Just reporting that the latest round of 10/10 buffs did their job. I think it's actually at or at least really close to the intended level now.
At Sirius Cybernetics "Destroy Our Customers" isn't our motto. It's our
vision.
That said, I wonder if there's a factor I'm missing here, since no mechanic is supposed to be super-punishing compared to the others:
That's true, though there are different "tiers" of challenge mechanics. I.e. I wouldn't balance CPAs vs waves, I'd (loosely) balance CPAs vs exos. Basically there are the mechanics that are supposed to put pressure on you (waves, etc), and there are the mechanics that are supposed to
kill you (cpas, exos, etc).
Are there any exos in this game for comparison?
I got a CPA of 6226 ships at 235 AIP. Playing on ultra-low caps. I'm getting waves in the 1500-range, and I thought a CPA was supposed to be roughly a double wave, though that could be outdated balance.
It starts from a double max-time wave as a baseline, and cranks up the pain from there. Specifically, and looking at the logs you helpfully included: given a single-HW with no AIs that buff CPA sizes (I think that's just Chivalric), on Diff 10 it's 3.33 * (double max-time wave). Since you were encountering 1500-size waves, 3.33 gives right around 5000. Since you probably didn't see a double-max-time wave of standard-cap (neither high nor low) ships it sounds like it's within a reasonable margin of error.
Does the fact that the first AI is a technologist have anything to do with it?
Looking at the logs it doesn't appear to have anything to do with the
count of ships in the CPA. Presumably it did increase the pain of many of the ships themselves.
Final note: Really? The hunter plot's missile guardians are eligible for CPAs?
If it empties everything, it starts drawing from the special forces. In theory I think it could free the H/Ks themselves
Anyway, I think the main challenge-inflation problem you ran into wasn't the count of ships per se, but the fact that CPAs still go by ship count instead of ship strength. This is largely due to the legacy behavior of stating the number of ships in the announcement, and not being able to select
which ships until the actual CPA launch. So if it picks primarily stuff with a strength higher than a fighter (or other standard-cap ship) then it's going to hurt a
lot worse. And when it starts throwing in guardians.... ow.
Converting CPAs to strength-based budgeting is on my list but it turned out to be more complex than I wanted to mess with this close to 8.0, so it'll be something for relatively soon after.
The Decloaker's strength value being 1.93 didn't really impact how many it chose for this, but if you have a different suggested value I'm happy to put it in for other purposes (and eventually it will impact CPAs).
