Enemy Analysis: ADVENT Officer

In any event, Mark Target is also a good jumping-off point for discussing a few AI-related considerations, since a big part of its effect is modifying AI behavior.

First of all, pod leaders always have a markedly stronger preference for picking High Cover than units that are not pod leaders. This is particularly pertinent to Officers, since they are always pod leaders, and therefore they always have this heightened preference for High Cover.

Second of all is 'ideal range'. This is a specific number of tiles out from your forces the AI will prefer to advance toward, all else being equal. On the vast majority of enemies this value is 6, 8, or 1 in the case of most melee enemies. The only stock deviation from these three values is Faceless, who actually have an ideal range of 2, hence why they usually stand a tile back when going for a swipe. 6 and 8 aren't terribly different numbers in practice, but it does mean that some enemies play a little more defensively than others. In the case of Officers, the Basic version has an ideal range of 8 -unusually, their later tiers drop down to an ideal range of 6. (This is unique to Officers: every other tiered enemy has its ideal range constant across tiers) In conjunction with the pod leader behavior of preferring to hide behind High Cover, Basic Officers in particular are extremely prone to hiding in positions that are difficult to flank while providing maximum Defense. While they heavily prioritize getting a flank when one is available, they're much less prone to putting themselves in a position to flank someone than eg Troopers, and thus a lot less likely to end up taking such a flank.

Note that the Chosen complicate the Ideal Range mechanic, as certain behaviors overrule their standard preferred ranges. The Assassin has her Ideal Range set to thirteen if she's currently benefiting from Bending Reed, for example, and the Warlock frequently decides he's playing defensively and so sets his Ideal Range to eighteen. So basically he'll try to stay near the edge of your vision a lot of the time; this isn't just speculation from digging around in the files, it's consistent with my own play, where the Warlock has an unusually strong tendency to hang behind High Cover at the edge of my force's vision.

Third is area of effect attacks. The AI has a fairly strong preference to avoid repetitive placement of area of effect offensive actions within a given turn; this is part of why grenades get tossed less than you might expect, as a couple Advanced Troopers who both have access to exactly one good grenade target location are liable to have the first toss their grenade and the second refuse to do the same for fear of being called a copycat by their bar buddies. Mind, this only really stands out in cases where Cover smashing didn't happen or wasn't relevant, since it's perfectly sensible to take a shot on a now-exposed target, but if you do something like field multiple SPARKs it's a lot more conspicuous the reluctance to stack area of effect attacks into the same area.

Fourth is anti-clumping. AI units largely endeavor to avoid clumping as they move (Once their pod is activated, to be clear: they actually go out of their way to clump when inactive), making it difficult to catch a lot of enemies at once with smaller blast radii. This is a non-obvious but important factor in why Grenadiers are better abusers of explosives than other classes, as this anti-clumping behavior tends to keep them roughly 4 tiles apart. Perfect for preventing even Gas Grenades from catching multiple enemies, not good enough when it's a Plasma Grenade coming out of an Advanced Grenade Launcher. This is also why Rocket Launchers and Blaster Launchers tend to have stand-out performance; they have big enough blast radii to usually be able to catch multiple active enemies in spite of this behavior. Note that melee-capable enemies often ignore this anti-clumping behavior, seen most readily with Chryssalids but it can come up with any melee-capable enemy.

Fifth is the point that the AI largely ignores your disabled units when assessing where to move and what to target. This is a subtle but significant factor in why Mental Fortitude is actually a pretty powerful Resistance Order when it comes up, as it can readily lead to stuff like an enemy moving right on top of a Panicking soldier they don't bother to shoot, thinking they're safe, and then your turn rolls around and your once-Panicking soldier is in a great position to counter-flank that enemy. To be clear, the AI can decide to target a Panicking/Stunned/Dazed/Bound/etc soldier, such as if you have no non-disabled soldiers in view. They just default to ignoring them when there's non-disabled targets available to target instead.

Sixth is the AI's preference for moving. In the prior game, the AI was perfectly happy to find a defensible position and camp in it until you offered them a flankable target or something. In XCOM 2 the AI heavily prioritizes moving every turn, even if the movement isn't particularly productive. Individual enemies can have behaviors overrule this preference -Officers tend to prefer Marking a Target and then shooting, for example- but outside such special cases it's pretty rare for the AI to decide its current position is fine and stay there. Caveat: the more units you have on Overwatch, the more likely any given enemy will decide movement is too dangerous, even if they do have better positions to move to.

Seventh is, finally looping back to Mark Target, shooting preferences. The AI has a modest dislike of firing multiple shots at the same target: this is a big part of why Parry is so powerful, as what will often happen is one enemy fires, gets blocked by Parry, and all the other enemies decide they'd rather shoot new targets even though Parry is no longer protecting the Templar. However, outside Parry it's pretty easy to overlook this bit of behavior because the AI heavily prioritizes shooting weakened targets. As such, if a soldier gets hit, frequently the blood spilled will draw fire from any remaining enemies, overruling their collective desire to avoid sharing targets. Mark Target exacerbates the point, as its modification to AI preferences is also strong enough to overrule the 'but someone else shot at that guy and I'll look like a copycat' modifier. This can easily lead to situations where an Officer Marks someone in High Cover, and then they get shot at three times and end up dead where if no Officer had been present they'd have been completely safe.

This is really much more the danger Mark Target poses; it pushes the AI to actually pick one target and try to make it dead. Contributing to this is the Aim modifier itself, as the AI does in fact attempt to pursue higher-accuracy shots, and so Mark Target doubly pushes AI forces to focus on the Marked victim.

Officers themselves heavily prioritize Marking Targets, to the point that an Officer currently being flanked will frequently retreat to a safer position and then Mark a target instead of taking a shot. Similarly, as noted earlier they'll usually Mark a Target and then fire on the Marked unit if that's possible to do. This makes their unusually good Aim misleading, as much of the time they effectively have 10 more Aim than that. This is impressively high; almost no enemies have more than 80 base Aim, and indeed 75 is actually basically the roof for regular enemies, yet Officers de-facto operate on 85 Aim most of the time, all the way to the very beginning of the game.

In conjunction with their defensive behavior post-activation, Officers, particularly Basic Officers, are one of the few cases where you arguably are better off Overwatch ambushing to kill the pod leader. That way you never let them start taking alarmingly accurate shots from positions of safety you struggle to dig them out of.

Frag Grenade
The Officer may throw a grenade, which does 2-3 damage and has 1 Shred.

Notice this is the exact same grenade that Advanced Troopers wield. This includes that it has 1 tile more radius than you'd expect, which is even more alarming of a feature than on Advanced Troopers since Officers can be tossing this grenade at your poor Rookies from literally the first mission. It also includes that it has the standard explosives +1 chance of 20%.

Officers are notably more prone to actually tossing their grenade than Troopers, it should be noted. I'm not entirely sure why this is so, but it's another reason they're a bit of a priority target, all else being equal. The possibility of unavoidable damage is a dangerous thing to leave lying about.

Anyway, ADVENT Officers are in a bit of a strange position, in that they're both one of the rarer and yet one of the more common enemies. This is because they're one of a handful of enemies that is forbidden from being a follower in a pod: as such, in any given mission there can be at most 1 Officer per pod, when pods are minimum 2 enemies. (Outside a handful of special cases, such as Ambushes, where all pre-placed pods are single-unit pods) Yet they're a regular sight from literally the beginning of the game all the way to very nearly the end of the game. (They can't show up in the final mission, nor the second-to-last mission, as ADVENT units are almost completely forbidden from spawning in those two missions) As such, you don't have to worry about planning for mobs of Officers, but you do have to remain pretty perpetually aware of their relevance.

There are other enemies permanently restricted to being pod leaders, but these other enemies don't show up until later in the game, and the game is willing to bend the rules a little for some of them. Sectopods and Gatekeepers can both potentially have two copies show up in a single pod in the final mission, for example, where Officers never have more than one in a given pod, period. (Well, at generation, I ought to specify: it's entirely possible within a mission for an Officer to flee and end up joining a pod that has another Officer) So Officers are pretty unique in this regard.

In any event, ADVENT Officers are actually one of the most dangerous enemies toward the beginning of the game. They're tough for that part of the game, enough so they expect to survive any single given attack, more accurate than Troopers while being just as lethal, and able to mark someone for death. They're particularly problematic if you end up activating their pod unexpectedly, where you're not ready to immediately kill them or their podmates, or worse if you manage to activate two pods at once with an Officer among them, since Mark Target enhances the rest of the enemies. And unlike most enemies, they tend to hide behind High Cover and otherwise play defensively, keeping them safe to keep harrying you, and often far enough away you might not be able to use a grenade to smash their Cover -or hiding behind Cover tough enough that won't immediately help.

It's also worth pointing out that the game defaults to having pod leaders move before their podmates in a turn. With a number of units this isn't particularly important or can be actively sub-optimal of the AI, but with Officers it means that they're pretty consistent about Marking targets or smashing your Cover with their grenade before their subordinates start taking shots. The only bit of sub-optimality that remains in this regard is that the AI cycles through unit turns one pod at a time, with this being driven by a fixed internal order: if you do pull two pods, one of which contains an Officer, it's entirely possible for the Officer to end up contributing less than they ought to because the other pod goes first. This is particularly wasteful if eg you killed the Officer's podmates already, so that the Officer ends up the very last enemy to act.

A curious point is that there's several bits of dialogue in the game that refer to ADVENT Officers as ADVENT 'captains', and this is also how they're designated inside the code. I suspect they changed this in part due to having ADVENT forces have tiers; it would be a bit strange for the Advanced and Elite forms to have the exact same rank as the Basic forms. Regardless, it can be a bit confusing when actually playing the game, wondering if there's some 'captain' unit type you haven't met yet. Nope, your support staff are just referring to Officers.

Advanced
HP: 8/12/12/13
Armor: 0
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0/15/15/15
Aim: 65/75/75/75
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 6-7 (+3)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/10%/10%/10%
Will: 50/70/70/70
Tech: 125

Frag Grenade
The Officer may throw a grenade, which does 3-4 damage and has 2 Shred.

Now slightly better than your own Frag Grenades, though you're only likely to notice if you have Shen's Last Gift. It's possible to have 2 Armor on a human soldier while Advanced Officers are running around, but... Experimental Armor requires prioritizing Autopsying a Shieldbearer, and Blast Padding is usually a poor choice, particularly in the base game where you can't just buy Shredder from the Training Center later. You'd need to combine those two or combine either with an early E.X.O. Suit to end up with 2 Armor. SPARKs being unhappy with losing multiple Armor at a time is a lot more likely to crop up as noticeable and relevant.

Like Elite Troopers, their Frag Grenade also has an invisible bump up in its expected performance, as their +1 chance is 34% instead of the 20% typical to explosives and seen on the Basic Officer's grenade. Still usually won't get full damage, but it's that bit more likely.

Anyway, Advanced Officers are less of a spike in danger than you might expect. While they still tend to play more cautiously than the soldiers they're leading, this is a little less true than it is of Basic Officers due to their closer Ideal Range. As such, their big boost in HP often ends up doing less than you might think to extend their lifespan: among other points, they're a lot more likely to be in easy reach for a grenade throw to clear out their Cover. You're also quite likely to have expanded your squad size and partially transitioned to magnetics by the time Officers upgrade to Advanced, so your overall firepower is up, not even touching on the implications of leveling, which tends to more than offset their HP increase in practice.

That said, they still tend to be a dangerous, high-priority target, especially in War of the Chosen where they're liable to be leading stuff like a Purifier and a Shieldbearer instead of two Stun Lancers. 6-7 damage with the potential to crit for +3 is going to be dangerously lethal for quite a long time, and they remain an alarmingly accurate unit very prone to attacking on their first active turn, where many of the units running around at the same time as them tend to be more delayed threats, or more manipulable ones. Ideally you'll kill them before they act, or at least flank them -Officers will usually respond to being flanked by backing off and Marking a target. If you can't kill them right away, it may be worth Dashing someone into a flanking position.

Overall, though, there's not a lot new to say relative to Basic Officers.

So let's talk about a different mechanic...

Reinforcements.

The big reason I'm talking about it in the ADVENT Officer post is that code indicates that at some point in time they were able to call in such reinforcements. In the actual final product all reinforcements are scripted based on mission type or trigger from failing a security tower hack, which is a bit disappointing though perhaps for the best given how much of a problem more dynamic reinforcements would've been in any mission with a time limit. Still a little disappointing, given how it would've really sold Officers being important, in-charge figures.

Reinforcements themselves have a bunch of non-obvious, not-entirely-intuitive elements to them. First of all, reinforcements actually occur before the enemy turn starts properly. This is particularly important in War of the Chosen for reasons I'll be getting into in a later post, but even in the base game it can trip you up if you were planning on catching an already-present enemy with Overwatch and didn't realize the reinforcements would eat your Overwatch first, as they not only arrive but perform initial pod activation movement before the enemy's normal turn. This is particularly inconvenient when a melee enemy is in an awkward position none of your troops can readily reach, where Overwatch is the only good solution.

Contrary to what you might expect, however, reinforcements don't get an immediate turn beyond their initial activation phase, in spite of arriving and activating before the enemy's turn starts. So it could certainly be worse.

You always get a one-turn warning in the form of a red flare landing where the reinforcements will arrive, allowing you to set up Overwatch, place Bladestorm soldiers on the flare, or plant a Proximity Mine in preparation for their arrival. Or just avoid it if you're trying to extract instead of fight, whatever. A related point is that you will almost never see more than one reinforcement flare dropped in a turn, particularly in the base game; War of the Chosen introduces some mission types where it's standard to drop two reinforcement flares in a single turn, such as one VIP extraction type that involves defending against waves of reinforcements for a few turns before you can make your escape. But it's mostly still rare, and will generally only happen if you fail a Hack that triggers reinforcements in the same turn reinforcements were going to arrive for scripting reasons.

Reinforcements are airdropped in, which for one thing means you don't have to worry about them landing among troops that are inside buildings. (They'll land on the roof instead) There's no exceptions to this; even if it would make logical sense for reinforcements to walk in off the edge of the map in a given mission, they won't do so. (Unlike, say, EXALT in Enemy Within) There's some plot-related cases of enemies arriving without it involving an ADVENT air transport, and in War of the Chosen there's some other examples of enemies being spawned in that break from this (eg the Chosen summoning reinforcements), but as far as general base-game play goes? Always airdrops, all the time.

This is important because ADVENT transports only ship in ADVENT units, and not even all of them. So outside some very narrow exceptions, such as Shen's Last Gift and Alien Hunters each including a single mission with special reinforcements, reinforcement enemy groups are a very constrained list of units, and notably are biased toward the weaker end of things. This has the unfortunate effect that for the most part enemy reinforcements aren't a particularly serious threat, and in fact mostly tend to serve as free experience, which is problematic since some mission types quite clearly are trying to use reinforcements as a 'hurry up and Extract before you're overwhelmed' mechanic.

The specific list is:

ADVENT Troopers
ADVENT Stun Lancers
ADVENT Officers
ADVENT Shieldbearers
ADVENT Mecs/Heavy Mecs
ADVENT Priests (War of the Chosen)
ADVENT Purifiers (War of the Chosen)

This is kind of disappointing mechanically, and narratively it doesn't make much sense either. If ADVENT soldiers can hop five or six stories down and land just fine, why can't various Alien units? I get that, for example, it would be fairly difficult to make a Viper airdrop animation that didn't look really stupid, but I can't imagine a reason why Mutons, Sectoids, or Andromedons would be excluded from this list.

Nor is it like the narrative has a particularly strong conceit that the Aliens are trying to pretend ADVENT is totally separate from the Alien forces, such that it's vital to their PR efforts to not have ADVENT transports seen airlifting Alien units.

I'm genuinely curious why the list is so limited. Did they run out of time to animate reinforcement arrivals for the Alien units, or something? ADVENT humanoid troops quite clearly have fairly significant animation overlap with X-COM's troops, as well as each other, such that making an airdrop animation for a Trooper would be readily re-used for Officers, Stun Lancers, etc, so I can buy they made that one animation plus Mecs and then ran out of time.

In any event, War of the Chosen makes some changes to this setup.

First of all, underground missions use different visuals regarding reinforcements, with a simple light source for the flare instead of a smoking light source, and no aerial transport dropping them in. Second, these missions actually have a wider reinforcement list! Sectoids can drop into underground missions, for example, as can Spectres, Mutons, Andromedons, Vipers... I don't think Sectopods, Gatekeepers, or Archons can drop into underground missions, and I know very restricted units like Faceless won't do so, even when eg Savage is in play; if a Savage underground mission gets reinforcements, they'll still be the usual underground reinforcement list, no Chryssalids or the like. Outside Archons, Sectopods, Gatekeepers, and Retaliation-exclusive units (ie Faceless, Chryssalids, and Berserkers) I'm pretty sure anything normal can drop into an underground mission, but I'm not 100% sure I've got this list exactly right. It's possible Berserkers can drop in and I've just never had it happen, for example. (Oh, and Turrets still can't reinforce in for obvious reasons, nor can special enemies like Alien Rulers or Avatars)

Third, War of the Chosen makes reinforcements less threatening on various Guerrilla Ops with an objective possible to complete prior to killing every enemy. (eg Hack-based objectives) In the base game, completing such objectives more or less always immediately triggers a reinforcement flare, which will be promptly followed by reinforcements on the enemy turn. In War of the Chosen, completing such objectives will instead cause a flare to spawn on the enemy turn, and it's only on the enemy turn after that turn that reinforcements will trigger, and it's less common for the flare to trigger at all. (I'm not sure of the exact parameters here) Notably, in missions that can't end until all enemies are dead an active flare will prevent the mission from ending, but a flare queued to be dropped on the enemy turn will not. As such, in War of the Chosen it's possible to bypass reinforcements in many such missions by killing everything before completing the objective.

Note that these changes are specific to Guerrilla Ops. (Well, and one form of VIP Extraction) Avatar Project Facilities also trigger reinforcements on setting the X4 charge, and the Blacksite and Forge have equivalent 'done the objective, time to evac while reinforcements trigger' dynamics, and these still involve flares instantly dropping in response to completing the relevant objectives. Which incidentally means in those missions you should ideally get your squad all ready to act before trying to complete their objectives: it's not like these missions have time pressure. (Where Guerrilla Ops do)

Elite
HP: 9/15/16/16 (9/16/16/18 in the base game)
Armor: 0
Defense: 0/10/10/10
Dodge: 0/20/15/15
Aim: 70/75/80/80
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 7-8 (+3)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/10%/10%/10%
Will: 50/75/75/75
Tech: 125

Yes, Elite Officers have more Dodge on Veteran than the higher difficulties. This is likely an oversight. It's a small enough difference you can't really tell the difference in actual play anyway.

Mark Target
Increases Aim against a chosen target by 10 for 2 turns, and encourages the AI to preferentially target that unit. Does not necessarily end the turn. 2 turn cooldown.

Still the same boost, though at least Elite Officers finally pick up some Aim. (Unless you're specifically on Veteran) Indeed, Elite Officers are functionally one of the most accurate units in the entire game, since they heavily prefer to Mark Target and then shoot said target, resulting in effectively a base Aim of 90. Prior to War of the Chosen, 80 was basically the ceiling for base Aim on enemies, and only one other unit could be argued as having a Mark Target-esque internal way to give them effectively higher base Aim... and the unit in question ends up at the same de-facto 90, with it being possible to prevent them from getting the bonus. (Mark Target isn't disabled by Flashbangs or being set on fire, frustratingly) So prior to War of the Chosen it was reasonably accurate to think of Elite Officers as the single most reliable shot available to the AI, and even in War of the Chosen only the Chosen themselves beat them out.

Fortunately, by the time you're fighting Elite Officers you generally have a sufficiently powerful, elite squad with good enough protections an Elite Officer probably won't get the chance to attack and certainly won't kill a fresh soldier if they do fire and land their shot. Indeed, in practice they tend to be the least threatening Officer tier, simply because your own forces have grown explosively more powerful, and their own growth is much more modest.

Don't habitually ignore them and leave them free to act, though. There's plenty of units that are higher priorities in the endgame, but there's also plenty of enemies it's safer to put off until later than an Elite Officer, because they're not going to immediately take a functionally 90 Aim shot on someone.

Frag Grenade
The Officer may throw a grenade, which does 3-6 damage and has 3 Shred.

Elite Officers are using a special Frag Grenade that doesn't really map to anything you use, having a Beam Pistol-esque damage range instead of anything found on any of your own explosives and 3 Shred, a Shred value not seen on any of your own explosives. They also have the rather strange +1 chance of 49%, so their average expected damage is overall even higher than you'd expect just looking at the stat table while familiar with explosives trends.

I personally find it rather frustrating that Elite Officers have such a wide damage range on their Frag Grenade. On the one hand, they can roll high and do 6 damage en mass, when 18 HP is expected endgame HP for your non-fragile troops. On the other hand, they can roll low and do a measly 3 damage just like an Advanced Officer expects to do. Thus, Elite Officers who decide to chuck a grenade will have their threat potential defined frustratingly heavily by RNG, especially when you consider you expect to have Armor a large fraction of the time when fighting them, making the difference in damage starker: a soldier in a W.A.R. Suit takes four times as much damage from a high roll as from a low roll, for example. (Assuming no other Armor sources, admittedly)

Fortunately, they still prefer pretty heavily to use Mark Target, and the commonality of various other explosives sources in the late game means that if eg you pull two pods you have decent odds that the non-Officer pod goes first, tosses out an area-of-effect attack, and the Elite Officer thus declines to toss their own grenade, so in practice it will tend to rarely crop up.

But it's still pretty irritating a decision.

Also notice that Rookie is seriously babying you when it comes to Officers, even at Elite. 9 HP? Seriously? That's slightly over half the HP on Veteran and Commander, half the Legend HP, and only 1 above the Advanced Officer's HP, which was only 1 above Basic.

An odd thing; Officers transition from Advanced to Elite around the time Officers are largely being displaced as pod leaders by late-game enemies like Archons, Andromedons, Sectopods, and Gatekepeers. As such, while ADVENT Officers as an overall enemy type are pretty common, Elite Officers in specific are fairly rare. I've had runs where I'm pretty sure I never actually encountered an Elite Officer.

In any event, Elite Officers are actually one of the more problematic endgame enemies, not so much by having any obvious, serious advantages, but rather by being an all-around solid enemy that immediately attempts to threaten your soldiers and lacks any serious weaknesses. They have Dodge, but they're not heavily reliant on it for their survival; the Plasma Bolt Caster isn't going to one-shot them above Rookie difficulty. They have Defense, but they're not so reliant on it for their protection that Defense-ignoring tools are outstandingly effective against them, and indeed their bit of Defense compounds their access to Dodge; you'll often see you have accuracy along the lines of 96% against Elite Officers, where if they didn't have their Defense you'd be ignoring their Dodge. They have access to Shred, so Armor stacking is dangerously unreliable against them, but don't make any real sacrifices to get that strong Shred access.

Most endgame units that are solidly dangerous are designed to be heavily reliant on a specific stat or ability, and/or to have weaknesses beyond such points. Such enemies can be substantially reduced in threat by bringing the right tools, often to the point of basically trivializing them. Elite Officers don't offer anything so convenient.

This has the effect that, somewhat counter-intuitively, Elite Officers are one of the best enemies to be targeting your most powerful and general effects at, like Stasis or Frost Bombs, even though they're on paper much less threatening than eg Andromedons. An Andromedon can be substantially reduced in threat via ignoring and/or removing their Armor, such as putting AP Rounds on a Shredder soldier, or having a team full of Psi Operatives with Void Rift and Null Lance. An Elite Officer really does require you to go to the nuclear options if you don't get lucky and kill them with just regular shooting.

And unlike some enemies, Elite Officers don't give you the option of spending a turn taking shots and praying you get lucky, because they will immediately start trying to kill people.

Though that topic is for another post.

Officers, it should be noted, are unique among enemies in that their Autopsy will never reach an Instant state, no matter how many corpses you accumulate. As such, if you were hoping to put off their Autopsy until it became Instant... yeah, don't bother. This isn't a particularly big deal, as their Autopsy is lightning-fast, but with how opaque the Instant Autopsy mechanic is it can trip up a player on early repeat runs, and since they're restricted to being pod leaders it's easy to think they haven't hit Instant yet due to the corpse accumulation being slow, rather than because it'll never happen.

Said Autopsy unlocks the Proving Ground, so it's pretty important to get it reasonably early! It's also required before you can do any other ADVENT Autopsies, so that's a further reason it's fairly important to do. And of course it's essential to completing the game, since the Proving Ground is necessary for completing the game. You're going to Autopsy an ADVENT Officer, it's just a question of how long you put it off. The Proving Ground itself is sufficiently high-value it's generally better to get the Autopsy done sooner rather than later, especially in War of the Chosen where you have more flexibility in viable build orders.

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ADVENT Officers are one of the first cases of the game starting to make an effort to get the Aliens actually PR-conscious in the manner they really ought to be for what we're seeing to make any sense. While ADVENT Officers are still in the red-and-black color scheme seen on Troopers, they emphasize the red more than Troopers do, and they even have a red scarf, which not only helps make it more obvious who is an Officer and who isn't but also helps push them more in the direction of 'cool and heroic design' rather than 'obvious stereotypical evil soldier design'.

Their design is pretty decent in that regard, and overall I like their distinctive helmet. I do have to wonder how they're supposed to see through it, but this is actually a bit of a recurring problem with ADVENT soldiers; the Stun Lancer and Purifier designs are the only ones where there's a fairly obvious explanation for how they can see. (One-way glass, specifically)

I especially like how the scarf makes them look in motion. Most enemy movement animations are fine-but-forgettable. The Officer is uniquely eye-catching.

ADVENT Officers are, by the way, very chatty, much more so than any other ADVENT soldier. The wider internet will tell you ADVENT soldiers are speaking in an 'alien language', and I imagine that is the intent, given that for example the opening cinematic's subtitles provide gibberish non-words when ADVENT troops are speaking, but it's actually largely just English phrases that have been heavily distorted. In some cases, the distortion is light enough you don't have to be trying to parse it to know what they're saying. ("I need support" when flanked, for example) It's rather bizarre there's an official news post that claims they had voice actors speaking nonsense phrases, because that's only held to in pre-rendered cinematics. The actual gameplay voice clips are mostly or universally heavily distorted English.

But hey, let's go with the idea that it's an alien language, since there's a lot of supporting evidence this is the intent, such as Skirmishers using a few made-up phrases. This... raises a lot of issues with the narrative.

The two most prominent issues are closely intertwined: firstly, ADVENT soldiers are supposed to be, in-universe, believed to be human soldiers, and secondly ADVENT troops are clearly shown to be using their 'alien language' when interacting with human civilians with no evidence of a lack of understanding.

In and of themselves, these aren't directly problems. This is supposed to be a dystopian nightmare. It makes sense that the Aliens are doing what humans have done to each other many times, imposing a new culture and language on the conquered whether they like it or not. It also makes sense for those in military service to be expected to use the 'correct' language when on the job, rather than their mother tongue, as a further example of cultural erasure, one that has in fact occurred in real life.

But...

First of all, the narrative shows zero awareness of such notions. Nobody expresses anger over the cultural erasure the Ethereals are imposing on humanity. In fact, Tygan and lady Shen repeatedly indicate nobody in X-COM can understand Alien language, with no acknowledgment of how this is rather confusing alongside the plot making it clear ADVENT troops speaking an 'alien language' to civilians is understood just fine. There's mental hoops you can jump through to make this work that aren't even that unreasonable, but I'm extremely skeptical the team was actually aware of the potential contradictions needing to be addressed.

Second of all, this raises a lot of questions that characters in-universe should be asking, if we just ignore that civilians all apparently understand the Alien language just fine and so X-COM should understand it too. In that scenario, it would be rather conspicuous that random citizens switch so easily to an Alien language upon being recruited into ADVENT, as is ostensibly happening.

This is exacerbated by how short a distance into the future XCOM 2 is supposed to be occurring after the prior game. If it was 40 years or more, I'd buy that basically everyone is fairly fluent in the Alien language, and the issue would be restricted to the 'so why doesn't X-COM know it?' problem. With it having been just twenty years... well, for one thing, ADVENT/the Aliens wouldn't have been performing this cultural imposition for the full 20 years. It would take time to build infrastructure, pull citizens into educational programs, and so on. Even generously ignoring that, though, that only really allows it to be plausible for the latest generations of ADVENT troops to be smoothly integrated in this fashion, as it would only be 2-ish years ago that people born around the time of the Alien takeover would have reached adulthood and thus be plausibly recruited. The vast majority of ADVENT's troops ought, however, to be people who didn't grow up with this alien language and so would be expected to regularly drop into English/French/Japanese/whatever they did grow up with, whether because they thought they could get away with it or because they couldn't remember what the Alien way of saying 'you have the right to remain silent...' is off the top of their head. (I mean, this is a dystopian police state so probably you don't have a right to remain silent, but work with me)

By itself this is a relatively minor issue, but this is a recurring trend with how the game approaches the topic of secrecy surrounding ADVENT 'peacekeepers'. We're expected to believe that their true nature is a secret, but the narrative keeps introducing elements that make that a hard sell. Alien language, orange blood, non-human features that are difficult to hide in everyday life (Do ADVENT troopers really always eat with their helmets on? Or do they just not eat anywhere civilians can see it?), no proper humans in the military implying anybody who applies and is accepted is being disappeared and this somehow goes unnoticed by friends and family...

... the whole thing makes it obvious that either the developers gave no thought to how any of this, let alone all of it, could be kept a secret for any meaningful length of time, or they did think about it but have no understanding how secrecy actually works.

This is frustrating by itself, but the thing is it's not an issue that's off to the side. The notion that X-COM is a secret was, in the previous game, kind of ridiculous, but I didn't feel the need to harp on it particularly because the X-COM Project being secret was a borrowed conceit and not anything that was central to the narrative. (However limited said narrative might have been) The X-COM Project making no logical sense to be a successful secret was a failing, but an unimportant one, and one of the more understandable errors caused by thoughtlessly copying the framework of classic X-COM.

This secrecy-fail is much more deeply problematic. The second-to-last mission of the game is, narratively, centered around the notion that the Ethereals are maintaining control over the human populace through carefully-crafted lies that the average citizen wholeheartedly believes, where X-COM 'wins' by blaring The Truth to the world. (And being instantly believed for no actual reason, but that's an entirely different issue to my current point) This ending is premised under the notion that ADVENT's secrets are secret... and so is an utterly lacking ending, because that notion is completely impossible to believe.

It was, in short, vital that the story successfully sell the notion that ADVENT has plausible secrets, and it's painful that the story didn't merely fail, it failed catastrophically. This was probably literally the most important element of the story to get right, and it's... not the worst-handled element of the plot, but the one chunk that's genuinely worse is worse-handled in ways that aren't actually narratively important.

I like XCOM 2 a lot and think it's a huge step forward, but there's still some pretty substantial blunders like this, and this particular blunder is just confusing, because there doesn't really seem to be any evidence of the concept changing partway through, which is a common, understandable reason for this kind of failing to make it into a large-scale project. Is it really the case that no one on the development team put a minute's thought into this mess? What happened here?

I just don't get this mistake.

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Next time, we cover the other major pod leader of the early game: Sectoids.