if you cannot shred his armor yourself then coax the enemy to do it for you. as their first offensive move is always "initiate self destruct" you can manipulate them to try and attack you next to julian. setting up an easy explosion. or you can do what i did and bait julian + a mech to go closer to the generator (more on that later) then blow them all up next to each other at the same time. leaving him with only 2 armor left and making the rest of the fight much easier.

the easiest way to control the mechs is to hack them with haywire protocol, don't do this without thinking however as the hack has a long cooldown and can easily leave you stranded without your best ability. another option is to hack julian directly, this presents the option to seize control of all mehcs. this is exremely worth it. make sure to save first though because if this fails you have to wait 5 turns to use it again and you absolutely do not want that unless you get something good from it.

the mechs aren't just good for shredding armor, they're great defensive tools too! a single hacked mech will draw a lot of aggro. all the enemy units turn on them almost instantly in my experience. it can tank one hit from julian but not two, so try to make sure it lives long enough to self destruct. as if it doesn't self destruct the hack isn't worth it. unless you've already removed all of his armor i suppose.

there are two generator things in the center of the map. these can explode and shred armor however this can be a bit tricky. first you have to ensure julian is in range of the explosion, simply placing some units between julian and the platform should do the trick. baiting him with the spark seems to work as well (cuz i believe he prioritizes shen and the spark but i'm not sure). all in all this is the easy part.

the thing is that this can easily break and bug out, for me the generators got listed as a friendly unit with two action moves (which it obviously wouldn't use). problem being that you can't target it with your weapons in this state. you literally can't aim at it. so what do you do? my first idea was to self destruct a mech next to it. this won't work, you would need two to three mechs to achieve that. it'll light on fire but unlike vechiles it doesn't go on an explosion timer. it won't blow up unless you remove all it's health. instead what you should do is use shen's capacity discharge (the aoe ability) as this electricity does health damage to the generator for some reason.

a reaper with remote detonation might work as well.

also, at least for me, the generators randomly become targetable after a couple of turns, making me question if it's a bug or a feature.

remember where you first spawn? first of all this is a great place to heal up before the fight. shen has something like 5 heals total to use over the course of the mission and can heal twice in a row if she doesn't move. if you have left over charges you can use them now before heading upstairs and triggering the boss fight.

that's not the important part though, what you need to know is that by standing there for a long time during the fight, julian may walk down the stairs into the spawn area. if he does this he will have a very hard time leaving, sometimes just walking back and forth and ending his turn. though inevitably his head will crash with the building above and give him line of sight to shoot from. meaning he can stay there and take pot shots at you.

so what you can do is bait him to go down the stairs and then instantly move your squad to the opposite side of the map. without julian to deal with you have an easier time managing mechs. kill any nearby AI that have initiated their self destruct and then use the rest of your action points on sniping julian. this is a safe way to whittle him down and grind his healthbar to zero, julian is very innacurate at long range so you should be fine. if someone does get hit you can cycle them out of cover with another unit. given enough time julian will fall without much effort.

magnetic weapons are a must for this mission. you can probably do it without but you will have to allocate a lot more of your power budget to defeat the mechs. with normal guns it takes two to three units to bring one down, with mag weapons your units have a fairly good chance of killing them alone. this is a big relief.

but if you already headed into the mission without it GL i guess lmao

oh, and you should obviously use combat protocol on julian as much as possible. capacity discharge seems to be affected by armor however so be a bit more careful with that. it should go without saying that shen has to more or less solo this mission on her own. normally you have limited charges on many of these abilities but she uses a cooldown instead. without a mission timer you can eventually whittle julian down with her abilities assuming you can handle the mechs (and assuming julian is stuck on terrain or something).

anything else? the spark can easily tank one shot from julian, two without dying but i don't recommend it. tank once and then bail, hide the spark somewhere and use it striclty to fight mechs for the rest of the fight.

if someone gets low the best idea is to send them to the opposite corner from julian, trapping him by the stairs makes this much easier.

oh and i believe mech spawns are somewhat influenced by where you're standing. they spawn in the top right fairly consistently no matter what but they mainly spawn at the other locations if you're nearby. leaving a unit alone on the other side of the map may be a bad decision for this reason. make sure your other units can reach them if they get swarmed or make sure your unit can handle a mech by themself.

if i think of anything else i may add it to this guide but eh :discordshrug: