Cyborg Squad is meh

[gussmed]

After some 80 hours I finally managed to get all the achievements, which meant I had enough coins to unlock the "Secret Squad" of cyborgs.

They can't take regular pilots, and they have a power penalty on all conventional equipment, so generally you don't want to fit them with anything. You're somewhat stuck with upgrading their native attacks with power cores.

Since they're not very flexible, and the cyborg pilots have no special ability (beyond taking an XP penalty instead of dying when a mech is trashed), you'd think they'd compensate for that with something else interesting. They don't, really.

Initially, they all have 1 damage attacks, which is very limiting in the early game. The compensation is that the Beetle starts with dash, so it's pretty close functionally to the Rift Walker tank, and the Hornet can fly, and the Scarab is identical to the Rift Walker Artillery (1 damage, push in all directions).

Upgraded, the Beetle's still mediocre. +2 damage is nice, but a well-upgraded Combat Mech does more damage (4 vs 3) and shares dash. The "line of smoke" upgrade can hinder you nearly as much as it hinders the enemy, since there's no smoke-immune pilot and the "smoke does damage" passive costs an extra core (and thus an extra 3 reputation) to power.

The Hornet gets decent damage and area upgrades, but no better really than the TItan Spear. Fully upgraded it's doing 3 damage to 3 tiles, where the Prime Spear is doing 2 damage to 3 tiles and applying acid to the final target. The acid's often a better effect than +1 damage if you're hitting a single target.

The Scarab gets 2 tiles of 2 damage plus pushing adjacent tiles. This is kinda decent, but not necessarily better than the Aegon Mortar (3 damage to 2 tiles, but no push) or the Cluster Artillery (2 damage to 4 tiles, plush pushes).

To make things worse, the Cyborg pilots can't time travel. No carryover experience from a prior run, they always start from zero.

Overall, they feel like a novelty, but less intereresting than any of the conventional squads.

[Giraffasaur]

I'm pretty sure the Secret Squad is designed to be a challenge for experienced players, which is why it requires completing everything else, first.

They get quite powerful with their base abilities, but it takes a bit of effort getting through the first island (and sometimes the second).

I wish there was some way to "pocket" a pilot when using them, so a built-up pilot isn't lost just because this squad is chosen. I dumped a Mafan who had saved 18 timelines in 20ish attempts, RIP.

[gussmed]

It's true that you have to unlock everything else first, which means you've got considerable experience manipulating every aspect of the game. Can't really get all those achievements without learning every mechanic available.

That said, do you really think the Cyborg Squad is intended to be harder than other squads? Because that's not very interesting. You can get a more interesting challenge just accepting a random squad and running with it, even if it's a bunch of mis-matched mechs.

For the initial island, they're like a slightly gimped version of the Rift Walkers. They play virtually the same way. Beetle = Cannon Mech (because dash ends up being a lot like a ranged attack), Hornet = weaker combat mech that flies, Scarab = artillery.

They evolve pretty siimilarly, too. Though to get a close approximation you have to pick up a Prime Spear at some point to duplicate the area attack of the Scarab, and maybe a Cluster Artillery to replace the basic gun on the artillery.

I'm disappointed because the base 8 squads are all interesting in some way, and tend to play quite differently. The Cyborgs play too much like the Rift Walkers.

They're also just less interesting because you can't use pilots and weapon upgrades have a substantial penalty. They're the least flexible squad in the game.

[{DNJ} YourCurtainsAreUgly]

Having just completed 100% hard, and saving the cyborg squad for last, I found them to be quite fun. I didn't use the smoke, but I found the area attacks on the hornet and scarab to be very useful, and by the end of my 4-island run I had a great time stacking up huge kill counts with them. The kill 7+ missions were cake. That said, yeah, without pilots they are very different and limited, but given that you can sell all the pilots you get for reputation, you can snowball quite quickly. You just have to strategize a bit more and take the first couple islands with enemies with less HP. Or whatever suits your style.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

[PastrySandwich]

I think they were a good idea, but I hate the units they gave us. Why use ones that just feel like the regular mechs? Why not give us ones that use different weapons, like leapers, blobbers, spiders, etc. all the Vek that don't just use the exact same weapons as the regular mechs. I didn't feel like the secert squad was all that unique, just the basic squad but purple.

[gussmed]

That crossed my mind as well.

I was thinking about how the Cyborg Squad plays very, very much like the Rift Walkers, and how all the regular squads are quite different in some way, and I realized it was largely the choice of bugs they gave us.

Leapers, scorpions, and spiders have webbing. Cyborgs with webbing would have been quite different. It'd wouldn't play exactly like the ice mech, either, since webbing doesn't cancel actions, and the webbing unit isn't incapacitated by its own attack like the ice mech.

Spiders throw out spiderlings. While you can get tank deployment devices (push, pull, and acid) on regular mechs, none of the regular squads start with those.

Blobbers... probably not. The delayed nature of the explosive goo is what makes blobbers different, but a similarly delayed player goo ball would be extremely unpredictable and probably unusable as a result.

A Psion might be too similar to the science mechs. A passive ability on a flyer with no direct damage attack would be a lot like the grav mech or the nano mech.

[Coback]

Eh. The sad reality is that webbing would be... Less than useful to the player as well, without some heavy modification - the way the enemy uses it, it would almost universally be less useful than a push, since it would do nothing to prevent damage to whatever the enemy is targetting.

Blobbers would essentially just be bad Siege Mechs at best, as well, not particularly interesting, pass.

Maybe, instead, the Beetle could have taken inspiration from the Digger mush as the Scarab did from the Crab? Placing rocks actually would have had its uses.

A spider could have been interesting - though perhaps modified to directly summon its spiderling instead of waiting for an egg to hatch. It likely would have needed a somewhat more useful form of disabling than the egg's webs, anyway.

The hornet is okay enough - it does have an unusual maximum range, and one can't really use a melee attack while flying without Prospero otherwise. It's no lightning whip, but it's also, well, reliable and effective, something a player might come to miss after the gimmicky squads they've had to play. It's not like anyone starts with the Prime Spear, either.

Psions would require both the ability to change their passive somehow, and likely some sort of active ability, so they're probably less than desirable for a hypothetical new attempt at a secret squad. Perhaps the ability to rig a specific enemy to explode on death could have been interesting?

Another consideration could have been the Centipede - AoE A.C.I.D. is an argument of its own, really.

[gussmed]

It’s true that all the squads other than the Rift Walkers are a bit gimmicky in some way, but that’s what makes them play significantly differently from each other.

It’s just a bit unsatisfying that the Cyborg squad, which requires that you complete all achievements to obtain, ends up feeling so thoroughly vanilla. At the very least I would have liked to have seen special abilities on the pilots.

[{DNJ} YourCurtainsAreUgly]

"Doesn't die when defeated" is a pretty amazing ability for the pilots. It certainly has saved a few of my hard runs.

[Giraffasaur]

Originally posted by {DNJ} YourCurtainsAreUgly:

"Doesn't die when defeated" is a pretty amazing ability for the pilots. It certainly has saved a few of my hard runs.

I get what you're saying, though pilot death doesn't have a crazy impact on a run. If a player is stuck between a rock and a hard place, a pilot sacrifice can be the best option on any mech. But I do agree this style of play is made easier through the use of the Secret Squad, which it desparately needs for no-grid-damage runs.

[gussmed]

I generally only kill off pilots in the volcano, so I didn’t see any value in an ability that only triggered doing something I never do.

[{DNJ} YourCurtainsAreUgly]

Right, it's something you never do because, usually, the price of losing a pilot is so high. But if you don't change your behavior when the price of death is so much lower, you're going to make suboptimal plays. I don't think you're going to constantly killing cyborgs, but I probably let them die 1-2 times on average per run, and for two of my hard runs a death was a game-changing play, one time saving a perfect island, the other protecting the bomb at the end.

I don't mean to just say "you don't like them because you're playing them wrong", but just that you should take a different perspective in analyzing their utility because they are so radically different from the other squads.

[gussmed]

Sacrificing a mech is almost always a last turn ploy, because the drawback of not having the mech's actions for even one turn is pretty severe, regardless of the issue of pilot death. Even then, I rarely find myself in situations where sacrificing a mech will help.

You have to be a in a spot where you can body block an attack (i.e. not a melee attack), and you can't get rid of the attacker either by bumping then or killing them. That tends to be an early mission situation rather than late, where you've got 4-5 Vek. Ideally you want to get things under control, killing off Vek and blocking entrances (with Vek if possible) so you've only got 2-3 by the end of the mission.

Sometimes it does spiral out of control, of course.

[Coback]

Concerning the gimmick comment only, it pretty much applies especially to the Hornet because the Prime category, which it'd be part of if it wasn't a Cyborg... Is really bad about the gimmick part.
Bringing something the Combat Mech can't really do without requiring the rest of the squad to bend over backward to accomodate it is actually pretty much unique in the category, with only the Laser mech arguably coming close.
The problem is that it's pretty much the most interesting Cyborg by a long shot.

I agree that Beetle and Scarab are just boring, given they don't actually bring anything special at all. Remaining in the same effective categories, a centipede and some attempt at making the spider or the blobber function as a player unit respectively would have had much more potential. Any of these would have, at the very least, brought unique ranges and considerations compared to what we got.
Though the blobber would have required being practically unrecognizable from its enemy form, at risk of otherwise just being a Siege Mech that can't fire on a unit's tile and always damages cities... Which we already have the Leap Mech for at that. A delay on the explosion would just make it darn near unplayable - there's a reason Vek blobbers actually fire the blob out without the squad getting to stop it, and the entire point of the game is that players get to react to what the Vek do, rather than needing to predict them the turn prior.

[Murray]

It's fine.

But it did erase my time traveler that I kept from my very first run. So that's upsetting. Stupid.