Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Progeny Codex

HP: 7/7/8/8 (+1/+4)

Dodge: 20
Aim: 80/80/85/85 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 3-5 (+1/+1)
Will: 80 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 70

Psi: 100

Alert actions: Move to a better position, Hunker Down.

Surprisingly, as far as I'm aware Codices will never Teleport as part of an Alert action. I'd have expected it to replace regular movement as an option, honestly, but nah, Codices are strangely boring in the Breach Phase.

Digital Enemy

Passive: Susceptible to Bluescreen Rounds and takes damage from Shock Grenades.

This is still not a visible ability with a name or anything, but I'm still mentioning it explicitly, with the made-up name I gave it in XCOM 2.

Also, it should be pointed out that Codices are impossible to knock Unconscious: they automatically die at 0 HP. This was actually true in XCOM 2, but it's a lot more relevant in Chimera Squad. Among other points, they shouldn't be your first choice for Verge adding them to his Neural Network, as they'll exit it when they go down -even if he has Collar.

To a lesser extent, it means you might miss out on Intel if you're not very aggressive about pursuing captures in a mission and don't realize Codices won't contribute. (eg you decide to KO exactly 5 enemies, and don't notice that 3 of your 'KOs' actually aren't because you Subdued Codices) This isn't a big thing, as Codices show up rarely in general and are restricted to the later portions of the Investigation; I imagine plenty of players have gotten through a campaign without noticing this and without it ever costing them Intel.

Immunities
Passive: Immune to all damage over time effects.

Note that Codices no longer have the weird partial immunity to Stun they uniquely had in XCOM 2. Feel free to have Verge Stupor them, or toss Shock Grenades their way; it can absolutely eat their entire turn, unlike in XCOM 2.

Their immunity to Burn, Acid Burn, and Poison is a bit less of a mercy than in XCOM 2, as while they still have Clone their base HP is noticeably lower. The player's firepower is lower as well, admittedly, by not by so much proportionately; where in XCOM 2 it was very easy to end up triggering Clone 3-4 times off a given Codex if you were careless, in Chimera Squad it's surprising if it happens more than the one time, all but requiring you actively try to make it happen. That it makes them immune to Torque's Toxic Greeting and Poison Spit can actually be noticeably inconvenient, in fact, taking away reliable options for finishing a low-HP Codex and whatnot.

It'd probably be an overstatement to say it's significantly more problematic a set of immunities than in XCOM 2, but it's certainly the case that, where in XCOM 2 taking away their immunities would in some ways make them harder, in Chimera Squad it's pretty firmly overall upside for them that they have the immunities.

Also, it's worth noting that Codices still have unlimited ammo on their weapon. This was already true in XCOM 2, but it's way more relevant in Chimera Squad, where a player might chuck a Cease Fire Grenade at a Codex and be unpleasantly surprised when it does nothing.

Teleport
1 action point: The Codex transports itself to a new location, bypassing intervening terrain and not triggering Overwatch or other reaction fire. This has a global cooldown of 1 Round, meaning only one Codex will teleport in a given Round. No local cooldown.

A nice thing is that Chimera Squad has actually fixed the buggy behavior on Teleport; Chimera Squad's Codices genuinely spend an action point on a Teleport, rather than setting their action points to 1. As such, stuff like Verge Stunning them for one action point actually will mean that if they Teleport they won't get to do something else right afterward.

Anyway, Teleport is overall less significant than in XCOM 2, simply because Chimera Squad has tighter battlefields. In XCOM 2, if your squad was spread out and fighting multiple pods, it was entirely possible for a Codex to teleport two entire screens and really mess up your plans. In Chimera Squad, you don't really care; it mostly means they're somewhat above-average at getting flanks and hiding in High Cover. Since Codices still heavily prioritize Psionic Bomb, the flank threat aspect isn't all that relevant, though at least High Cover is more impactful in Chimera Squad than in XCOM 2 so the 'better at getting into High Cover' aspect is pretty meaningfully noticeable.

Teleport also gets a bit weird in missions where the AI is supposed to flee from your squad, as a Codex won't Teleport to the escape point and evac if marked as supposed to flee that turn, instead either simply walking normally to the evac point or Teleporting under their normal 'try to flank in good Cover' rules and then attacking. Whoops! This doesn't come up very often, as Codices are rare enemies and missions where enemies try to flee are rare, but it's a pretty noticeable oversight on the rare occasions they intersect.

I haven't seen similar issues with Sorcerers, but as the 'rare enemies and rare mission type' thing applies to them as well, it's entirely possible they have this same jank and I just happen to have not witnessed it. They don't use their Teleport the same way Codices use theirs, though, so it's equally possible they don't have this issue from having a different AI routine.

Clone
Passive: When the Codex takes damage, it immediately teleports itself away to a new location, leaving a clone of itself behind at its old location. Its HP after Clone triggered is split between these two Codices. If the Codex has only one HP left when it attempts to Clone, it will simply teleport itself instead. When triggered in the Breach Phase, only occurs once the Breach Phase is over, and only triggers a maximum of one time.

Just as in XCOM 2, the fact that the clone is the one left behind carries connotations to keep in mind, like that Disorientation will be on the Codex at the new location, not the Codex standing in the old spot. This includes Verge's Neural Network, for example.

Speaking of Neural Network, Verge's Slam ability doesn't trigger Clone. That's appreciated; usually games miss edge cases like this when they're intending for skill-ups to be unambiguous improvements, leading to secret disadvantages that aren't actually meant to exist. Not that Chimera Squad caught all such cases, but honestly I'm used to games sloppily not catching any such cases, even when there's multiple really obvious such considerations.

Anyway, Clone itself is noticeably less threatening than in XCOM 2. First of all is the previously-noted point that the HP and damage numbers mean you're much less likely to trigger Clone multiple times than in XCOM 2. Second is the part where Clone's behavior is weakened in the Breach Phase, not triggering at all if the Codex doesn't survive to the end of the Breach Phase and only triggering the one time even if you manage to hit a given Codex four separate times in the Breach Phase; this makes it a lot easier to alpha strike a Codex if you're worried enough to want to do so. Third is that there's nothing equivalent to catching an inactive pod with Overwatch; in XCOM 2, the otherwise-sensible play of trying to catch inactive pods with Overwatch for free damage could randomly be punished by triggering Codex cloning, especially in the base game where the Codex would never take more than one Overwatch shot before triggering Clone and the clone would actually get an immediate turn if generated in the enemy phase. In Chimera Squad, the only situation that could have even vaguely comparable connotations is if Codices reinforce in... which isn't a mechanic you see in literally every mission the way XCOM 2's inactive pods were standard, and I'm pretty sure Codices are usually not allowed to reinforce in anyway.

Also noteworthy is there's nothing equivalent to how in XCOM 2 you could readily see pods of just Codices, where chucking a grenade at the group could be a tempting thing to consider and would trigger up to 4 Codices to clone themselves if said temptation was indulged. Indeed, it's uncommon to see even 2 Codices across an entire Encounter, and when multiple Codices do show up they're rarely clustered together.

Also, just as with Teleport, the smaller battlefields minimizes Clone's opportunities to create havoc. In XCOM 2, triggering Clone basically always carried the risk of the Codex teleporting to somewhere extremely inconvenient for you. The AI insisted on teleporting somewhere your squad could see, so they couldn't disappear behind a wall or the like, but they could still jump to a location that was visible to the squad but wasn't meaningfully accessible to anybody with action points left, which could easily happen if your squad got spread out and you pulled a Codex relatively late in your turn or prioritized other targets before turning your attention to the Codex. In Chimera Squad, such situations can technically still happen, but the smaller maps make it much less likely to happen, and in fact some Encounter maps are so tiny it's genuinely impossible.

The Timeline framework is another wrinkle, in that Codices are one of a handful of enemies that can spontaneously generate additional 'proper' enemies in the middle of a fight, and in every such case the newly-generated enemies are actually appended to the end of the Timeline. In XCOM 2, if you injured a Codex as the very last action before its turn, you'd have two Codices immediately acting -or more, if you did something like chuck a grenade at a pod of 3 Codices. In Chimera Squad, if you have the agent who will act right before the Codex injure it, the clone won't get to act until your other three agents get their turns, including that this applies to every clone if you trigger Clone on multiple Codices!

As such, doing the maximally-wrong thing (Because you're not familiar with Codex mechanics, for example) has much more manageable consequences in Chimera Squad than in XCOM 2.

Psionic Bomb
Turn-ending action: Area-of-effect attack that immediately attempts to empty ammo from the weapons of all units caught in its blast radius. This is a Will test, and so higher-Will units are more likely to have their weapon unaffected by the Psionic Bomb. The turn after Psionic Bomb was first used, it will hit all units in the same radius for 2-3 damage, ignoring Armor, even if the Codex that initiated it is dead. 3 turn local cooldown, 2 turn global cooldown.

The damage has gone down, but otherwise this at first glance seems to be exactly the same as in XCOM 2.

Then you realize turn mechanics have completely changed, and that Chimera Squad is, in fact, willing to use that fact. After all, the Progeny have Codices and Sorcerers, and the latter have Tyranny, allowing them to force a Codex's turn ahead of the curve. Doing so will cause an active Psionic Bomb to instantly detonate! (This is, in fact, basically the only use of Tyranny that's liable to be a bigger threat than the Sorcerer taking their own turn) Same for if you Puppeteer a Codex, have it use Psionic Bomb, and then use Team Up on it.

Conversely, if the player uses effects to delay the Codex's turn, that will delay Psionic Bomb's detonation. The only qualifier here is that a dead Codex will still have its Psionic Bomb go off whenever it last would've gone next. (Which for one thing means it can sometimes make sense to delay a Codex's turn instead of killing it) An unfortunate UI point here is that the Psionic Bomb's phantom turn doesn't get marked in the Timeline if a Codex goes down; you'll have to remember it on your own. This usually isn't a big deal, but can be unfortunate if you step away from the game for a minute for some reason.

Conversely, a nice touch is that Chimera Squad added in 'danger' tile markings for where the Psionic Bomb is targeted at, so you know where to not stand your agents. The fact that XCOM 2 didn't have those was an actual painpoint given how the graphics weren't very clear on which tiles were in the radius vs which weren't, so this is an appreciated addition, especially if Psionic Bomb returns again in XCOM 3. (As presumably it will also bring back the danger markings in such a case)

Overall Psionic Bomb is actually generally less oppressive a threat than in base XCOM 2 and to a lesser extent War of the Chosen. Agents universally have access to a move-and-melee attack that can often make sense to use even without ammo being a consideration (And which most agents can power up with an Impact Frame), and Chimera Squad is very fond of passing out ways for agents to contribute offensively that aren't based on their weapon; only Godmother actually requires ammo to contribute. (And only if you discount Subdue) One of your agents most focused on using ammo -Blueblood- can literally get infinite free reloads as a personal passive skill, where a run that doesn't hit the Progeny first may have Blueblood essentially immune to the ammo drain in every fight it comes up.

The Encounter system also reduces its capacity to be a problem. In XCOM 2, it was possible to be hit with Psionic Bomb's ammo drain, wipe out the Codex's pod that turn, and still end up with the ammo drain creating problems, whether by another pod immediately stumbling onto your squad and the need to reload taking away options for solving this new fight efficiently or by it being a timed mission where spending half a turn on reloads is risking mission failure in general. In Chimera Squad, taking out all the enemies you're currently fighting often means the Encounter ends, at which point your squad automatically reloads for free, so an ammo drain can easily have literally no consequences.

This does come with the qualifier that the initial post-Breach positions of your agents can easily be clumped enough Psionic Bomb will in fact catch all of your agents. Depending on the map, it can be the case that this is more or less completely unavoidable, contrasting with how in XCOM 2 you always had the opportunity to control your soldiers positions before encountering a Codex and so always had the ability to reduce how many people could be caught by a single Psionic Bomb. As Codices actually have fairly high Initiative, it's possible to be in a position where you can't really avoid your entire squad being caught. (You already used Team Up in a prior encounter, none of your agents currently can perform action-gifting, you got the Breach Modifier that Roots the agent in the first slot...)

But that's not a consistent point -a given run may never have the squad clump like that simultaneous to a Codex being present- and its impact is still generally reduced by the other points.

It's also worth pointing out that Weapon Attachments can be freely swapped by default in Chimera Squad and that the Investigation framework gives greater predictability to Codex appearances. A player can loot or buy Auto-loaders and swap them in/out as appropriate trivially, whether that's Investigating the Progeny first and prioritizing Auto-loaders in expectation of largely phasing them out or Investigating the Progeny later and swapping in Auto-loaders temporarily during the Progeny Investigation. I don't bother, personally, but it's an option for minimizing the damage of the 'catches the entire squad immediately' scenario, if that scenario strongly concerns you. (Maybe you picked a particularly turret-y squad)

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Narratively, Codices in Chimera Squad come across like a(nother) retcon of what a Codex is. The base XCOM 2 info seemed to pretty heavily imply Codices were Ethereal-controlled/created puppets. War of the Chosen muddled things with the Assassin complaining about how Codices are 'so unmoved by our pursuits', seeming to imply they're separate intelligences that obey the Ethereals but aren't big on the propaganda, or something of that sort. And now we get told that the Progeny have gotten a hold of a Codex, where the implication seems to be that all the Codices you fight in missions are projected by a central 'real' Codex the Progeny is controlling to thus indirectly control these projections.

I'm not sure if the Codex concept was simply never entirely clear internally to the devs or if it started out clear but drifted for any number of reasons, but it's Another Muddy Progeny Thing, contributing to the Progeny being difficult to fully contextualize. This 'central/real' Codex conceit could, for example, just be riffing on a part of the XCOM 2 mechanics; that mechanically a Codex would only drop the one Codex Brain no matter how many times Clone triggered. This is the kind of detail that at times sticks with people better than stated lore. (This is in fact a big part of why I place such a heavy emphasis on gameplay as a foundation to narrative; because quite clearly it's very normal for players -and developers!- to prioritize gameplay for informing their understanding of a game's story, often clearly without even realizing they're doing it)

Another layer of muddiness is that as far as I'm aware Chimera Squad never really gives an explanation of why the Progeny grabbed a Codex. Did they actively pursue it for a specific reason? Did they sort of stumble on the Codex, play around with it psionically, discover in the process that they were able to control it, and just kind of shrug and decide they might as well use the free extra muscle? Were they given the Codex by an external group to prop them up, and are just using it because if they have it they feel they might as well? It's difficult to tell if there's an internally-sensible reason that was just poorly-communicated by the game, or if this is a moment of 'game logic', where the devs decided the Codex would be in the game, assigned it to a faction for broadly sensible reasons ("The psychic faction gets the psychic unit, and we'll say they have it as opposed to other factions because they're controlling it psychically"), and then didn't give thought to the in-universe, in-character aspects of why.

I do hope XCOM 3 comes back to the Codex with greater clarity, hopefully managing to contextualize their appearances in these two games in the process; the Codex is one of the more interesting enemies in XCOM 2 as a gameplay piece, in terms of visuals, and apparent narrative elements, and it's a bit disappointing how the series progression has taken an interesting mystery and increasingly muddied it. Among other points, I worry this is one of those cases of a dev prioritizing 'maintaining the mystery' over sticking to a single explanation underlying said mystery; prioritizing keeping a mystery mysterious invariably requires contradiction and destroys any reason to care about the answer because there clearly isn't going to be an answer that satisfactorily explains all the contradictory stuff that came before.

And honestly, Codices are another enemy that has the potential to be a good foundation for a fun gameplay piece. Imagine if XCOM 3 returns once again to the SHIV/Mec/SPARK concept of a soldier you manufacture instead of training, but this time it's derived from Codex tech. It's easy to imagine a Codex Operator class that works sort of like a less janky (And less horrifying) Mec, where a psionically adept soldier is sitting in a rig back at base while puppeting a Codex-like psi-digital body; this would allow for the manufactured soldier to gain experience and abilities (They'd presumably gain psionic abilities as they leveled), but be relatively disposable and upgradeable (If the Codex shell goes down, the operator is back at base, still alive; if you want there to be more consequences, just say they suffer a psychic backlash that puts them in the infirmary for a few days) while making narrative sense. You'd still be able to have equipment upgrades be a thing, too; upgrading the Codex Brain that actually projects the body could act as a ready stand-in for upgrading the body armor/chassis, and if the engine supported it without too much jank you could also have the operator's rig be something you upgrade to provide some other benefit. (Maybe upgrading the rig would be a replacement for upgrading the primary weapon -or a replacement for Weapon Attachments. Or both!)

Such a thing would make it perfectly natural to give some more context on Codices, even if XCOM 3 focuses firmly on the new enemy group and doesn't have Codices show up as an enemy in gameplay; it would be elegant in a lot of ways.

I doubt it'll happen, mind, but I can dream, right?

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Next time, we move on to the last regular Progeny enemy, not to mention probably the most unexpected one; Archons.

See you then.