A rather underwhelming showdown (Spoilers)

[Lord Of Nothing]

I finished another game via showdown a few days ago, and was, in the process, rather surprised.
Here is why: 763AIP, single world chokepoint, lots of active golems, 8 champions.
The surprise: the AI waves were... a bit on the small side.
Now, this was ultra-low caps, but even then, waves less than 500 with all those golems, AIP and champions?
Also, the Exo-galactic attacks, apart from the GCS waves at the end, were pretty tiny- maybe one or two dire guardians at most, certainly no golems- which just disintegrated as they hit the defences. The only thing that took a bit of killing, and even then didn't stress the defences, were the Special forces release and the GCS itself.

Comparing this to the first showdown I did, with no golems, half the AIP, (Admittedly normal caps) resulting in things like golems in every exo-wave, and far, far higher number of incoming ships, this seems a bit... feeble.

I had already killed one AI home command- is that why?

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, it does seem odd that the response appeared less severe than with fewer superweapons.  We tamed down how much additional it got due to superweapons, but that's not a recent change.

The fact that you'd killed off one AI would reduce that last step with the GCS (you'd just get the one GCS-exo, not two), and it may have reduced the ships available for the CPAs, but the wave and exo sizes shouldn't have been affected significantly, iirc.

Did you have Advanced Logging on?  Possibly in the case of both games?  It would allow us to see the actual strength values of the waves and exo-budget values of the exos.

[Lord Of Nothing]

I didn't have it on, but I think i'm going to turn it on and rerun them now- curiosity has taken hold...

Some time later...

Okay, Here are the event attack and basic wave logs. I've got the entire weak showdown, since I was able to run through that on 200% speed quite easily, but only the last five minutes of the strong showdown, since that one was slowing my computer down quite a lot owing to the normal caps.

I also noticed, playing it again, that the strong one was sending double waves at each interval, whereas the weak one was not.

Finally, I also noticed that the strong one was a three-homeworld game, whereas the weak one was two homeworlds- although that doesn't seem enough to make up the difference.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, interesting.  It's a little hard to tell what's an apples-and-apples comparison since I'm not sure which of the weak logs correspond to the strong ones time-wise.

In general the 3-HW vs 2-HW thing is a fairly big deal, as that's a 1.5x difference.  There may be some discrepancy but it's hard to tell.

In the end it may just be that we overly nerfed the impact of superweapons on the showdown; prior to that the showdown's viability varied drastically based on how many superweapons you had on, such that having them all on was kind of another word for "dying" (iirc).  So certainly may be some additional balancing to do here

[Lord Of Nothing]

Looking at the basic wave logs, from a novice perspective (But having played the game that created them, and thus more able to tell which are which), it seems a bit odd that the size factor of the waves in the weak showdown was always 1, whereas the strong showdown was either 3.04 or 6.07. As for the Exo's, comparing the GCS exo in particular is interesting- the strong showdown threw about 2/3rds more points in- it should be less than half more points , as the superweapons should have contributed some of the difference in the weaker...
In the case of the regular exo-waves, it's a greater difference- the strong showdown's have twice the points value of the weak showdown's.

Also, just noticed: the strong showdown, the AI's have a negative 30% handicap acting against them, the weak showdown, no handicap.

Hmm. This calls for more !!Science!!