When I kill a guard post of Command Station I get Exo-waves of about ~30 units, or (according to the report) ~100 strength.
When I kill a CSG I get a 1,000 strength wave consisting of over 300 units, including MKV Bomber Starships or even powerful Spirecraft ships. Btw my AIP was 30 when this happened.
Well, in the logs you included bear in mind that all of those were 4500 point exos, but most of them were split into two 2250 point battlegroups. The last one randomly chose to just be one battlegroup, which means roughly half as many ships but more points spent on each one. Hence the bomber starship V (iirc) in that one.
Also, CSG deaths do generate a stronger response than CS or GP deaths (2x a CS, 4x a GP, iirc), by design. So popping a CS and having it roll two distinct battlegroups, then popping a CSG and having it roll a single battlegroup is generally going to give you individual ships 4x as nasty on the second case. The game's idea of exactly what that 4x means is somewhat difficult to predict unless you're very familiar with the internal numbers.
@Kahuna: yea, there's some nasty surprised under development
Bear in mind that the numbers on the new stuff that's not active in the normal game haven't actually all been run through balancing. So some are guard post numbers plugged into a guardian slot and then pumped up 10x. I doubt they'll make it to testing like that
EDIT 2: Added a screenshot... what is that? A bug?
The command core? Or the "you lost"?
@tmm and Kahuna: On the Core AI thing, I may well have broken that (even for single-type AIs) weeks ago whilst implementing dual-type AIs, as that involved basically corralling
every place where AI-Type impacted the sim into a flag that could be based on an "or" instead of an exact equality.
So far, I've only seen Shark trigger on Command Stations, Home Command Stations, and Military Command Station Foldouts.
It doesn't trigger on Golems (Broken or repaired), Spirecraft, Champions, Fabs, Fac IVs, ASCs, Trader goodies, Cryo pods, or Settlements.
Is it supposed to trigger on anything other than Command Stations?
Looking at the code, it's only defined on the command stations. I figured that losing actual irreplaceables is punishment enough in itself. The issue behind Shark was that command stations were so painlessly replaceable. The rules can be extended to other things like that if desired, though.
Also, it triggers when you upgrade the command station in a system - Booooo 
.
I know detecting that an upgrade has occured has been a long-standing issue, but it was trivial to ignore. It just got nasty. Maybe check to see if there's a Colony Ship trying to build a new Command Station at the same time, or use the "has been damaged recently" flag, or something.
All of that would be seriously cheeseable to avoid the shark penalties (or just the normal reconstruction penalties). And don't tell me you wouldn't cheese it, I remember what you did with partially-built matter converters
Anyway, I do have a solution in mind for the command station upgrade case not causing the penalties. It'll be a bit of effort on my part, but I agree that it's worth it.
Three guesses what the Achievement name should be...
It should go next to one for simultaneously killing 10,000 units in carriers in a single nuke. One guess.
@Cyborg: glad you like Shark; odd about the AI champs, I don't remember telling it that it could make those as part of the plot. Maybe it didn't feel it needed my permission.
@Coppermantis: will look into the turtle+support-corps launching waves thing. Vengeful tantrum exos ignoring the no waves flag is entirely normal.
@Toranth: on exotic and wave warnings/etc, exos are inherently cross-planet rather than wormhole based, making it wormhole-based would make it a different kind of attack (basically a special kind of schizo), not an exo. As far as a timer, it would be possible but a lot of work because currently it doesn't use the wave scheduling thing at all. Basically it launches the exo at the time it would have been scheduling the wave, not at the time it would have been launching the wave (which it doesn't even compute for Exotic, currently).
Thanks for the feedback everyone, sounds like overall things are going well
