And to balance the unlinear research tree, soldiers’ abilities and individual alien mutations, the developers had only 3 months… Isn’t it a bit scarifying? 
Don’t worry they are working more than 3 month on it, don’t think that nothing was ready in september.
Not that I’m really worried. How to explain it … Here we are guessing blindly about how an elephant looks like from three different sides (technology, soldiers and mutants). However, in our case, we were not given to feel the elephant, but the sketch of the elephant. It is very textural and bright, but there is no trunk, no tail, no skin in it, the details do not really fit together yet, and we just believe that it exists somewhere, and based on this we make assumptions about how the elephant will turn out
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This might be a over-emphasized feature “in commercials”, easy to missunderstand.
Original XCom had a great and revolutionary feat of Aliens responding to general tactics - e.g. you focus on their bases, they increase terror, you do to well - they attack your base etc.
http://gamingsession.taterunino.net/2012/05/31/the-many-faces-of-x-com/
I hope some of that is preserved, since in Fireaxis XCom general plan tactics was cut off much and left to satelitte launching and base attack mission.
Now, here it seems PARTS MUTATION or AI WEAPONS/PARTS ADOPTIVNESS is nice new AI. We have seen different crabs and combos of different weapons they use.
Surely that has to be limited mutation system not to make frankensteins, and cannot be fully enemies adopting in new species each game, no game did RANDOM ENEMIES and wont soon.
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And now we return to you first post 
As you might expect I am with @Ryu: Backer beta does not show everything devs are working on, so they probably have more (definitely should much have if they aim to deliver something resembling what was promised!) then what we have been shown.
I do agree with you that there is a lot of guessing, with what we have not quite resembling original pitch, and with too many pieces missing predict what exactly we will get in December. That’s the very reason I have started this thread, as I was curious if people who played beta could help my to conceptualize how the enemy mutation might work in the final game, and if they are aiming for what they originally promised. From what Yokes has written, it seems they still might, but there are quite a few pieces missing.
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While we are on procedural generation, proc on general world map
and some more variety in tactical maps, and that is enough “to Civ make” every game differnt.
Add that “general tactics AI” and “parts mutation AI” and that might turned to be quited good, even better then just “enemy proc generation”.
For some 2D enemy proc generation, I recommend Bindings of Isaac + expansions.
Does BoI have procedural enemy generation? Played very little of it (not my cup of tea), but from what o have seen the main thing that seemed to change in-between playthroughs were my powerups.
According to the latest news on the developers’ blog, they have completed the development itself and continue to add the latest content, bug fixes and polish it to prepare the game for release. Fortunately, even if I, with all my skepticism, can see the potential to solve the most of main issues within the framework of the raw mechanics already shown, than the chances of a successful completion of the project are very real. Probably, personally, I will see fewer innovative solutions here than I would like, but this is still more than enough. Good luck !
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I agree with this. I had perhaps naively high hopes for some sort of ‘Spore’ evolutionary system (although I’ll admit, I’ve never played that game lol).
Rather than pre-defined, preset body part replacement, that the AI can choose from off the peg, I had assumed that the system of evolution would comprise something more analogue, as you say; perhaps worms, or goo, sprouting vestigial limbs, then armour, heads, weapons, and so on, in a totally (at least ostensibly) ‘morphy’ kind of way. What we observe so far in BB5 is just a bunch of loadouts that the AI is initially forbidden to use. It progressively gains license to employ these, seemingly based on the amount of damage dealt to certain body parts, offset against its mission success overall. The criteria aren’t bad, but the realisation of the concept is a little disappointing, especially since (re Arthrons and Tritons) their current loadouts don’t really make much difference to their vincibility at all.
I’ll go as far as to say I’m a bit disappointed that all enemies are clearly identifiable, and have a genus, as such. I’d imagined that due to the (wrongly interpreted by me) system of evolution, it might even be possible for no two players to ever get the exact same enemies, but there we are. I was probably reading the pre-game nonsense for No Man’s Sky, and got confused.
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Addendum: has anyone played through BB5 trying to make the game go on as long as possible, but losing every tactical mission? I wonder if the initial enemies remain exactly the same?
I never got that impression, but then again, I have been closely following PP ever since first news about it appeared - well before the fig campaign.
For the record no one ever pitched “evolution” - the pitch was mutation: and that happens within species.
There were some ambitious ideas in the earliest interviews which didn’t seem to make it into final pitch - like mutation including change is size, And there were hints that regions might influence available chassis (animals DNA which they use to mutate).
But those are also very early interviews, so they might be an effect of both developers and interviewers wishful thinking.
They may of named it mutation, but the talk was of creatures changing as a species in response to the player’s actions.
The way that this is happening in BB5 is not random mutations of 1 individual within a group, but changes to the entire opposing force. It might be different in the final game, but as it stands the current build attempts to simulate evolution more than mutation.
Nothing else was ever discussed. The quote I posted is the most “overblown” promise I know of. Ever since FIG campaign mutation was described as I did in the opening post. Your idea of enemy evolution must have been misinformation/misunderstanding.
From January 2018 Q&A
Will there be multiple different races or just loads of crabmen?
There will be lots of different alien varieties and they will all mutate.
This crabmen GIF has been used early on to showcase what mutation is to work like, though I can see how description might have been misleading. Perhaps that the origin of this misconception?
https://phoenixpoint.info/game
EDIT. Original written explanation of mutation system:
In case one wants to check the Q&A for specifics you can find it here. The time stamp is 3:50.
Listen for a bit to it while making supper. Aside from release when it comes to date and platform it seems to be on track. Something interesting I found though not relevant to this conversation:
Timestamp 1:30 - PP was supposed to release as Early Access game in addition to Backer Beta. I wonder if EA was scrapped, or if we should treat Epic release as Early Access.
But it is not evolution of species. It is controlled process of mutation to change warriors according to existing situation. 
I think you’ve misunderstood the point that I’m making.
If one crabman appears with 6 fingers instead of 5, that’s a mutation.
If all crabmen appear with 6 fingers instead of 5, that’s evolution.
They don’t have to become crabsirens to evolve, they’ve evolved as soon as the species as a whole adopts a mutation of any given type.
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Fair enough. Someone, somewhere mentioned cross species progressions, so must have confused those two.
Looking yesterday at the clips, it does seem there is some kind of intended progression for the enemies (they can become something different in various playthroughs!), so I am curious if we will see it in 1.0.
That was me too, and I think that’s where the difference lies, it’s the scale/acceleration of evolution that I’d originally expected to be more.
At what point does one species become a new species? Technically, as soon as all those crabmen have got 6 fingers it’s a new species (or a grenade arm rather than a stabby arm)
I’d expected it to go a bit further than that.
To use an example from our world, I didn’t expect wolves to become killer whales, but I did expect that they might become a variety of breeds of dogs.
I’d respectfully challenge the differentiation here between mutation and evolution. There is no question that the enemies in the game have mutated, but also involved is a process of natural selection; the strongest and most successful members of a species prevail, and the weaker iterations are discarded - or at least that’s the idea in the game. Natural selection is arguably the most significant factor in evolution, so I would in turn argue that to say that the enemies in the game are unequivocally not evolving is false. Simply because we see this happen in a relatively short space of time shouldn’t mean we reject the concept out of hand.
Traditionally, we might consider mutation to happen over a shorter space of time than what we consider to be evolution, and this might make it a more attractive concept to apply to the way we see the enemy changing in the game. However, genetic mutation is normally a result of passive interaction with the environment, or some error in the copying of DNA; it isn’t necessarily a desired part of the prevalence or success of any organism. Evolution, on the other hand, is. The enemy in the game is willfully attempting to figure out what works best for it, and I would more readily call this process evolution.
When we are introduced to any genus of alien in the game, they are already mutated; the narrative contains exposition about what is known about the genetic composition of each species. This is where the mutation is - it’s in the narrative, and has already happened. It may continue to do so, but we aren’t informed of this. From here on in, we observe each mutated genus evolving as it adapts to the player’s actions, but as far as I’m aware (in BB5 at least), there is no reference to genetic composition changing over time, or at least it isn’t useful to the story or lore so far. In-game, as far as we know, the genetic make up of any creature remains as it was when we studied them for the first time - unless this is contradicted in any supporting literature? This actually begs a question: is the DNA of a Triton with a machine gun the same as one with only a pincer? Common sense would say that is was not, but it doesn’t matter which one we capture in the game - the report from the autopsy will always show the same information regarding its DNA, albeit most of it unknown.
With regard to whether or not a species can be said to have evolved unless all its members have changed in the same way, I’m not so sure. Homo sapiens sapiens (humans) are now the only genus among the species, but the different races it comprises have evolved in different ways (skin colour, bone structure etc), depending on environmental factors, but we are all still human.
The fairest we can say is mutation could be part of the enemies’ evolution (and probably is), but they are still undergoing a form of accelerated evolution.
Even in the Wikipedia page (which I accept may or may not have been written by a Snapshot employee), this process is referred to as evolution several times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Point
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I think we’re basically saying the same thing, but explaining it from different angles.