Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Progeny Archon

HP: 7/7/7/8 (+2/+4)

Armor: 2
Defense: 15
Dodge: 25
Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 12
Damage: 4-6 (+1/+1)
Will: 60 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 70

Alert Actions: None.

Archons are our first example of an enemy that doesn't use Cover, and common to such enemies is that they don't fully interact with the Breach Phase. Archons can at least be meaningfully Aggressive, unlike most such cases, but for an Archon the only difference between Surprised and Alert is that you won't get +30 Aim against an Alert Archon the way you will a Surprised Archon.

Flight
Passive: Is a flying unit, allowing it to reach locations without regard for intervening terrain.

Flight matters far, far less than in XCOM 2. Chimera Squad doesn't do destructible floors at all, so Archons in Chimera Squad will never be seen hovering midair, and in general Chimera Squad isn't anywhere near as fond of major Z-level differences as XCOM 2. You can easily go an entire campaign without ever seeing an Archon fly to high ground or the like, in part due to how uncommon Archons are as enemies.

Chimera Squad is more willing to use terrain that can't be walked through, though. Stuff like water in oceanside maps, for example. As Archons remain (non-dedicated) melee attackers, this means you can be in situations where if they weren't flight-capable you might be able to ignore them for a turn (eg because your squad is in High Cover relative to them so their ranged attack is unlikely to hit) but because they do fly they can absolutely reach someone and thwack them.

But it is overall less relevant than in XCOM 2.

Hardened
Passive: Does not use Cover, but is never considered to be in the open.

This would be a lot more meaningful if crits weren't so consistently weak in Chimera Squad...

Also, just like Codices, Archons still have unlimited ammo on their primary weapon, and this quality is noticeably more relevant than it was in XCOM 2. Not hugely so given they have other options and prefer those other options, but still.

Staff Strike

Turn-ending action: A non-move-and-melee attack that does 3-5 damage, with +10 Aim.

Yep, Archons still have a melee attack.

It unfortunately doesn't scale at all with Investigation placement, and so not only starts behind their shooting action but will be even farther behind if you hit the Progeny later. So triggering Battle Frenzy tends to drag down their damage output.

Speaking of Battle Frenzy...

Battle Frenzy

Passive: 75% chance to trigger on damage. Subtracts 1 Armor per trigger. Adds 1 action point for 2 turns. The benefit doesn't stack (but the penalty does), with new triggers merely refreshing the duration.

This retains the XCOM 2 quality of AI Archons prioritizing melee attacks over everything else if Battle Frenzy is active, including the part where the game doesn't really do anything to communicate this fact. It's also actually even less obvious than in XCOM 2; the close-quarters conditions, greater prevalence of High Cover, and greater strength of High Cover mean an Archon has overall better odds in Chimera Squad of being within melee range of a target that the Archon really is best off smacking in melee, where it's easy to assume they used melee due to it being optimal in context.

It's also overall less relevant than in XCOM 2 for the simple reason that Archon's are massively less durable than in XCOM 2. In XCOM 2 it was possible for the entire squad to pour firepower into an Archon and still not kill it from a mixture of misses, Dodges, and their very high base HP. In Chimera Squad it's mildly surprising if they survive even two shots, and there's always that 25% chance the first shot doesn't actually trigger Battle Frenzy. The Timeline admittedly makes it harder to do an alpha strike in the first place, but the point is that it's entirely possible to end up with two agents acting before an Archon and take it out before Battle Frenzy can matter.

In practice Battle Frenzy is mostly interesting to me for the part where the devs brought back the in-the-code-but-unused behavior in XCOM 2 of Archons having Armor that degrades as Battle Frenzy triggers. And that itself is mostly interesting for the 'meta' stuff of the Chimera Squad devs having a decent rate of bringing back such unused mechanics; within Chimera Squad itself it's mostly just part of a broader collage of decisions that keep Armor low-impact in Chimera Squad in general. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the Archon would stand out more from the crowd if their Armor was stronger and didn't degrade from Battle Frenzy triggers.

Personally, I kind of wish Battle Frenzy had instead pushed the Archon's turn up one slot every time it triggered. That would've been an interesting experiment with the Timeline system and made Battle Frenzy a bit more impactful than its current state. The additional action point was fairly notable in XCOM 2, where Archons often couldn't close to melee and attack in one turn if Battle Frenzy hadn't been triggered but could close the gap successfully if it had been triggered, but in Chimera Squad's context you could be forgiven for thinking it literally only eats their Armor.

Burnout

Turn-ending action: Targets up to 4 hostiles. If not interrupted, at the beginning of the Archon's next turn it hits its targets for 3-4 damage. Canceled if the Archon becomes disabled or takes any damage. 3 turn global cooldown.

Chimera Squad's equivalent to Blazing Pinions, with almost the opposite mechanics. It doesn't even retain the 'fly into the air and hang there' behavior -the Archon simply holds a pose and fires their rockets from a 'standing' position. Among other points, this means that where Blazing Pinions protected an Archon from grenades and whatnot, Burnout has no interesting secondary implications.

Burnout is also, unfortunately, functionally a 'waste the unit's turn to make things easier on the player' ability. I doubt that's what the devs were intending it to be, honestly, but Burnout being a delayed action that's completely canceled if the Archon takes any damage or gets hit with any number of non-damaging effects (eg Stupor and Battle Madness) makes it trivial to cancel. I'm not sure I've ever had an Archon successfully fire it off in all my runs, outside when I've specifically let Burnout go through to test it out.

This is sufficiently true that there's a bit of a reverse from in XCOM 2 in terms of how you generally want to handle Archons; in XCOM 2, if you couldn't kill an Archon just yet, you often wanted to damage it anyway in hopes of triggering Battle Frenzy so they wouldn't initiate Blazing Pinions, since Blazing Pinions could create problems even if nobody on the squad got directly hit by the missiles and it bringing the Archon into the sky made it still harder to kill the Archon. In Chimera Squad, you're often better off ignoring the Archon initially in hopes that it wastes its turn on Burnout so you can then cancel its turn trivially. 

Burnout, in the unlikely event its projectiles actually get to fire, works much like Blazing Pinions in terms of being splash damage projectiles... though they're more or less incapable of smashing terrain, unlike Blazing Pinions. And are trivially avoided and interrupted; somebody being hit by Burnout is unlikely to occur outside of an Archon and Sorcerer getting back-to-back turns and the Sorcerer using Tyranny on the Archon. (This has yet to happen to me, for reference)

To be fair to the design, Burnout being effortless to cancel is probably less design-awful than if it was almost impossible to cancel. 4 simultaneous splash damage attacks with respectable base damage in a game with tiny maps and the smallest squad size yet would honestly border into 'you just lose' if it was impossible to prevent.

I basically wish it just fired one projectile at one target, with the delay, and couldn't be prevented, only escaped. That would probably have been an okay balance. I assume the devs didn't go there because they still wanted the recognizable 'spray a bunch of missiles' effect from XCOM 2, whether for the pragmatic reason of reducing how much work they had to do (It uses the same animations as Blazing Pinions) or for the fan-focused reason of 'Blazing Pinions is iconic!' Understandable either way, but unfortunate.

Also, Burnout cannot be initiated by the player, such as when Puppeteering an Archon. A side effect of this is that I'm not sure whether Act-based bonuses apply to Burnout; no such thing is exposed in the config files and the ability is actually completely invisible even with the F1 mod, so the only way to try to determine whether Act-based bonuses apply is to let Burnout hit agents and make notes of the numbers. I'm... unlikely to ever do that, for reference. I suspect Burnout simply doesn't get Act bonuses, but I could be wrong!

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As an overall game piece, Archons are possibly the most underwhelming part of the Progeny's arsenal. Back in XCOM 2 they were one of the most elite regular enemies of the game, and depending on how you played they could honestly be more of a threat than any of the enemies that the game clearly considered to be their superiors. (Andromedons, Sectopods, and Gatekeepers) I imagine plenty of XCOM 2 veterans spotted their first Archon, prepped themselves for a tough fight, and then were surprised when the Archon was a complete non-threat.

I'm especially puzzled at how little HP they have. They admittedly have all of Dodge, Defense, and Armor, but Chimera Squad is sufficiently fond of tools that bypass most or all of those (eg Verge's Mind Flay) that this simply isn't as protective a combo as it is when it shows up in XCOM 2. (eg on the Chosen and Elite Stun Lancers) I'd have expected some HP bloat just to give their 'Battle Frenzy eats Armor' gimmick more of opportunity to play out; as-is, I often down them with 0-1 Battle Frenzy triggers, because it usually only takes 2 attacks to down them (Sometimes just 1 attack) and they aren't actually guaranteed to trigger Battle Frenzy.

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Narratively, Archons are barely touched by Chimera Squad, but there's one new wrinkle here: Archons apparently have hardware in them to let others exert some kind of fairly overt control over them. This fits with my earlier observation that overall the Progeny seem to just be opportunistically targeting people who are naturally susceptible to being controlled, and is completely believable to be a thing given what XCOM 2 showed us of the Ethereal mentality and modus operandi. It's really just the Psi Network brainwashing all over again, just presumably using a different exact mechanism.

There's also a reference to an Archon 'sanctuary', which is the same terminology Chimera Squad uses for Andromedon and Gatekeeper living spaces; this seems to suggest Archons live in a colony of just Archons, which is a bit curious. Andromedons pretty explicitly have a sanctuary because of the atmosphere incompatibilities, where presumably the Andromedon sanctuary is some kind of space Andromedons can walk about in without needing their exosuit to survive and its atmosphere would presumably melt the flesh of any other species that tried to wander unprotected through the Andromedon sanctuary. Gatekeepers having a sanctuary also makes relatively obvious sense just because they're enormous and all; just as a lot of spaces designed for humans in real life aren't exactly accommodating of an elephant wandering them, a Gatekeeper trying to wander a human downtown would struggle to go a lot of places without simply smashing through walls and whatnot. Archons having a sanctuary isn't as obviously intuitive, as they're human-scale, capable of navigating human-scale spaces reasonably readily, and both this game and XCOM 2 basically just ignores the fire hazards realistically presented by how they move about. So... what's the segregation supposed to be about?

One can argue that Archon Sanctuary concept suggests that Archons are in fact supposed to be an entirely different species rather than a continuation of the 'Floaters are cyborg Mutons' concept, but this is never actually stated and the Sanctuary isn't actually all that strong of evidence.

Indeed, I'm in general unsure how seriously to take Archons as a narrative concept within Chimera Squad. Given how Archons were presented by XCOM 2, where Shen is repulsed by the cybernetic horror show of what Archons look like beneath the surface, we seem to be intended to think of Archons as victims of grotesque body horror where the obvious default answer is to try to undo it, or at least to get them set up with bodies that aren't expressly made for combat and propaganda while likely being miserable horror shows to actually live in. Chimera Squad just sort of... moves forward as if their XCOM 2 look is the Archon's natural state, which is all kinds of weird.

But the thing is, the more in-universe-sensible outcomes would imply a lot of developer work that is likely beyond the scope of what Chimera Squad was really allowed to do. So I can't help but suspect the real explanation for the Archon narrative strangeness is that Chimera Squad was always going to use Archons because it's a relatively low-budget entry recycling many familiar gameplay faces from XCOM 2 with minimal modification, and that context further means they were never going to do much more than whatever was necessary to get them adequately workable in Chimera Squad itself. In which case it's entirely possible any follow-up media is going to completely ignore -or radically reframe- this 'Archon sanctuary' concept, because it was always just a kludge to try to vaguely justify Archons showing up with the same model and so on and not really meant to be a serious part of the narrative.

Mind, I'm particularly dubious on the probability of Archons returning in any form in XCOM 3, so Archons may remain confusing and unclear forever. I dunno, maybe that Reaper-focused The Bureau-esque game idea I've floated before will become a real game and actually explore Archons, among other things... I guess that's technically possible?

At least we do get some extra context on what was supposed to be going on in XCOM 2 as far as their loyalty; one optional mission drops in the notion that Archons were conditioned to obey by virtue of being in constant agony that somewhat lessened anytime they were obeying Ethereal orders. Which... is completely consistent with what we see in War of the Chosen of the Ethereals being all about negative reinforcement: 'obey or else suffer extreme pain' is literally what they do to the Chosen. So this is broadly believable, too.

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Next time, we wrap up the Progeny by covering their leader and her attendant boss fight.

See you then.