimera Squad; I have absolutely no theories as to why they did this.
Devastating Blow itself is both rare to see and rarely particularly sensible for a Brute to use. Excepting third-Act Brutes, their Shotgun always has the same damage while actually being allowed to crit, and so the only time Devastating Blow is overall better is if the Brute is close enough to Devastating Blow a target but not close enough to flank and then shoot that target. Third-Act Brutes only have a single point of damage advantage on Devastating Blow over their shotgun, too, which is both drowned out by damage variance and also can be canceled out by the shotgun critting, so even for third-Act Brutes Devastating Blow is a dubious use of their time.
Not helping is that Brutes have...
BloodlustPassive: Automatically advances toward attackers when damaged.
Anyway, Bloodlust in theory synergizes with Devastating Blow by making it more likely that a player will pull a Brute close enough to Devastating Blow, but in practice it just feeds back into the problem of there being a narrow band in which a Brute is going to be in Devastating Blow range but not in range to flank. After all, if a player shoots a Brute that is in that band, the most likely result is that the Brute is now close enough for a flank! Admittedly the converse is true, where a player can pull a Brute forward by just enough that now they're in Devastating Blow range where they weren't before, but in practice I'd still argue it's skewed toward reducing Devastating Blow's relevance, especially when talking a player who has a grasp on the general design of the game.
Note that unlike the Enemy Unknown version of Bloodlust, all this does is make the Brute move. They don't try to Panic their tormenter or anything like that. As such, Bloodlust is primarily a disadvantage an informed player can leverage, using one attack to provoke a Brute into leaving their Cover and then getting an easy shot on the now-in-the-open Brute. The only way Bloodlust can be a hazard is if it results in the Brute getting a flank/performing a Devastating Blow where that otherwise wouldn't have happened, and due to how Chimera Squad has retuned enemy accuracy and the power of crits this is only somewhat important if it specifically lets the Brute bypass High Cover. (Because of the Armor provided by High Cover, mostly)
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Overall, Brutes are a solid enough example of a concept Chimera Squad is fond of; uncommon semi-elites that tend to show up in small numbers throughout an Investigation, loosely comparable to how pod leaders in XCOM 2 are prone to being a cut above the pod members they're leading. Among other points, it continues the benefit from that system that the difficulty curve gets to be much less jagged than in Enemy Unknown, where these semi-elites showing up at all isn't a big difficulty spike, and in fact Chimera Squad gets even more nuance than XCOM 2 out of its approach because there's more granularity to an individual Encounter than there is to a pod in XCOM 2; a room of 4-8 enemies doing something like swapping out a Thrall for a Brute is simply less of a proportionate spike than XCOM 2 doing stuff like swapping a Basic ADVENT Trooper for a Basic ADVENT Stun Lancer in a pod of 3 enemies.
The Timeline also contributes, and in fact Chimera Squad is, unexpectedly, rather fond of semi-elite and even more properly elite enemies having low Initiative, where what I'm used to seeing from games with even vaguely comparable systems is to have more elite enemies also get to act sooner. This reduces the impact of phasing in elite enemies, as a particularly outsized threat can usually be responded to by the player going nuclear on it. If more elite enemies defaulted heavily to also having high Initiative, elite enemies being rotated in would tend to result in a disproportionate spike in danger, as basic enemies are weak enough it's not unusual for a single agent to be able to take them out before they act, whereas tougher enemies like Brutes often require two agents acting to take down. This is in fact often true in Chimera Squad even when the player is averaging more than one enemy taken down per agent turn, in part because Chimera Squad is fond of tools that can hit multiple targets at once and somewhat less fond of providing options for an agent to pile damage onto a single target.
So this is all neat, and I'm kind of curious as to whether XCOM 3 will try to come back to a similar approach, in part because War of the Chosen was already noticeably more fond of 4-unit pods in various missions; Chimera Squad's Encounter system isn't precisely a straightforward extension of this trend, but it clearly extends the concept and expands its benefits.
Aesthetically, it's interesting to me that the Progeny has the Muton type that most closely resembles the XCOM 2 Muton in terms of skin tone and armor coloration, and in fact also has the most mechanical overlap given that Melee Stance has clear overlap with Counterattack in terms of potentially punishing attempts to melee the unit. The next-closest in aesthetic overlap is civilian Mutons; there's a pretty noticeable rate of civilian Mutons wearing a green shirt, specifically, which is mildly interesting as it's suggestive of cultural components. (eg that this shade of green has some specific meaning or association in overall Muton culture)
The odd thing is that the purple skin tone is unique to Brutes; Axiom uses his unique primarily-green skin coloration (Well, unique for models in the engine; a portrait of a City 31 mayor Muton has Axiom's coloration as well), while all other Mutons we can see any skin on have a yellow-to-brown coloration. You'd expect the purple coloration of prior games to be presented as the standard, and instead Chimera Squad makes it seem like a minority of Mutons have this coloration. As far as I'm aware the game doesn't acknowledge this change, let alone explain it.
In general, the narrative end of Brutes is extremely unclear. Where Thralls and Resonants have clear indications that they're being psionically controlled by the Progeny's human members, Brutes... don't. Notably, they lack the Subservience ability that Thralls and Resonants share, which could be taken as evidence they're not being controlled. But Brutes are never handled as anything less generic than 'a Muton enemy', leaving it unclear whether they're meant to be Mutons willingly working with the Progeny or what. Their dialogue, for example, isn't akin to Thrall 'apparently on drugs' dialogue, and in fact sounds very akin to Gray Phoenix Legionnaire dialogue. (ie the basic, generic Mutons of Gray Phoenix)
It honestly leaves me wondering if Brutes were not originally made for the Progeny at all, it's so odd; the Brute is the only regular enemy in the game to come across as not really having any thought put into how they fit into their faction. While plenty of other enemies are murky in the sense that we don't get a clear, explicit explanation of what's going on with them, it's usually broadly intuitive what's up with them, at least once you've seen the collective picture of a given Investigation target.
Whatever the case, it's a detail that contributes to the Progeny being the overall murkiest faction, where one of their relatively common units is basically a giant question mark.
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Next time, we move on to another 'semi-elite' Progeny unit, the Resonant.
See you then.
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