What happened to double waves?

[Faulty Logic]

Ever since I updated to the patch where waves take ingress points into account, I haven't seen any double waves. (would always having one ingress point explain this?)

Anyone else notice this?

Which logs document this?

[Diazo]

By double waves you mean both AIs send their waves at the same time?

I have seen a few in my own game I started after the multi-ingress changes to test them but not very many I admit.

Off the top of my head I would have to look at the wave timings. If I remember the changes right, their is a smaller variance for waves on multiple ingress points and since the waves start staggered, they are more likely to stay staggered the more ingress points you have.

I'll give this more then 2 seconds thought and post again if I think of something, but that's my first reaction.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

The timing of waves would be recorded in the MainThreadWaveCalc log (not the exact name, but something close to that).

I don't think the ingress-points stuff would impact whether or not double-waves would happen, but the game's never specifically tried to cause them.  In fact, months ago I put in a change to make sure the first waves was never doubled; as diff 10 would always double-wave on the first go and the results were... well, pretty decisive.  If diff 10 were like that all the way through that would be fine, but it was a bit of false-advertising

[Faulty Logic]

By double waves you mean both AIs send their waves at the same time?

Yes.

Logs attached.

Note: may easily be simply random, which is why I asked if others had seen this.

[TechSY730]

It's random.
The AIs choose their strike times randomly (within certain bounds, that can vary with a lot of things). Sometimes, by sheer chance, the two AIs will roughly line up, but it makes no effort to explicitly cause this to happen.

IIRC, there also used to be logic where ultra-high difficulties (like 10), a single AI would send two waves instead of one whenever a single wave was due to be sent. Not sure if that logic is still around.

[zoutzakje]

In the past, every first wave in every game I played would be a double wave (except when the AI types themselves said something different). But in my current 7/7 game I got the first wave at 11:40 and the second wave 6 minutes later. I never thought the double waves were brutal on 7/7 or even 9/9, but I guess something had to be done for 10/10

[Wanderer]

If you're talking 10/10 some adjustment was made to the brutality of the waves, particularly due to early-game resource consumption vs. build times. 

For starters, yeah, each AI would send a double wave of ships.  They'd also pace it so the first waves came simultaneously.  I convinced Keith to change this for a few reasons.

1) I requested the opening salvos not double wave, simply due to time of construction of a MK I fleet was roughly dead even with the wave arrivals.  You literally couldn't build out your defenses without having a specific metal/crystal combination, Harvesters out the wazoo, and even then you'd have to do your build in a specific order.  Then it was a dice roll for defenses.  Keith just removed double waving altogether and worked towards balancing the higher AIP gain waves.

2) Because later waves did not particularly time themselves to exact simultaneous deployment, as Keith said the original openers were falsely advertising.  With them getting gapped it seemed more like later waves where things would come in close enough to be problematic but spread out enough that they were two separate waves.

Those particular changes were done to allow the 'First 10 minutes' of 10/10 to not be the deciding factor of if you could play the next 5 hours of a 10/10 game, as passing that critical moment, which was completely time based, was everything.

As for the rest... I've seen many times where the AI ends up spacing waves at 1 minute apart in some recent games, I even asked Keith to inspect it in one of my AARs where it seemed unreasonably often.  They still happen.  Just depends on the luck of the timers.