Adapt or Die

You never pilot a single unit. You author the pressures of evolution and watch, blind, from a bunker, as your bred machines fight an alien incursion that's learning right back.

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How to play

Each incursion you deploy a squad, and the enemy studies it. It profiles whatever traits your squad leaned on and shifts its counter-pressures toward beating exactly that — but it adapts on a running average, so it is always answering the squad you brought last time rather than the one you are bringing now.

The enemy reads your deployment and moves its counters toward your dominant traits.
It lags one deployment behind, because the shift is an average rather than an instant switch.
Its adaptation accumulates across the whole campaign rather than resetting each fight.
So a strategy that works repeatedly is a strategy you are teaching it to beat.
It never reads your current squad directly — only the record of what you have already done.

Controls

Desktop: a click-driven interface, drag the fitness sliders, click unit cards to protect, cull, vault or pair them, and use the Run Incursion and Breed Next Generation buttons.
Phone & tablet: designed around a mouse-and-click control panel, so a desktop or laptop is recommended.

Tips & strategy

Feint deliberately. Deploying a squad you do not intend to rely on pulls the enemy's counters toward it, and the following incursion is the one to strike with something else.
Never win the same way twice in a row. The second victory teaches it more than the first one gained you.
Because the shift is an average, a single odd deployment moves it only slightly — a convincing feint usually needs two.
Keep a trait in reserve you have never fielded. Anything it has not seen, it has not weighted against.
Read its counters as a mirror. What the enemy is protecting against tells you precisely what it thinks you are, which tells you what you should not be.

Origins

The squad-versus-counter structure is ordinary turn-based tactics. What is original is the opponent: it profiles the traits your squad leaned on and shifts its defences toward beating exactly that.

The crucial detail is that it adapts on a running average, so it is always answering the squad you brought last time rather than the one you are bringing now.

That lag is the game. A perfectly tuned build defeats itself by being consistent, so the winning strategy is not the strongest squad but a sequence of squads — which makes this closer to an iterated game than to a tactics campaign.