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[GiglameshDespair]

If you really pumped your score in Xcom Apocalypse you could face aliens with late-game equipment by your second encounter.

[Neonivek]

I also hope enemies don't devolve, and aren't always evolving in response to player actions

I find this kind of funny because in evolution often cutting dead end lines is what you need to do.

Mind you this isn't what you mean when you said "I hope they don't devolve"... Yet I just found it interesting to take it in this direction.

[zaimoni]

Isn't he the person that actually made Xcom to start off with though? I mean, I'm usually cynical about such ideas but I feel as though he's one of the few people on the planet who's got strong enough credentials to actually pull something like this off.

He's also the person who's since made simpler games barely anyone's heard of, like Laser Squad Nemesis, or Rebelstar: Tactical Command.

Laser Squad Nemesis implemented its genre pretty well (basically a PvP Apocalypse-style combat test driver, no real base management).

[Jopax]

Thing is, X-com was so far ahead of the curve in terms of what it offered that it didn't really need all that many big changes, tweaks and fixes in response to some of the problems coming up sure, and it's what Nucom kinda did but overall, the core of the game (the two modes feeding off of each other and making each other more interesting than they would be on their own) was and still is a damn fun and engaging expirience. And it's rather telling that when the first one was made, they didn't actually cut or majorly revamp any of the features because they kinda got it spot on in the first go.

As for this, it's a bit of a shift it seems, where greater focus is on the metamap part of the game and emergent gameplay that comes out of it while the TBT sees some benefits from it but it mostly sticks to the tried and tested formula. I don't see an issue with procedurally generated monsters, that's stupidly simple to implement (hell, Impossible Creatures could've had that implemented easily enough and that thing is almost 15 years old), what the real issue becomes, like others have pointed out, is how they do the adaptability part. What criteria will the AI use and how, will it track damage dealt or recieved, efficency of certain units or a certain combination of factors? If implemented poorly it could become something to game and cheese in a particular way, or it could become a brick wall after a certain point. The only way to fix it really is to combined procedural stuff with a bit of handcrafting it I guess, where you create certain archetypes and the game then does variations on them until it figures out which one works best trough a course of several missions.

Either way, this is gonna require a ton of playtesting before it becomes something really nice, hopefully there's a good period of public beta testing of those features to iron out all the possible kinks.

[Retropunch]

My one fear is that they do a sort of 'load out check' before you start a mission - so if you're going into the mission with rockets and grenades, the enemy just cheatspawns anti-explosive creatures.

I doubt that though - I think it's much more likely that they'll just say 'what weapons and skills did you do on the last x number of missions -> slowly move towards countering that'. Whilst working out how to stop you cheesing it would be difficult, I imagine they'd get a long way by just adding a few random mutation paths.

However, I'd like to think that he could be a bit more inventive than that, and could instead do something like match the players playstyle to a list of mutations. Does the player camp and use snipers a lot? -> mutate slowly towards fast moving creatures with high dodge to close the gap. Does the player like to have one or two power units and the rest as support? -> mutate towards strong single unit killers to counter that.

My hope is that they do it subtly - so much so that you're not really sure what they're mutating towards. As Jopax said, their needs to be a bit of handcrafting too.

[Rince Wind]

I would love if the monsters would evolve depending on the injuries survivors got. (Would make missions where you can't kill everyone mandatory though.) Or at least give them some kind of bonus to their evolve-roll if they had some of theirs surviving encounters.
If they met another survivor faction before yours they should have adapted to them somewhat, and might be very weak against you for a while.

Because those that are dead can't tell the aliens what killed them and evolution is based off the survivors, not the victims that can't seed their genes anymore.
That is all moot if there is a brainbug kind of thing, of course.

[Jopax]

Well, not sure how the lore will work out exactly, but I think the whole mist thing will consume whatever's left in the zone and adapt to that or something. Either way, the adaptation needs to be gradual enough, or the player needs to have some sort of scouting/intelligence gathering mechanic in place so they can adapt to changing enemies. Using a strong strategy until the game arbitrarily decides you've had enough and wipes you on your next mission with perfect counters could hardly be called fun.

[Mephansteras]

I didn't get the impression that the game was going to counter your last build necessarily so much as stop using things that you are effective against and move towards a different strategy with a bit of randomness to what it goes for.

[Chiefwaffles]

Yeeeah.
From what I got from his AMA, Gollop's idea is that the enemy has semi-random changes ("semi-random" as in more than just picking an object from a list at random) and they'll use the effective designs more often.
So less "player is now using lasers: switching to ablative skin" and more "this ablative-skinned monster is working better than most designs, so I will use more if it."

[Egan_BW]

Less like fighting a clever commander and more like fighting a bacterial disease, I think.

[sambojin]

That's sort of what I meant by my post, just the opposite. Some combos may become very powerful, just not noticeably so until they hit a breakpoint. Or are in a different environment, such as you all of a sudden bringing LOTS of plasma, instead of 1-2 troops worth. What was a little advantage may become larger with higher numbers.

I wonder if it will go as far as choosing engagement types? OldCom's maps were pretty random, based on large "tiles" thrown together from a map-type list, but this was one of it's strong points compared to newCom's style. But certain creatures were definitely harder to fight on different tiles, due to Los, lack of multi-troop firepower, etc.

Again, it wouldn't be too hard to set a weighting for these things, and even include a bit of a pre-mission intelligence option for them. Got heaps of snipers? The aliens start operating in underground bunkers and tight civilian areas to compensate, so getting a clear shot is harder. A fast unit means little on an open flat desert with a small ufo plonked in the corner of it. But in twisty, confined buildings, forests or temples, they could work well. Use lots of flamers and the reverse is true. So I hope creature mod weight and map type have some reflection on each other.

Considering that they can run a few million passes of the game to see how it turns out, adding weightings to some things won't be hard.

[Glloyd]

Also, Gollop said that they plan on doing some type of early access thing, so that should help in providing feedback on the mutation system.

[MrWiggles]

PTW

[Majestic7]

Something I liked about UFO-series was that there was an incentive to have different weapon types in your squads. Some enemies were resistant to kinetics, others to lazors and so forth. So unless you were 100% certain what you were facing, it was useful to have a variety of different weapons in your squad. Plus there were higher options for different weapons.

In NuCom you just switch from bullets to lasers to plasma. There is no point ever using anything lower tier nor are there different damage types evolving next to each other. I hope this thing will have that.

[Chiefwaffles]

My number one problem with the UFO Afterblank series is exactly that. On paper the genral idea is good to make it more interesting than linear upgrades, but in the game...

It ended up in every entry in the series I would only use projectile guns because they were simply superior. It removed a lot of sense of progression in the game when my guys had the same guns for over half the game.
Yeah, sure, some guns are better at certain things, but I always found that wasn't worth the hassle of inventory space and added weight. Ultimately I'd just keep 2 guys with lasers in case I ever got very certain types of enemies. (A single enemy in a single race in UFO Afterlight and a very rare endgame
race that was invulnerable to projectile weapons in Aftershock.)