Ok here is my opinion, which may or may not actually be best way to go just my opinion is all…
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Zombie Replacement/Advancement: No, I don’t like this one… I want to go places to fight those harder monsters, if i want to start off playing game and immediately go and try to fight the harder monsters i wish to do that… or i can decide to play a different style of game and may not want to seek out those harder mobs and play a more peaceful lifestyle/build. Let players choose when to advance then other way around, forcing players hand of “you have to be x powerfull within x time or zombies will be extremely difficult” type of forced gameplay. All this does to me is narrows the play styles and kills the sandbox type gameplay a bit. But i’m not 100% against monsters getting stronger if you leave them be for too long as well, i just don’t want it where it’s always super easy at first then later it gets continuously more difficult to point where after months/years game time passes your always fighting non-stop swarms of special zombies. Unless your purposely moving to an area that has mostly all brutes then that is your choice but hopeful the reward matches, for example going to a area full of weak “level 1” zombies shouldn’t reward as much.
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Conditional Zombie Replacement and Zone Zombie Replacement: I i’m for this one, i like having “zones” of more specialized zombie clusters that i can choose to seek out and explore for the challenge or just to have some variance between town to town so it’s not always the same boring mixture.
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Zombie Mobs: Sounds interesting, if properly implemented i think it would be fun.
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Zombie Immune Response: I not huge fan of this one… I personally like idea of being able to claim a town/base, etc. if i can kill an entire town of zombies and claim it, i don’t want to have sudden artificial spawning happening that sends more zombies my way… i guess i’m more of a static player then dynamic. but i don’t mind random wondering zombies… like the show walking dead with the migrating zombies that swarm in like a plague of locusts, it’s not really based on how good your doing or how many zombies you killed, but somewhat more random and can happen anytime, i’m for that. but not really liking idea of having more stuff thrown at me as sort of a punishment for claiming a land? HOWEVER if there is some special “zone” where this type of event can happen, like zombie factory of some sort where when you start killing off zombies and more spawn increasingly difficult until you reach some point of “winning” that special area and possibly rewarded well for it, that’s fun, and added variety to gameplay, and i would seek those out, i just don’t want that system added to every zone i explore,etc. i want to be able to claim towns/bases too…
5: Faction Expansion. I don’t mind this, sounds like it can work. Actually this sounds a lot like the dynamics of Depths of Peril game if you ever played it where random events can happen in certain areas of the game-world where boss like monsters spawn, first start off as mini-weak bosses but if left unchallenged for too long they slowly evolve into harder and harder monstres. I don’t mind this at all, but i always want to be able to eradicate them… I could choose to purposely ignore them and watch them grow then kill them for the challenge, or go in early and try to kill them while they are weak and once i do i don’t want to be continuously harassed by them again once they are eradicated… depth of peril i think does this well.
6: Faction Multiplication. not much to say to this one other then i like the idea and i’m for it.
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I guess bottom line is i like dynamics and variety but i don’t like forced progression based on time… let player progress at their pace. I may in one play through want to play a badass going around killing most difficult of monsters trying to get best loot and try find biggest challenges. another time i may want to try a more peaceful style of play, trying to keep killing to a minimal, like a pacifist, preferring to kill only when necessary for supplies and then eek out a comfortable existence… etc. not caring about having best gear. and so on, just don’t want to see a game running on a treadmill of increased difficulty to point where everyone ends up with same play style of i have to get x good in x time to stay safe etc.
Even in games like Gnomoria (based on dwarf fortress), you get swarmed and ambushed by enemies attacking your based based on the VALUE of your base and all items you have etc. So if a player wants more challenge, then build up their base value faster, if players want to build up strong as possible without being overwhelmed then they willt ry to keep thir value down as much as possible to have lesser ambushes.
What i DONT want to see is game play like Castlestory (look it up on steam), where you have waves of increasingly harder enemies and you are forced to increase your defense continuously to survive. While it works for castle story, i don’t think that works for Cataclysm.