And if you get really lucky, sometimes you end up with a one-man-army yourself. I've seen gameplay videos of people who high-rolled a bunch of highly synergistic traits on a guy sending them out to beat back ADVENT by themselves.

The Chosen and the Rulers engender a lot of really strong opinions; there's a lot of heat against them and a lot of love for them as well. It seems to come down to whether you view them as cool-ass puzzles to be solved or if you view them as simply being so out-of-place and so powerful that fighting them feels like an unfair punishment rather than a bracing challenge.

And they are out of place, or at least, they're something of a big design departure. X-Com has always been very, very hard if you chose to make it so. (Terror From The Deep was just hard, period, no matter what.) But earlier iterations sort of... spread that hardness around through the normal guys you encountered and through logistical challenges. Enemies that broke the normal rules of the game were somewhat unusual and usually only broke said rules in limited ways; if an enemy had an opt-out to the standard rules, that was their one trick, their "this is my superpower" thing. Unique enemies weren't really a thing except in extreme cases; the brain in the original X-Com, that souped-up Ethereal in XCOM.

The modern incarnation of the franchise sort of dipped its toe in the water with an explicit class system and talent trees. Exception-based design; "these are the rules, EXCEPT if you have a special power that lets you break the rules." As noted above, sometimes the enemies could do this too, but it was a light touch.

The XCOM2 DLC appears to be where they just went "fuck it" and dove right in. Crazy boss aliens who "cheat." They don't have one superpower, their one cool trick, they're nothing but superpowers.

That's weird. They've never really done that before. Even the Codexes and Avatar weren't like that, although in hindsight they were sort of a taste of things to come.

It might have been aesthetically better to dial them back a bit. I think they'd be more palatable to the people who really can't stand them if they were more boss-y; that is, if their presence in the world did something like give a global buff to their affiliated "regular" enemy type and if you wanted to strip that buff away, you hunt them and kill them. Hunting down and killing colossal powerhouses like the Rulers and the Chosen feels a lot better if you're engaging them on your terms, if the flipside to "they're a one-man army" is "I decide how and when I'm gonna fight them" rather than "they're just gonna show up for tea whenever they like."

I dunno. XCOM2 has been weird. It's such a great game, but it has these odd moments of blindness. Like the timed missions in the pure vanilla version of the game. That was such a brute-force way of solving a player behavior problem and its presence was jarring alongside so many other great mechanics.

> (No good deed goes unpunished in XCOM 2, despite Merc's insistence that
> Firaxis is friend to all scrublords. :)

Hey man, the Rookie difficulty setting is right there. :)

-Merc
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