Limitation of Enemies to 30 in Horde Nights

[White-Gandalf]

Version

v2.0 (b295)

Platform

Windows

I somewhat assume that this is not really an error, but as it contradicts what is set and documented ingame, i post it here as a bug report...

In a horde night in the wasteland at gamestage about 358, maxalive set to 64, difficulty "insane", in the current alpha (Release 2.0 b295),...

* the ingame log correctly logged the gamestage (358, scaling 1,567, resulting GS 560),
* but the game engine then chose a first wave of "feralHordeStageGS337"
* and stopped spawning at the 30th enemy

* second group was "feralHordeStageGS346"
* third group was "feralHordeStageGS354"

The chosen waves correspond to the 'gamestage stage="354"' entry in "gamestages.xml".

Thus, it seems the "scaling" doesn't get applied, despite being logged, and the number of spawns stops at 30, hard coded (as it was in the previous alpha v1.4).

 

[Diaboliko]

Offtopic: I wonder what on earth is the scaling? Probably multiplayer thing, since the number doesn't look like something you'd choose when thinking of a static value for single player.

 

[White-Gandalf]

"scaling" is a mechanism which the funpimps implemented in release version 1.3 (if i remember correctly) to mitigate performance issues on consoles.

They did so by ...
1. hard coding the maximum enemies alive over all to 30, and
2. by punishing those who resisted to abide by scaling up the Gamestage for the bloodmoon horde.
THAT "scaling up" is that "scaling" factor that you see in the "player log".

The scaling factor was determined by the "number of enemies alive per player" that the player has configured in proportion to 10. That factor is raised to a power of about "0.5" (slightly off). That's the reason because that scaling factor that you see in the log is something with many digits behind the decimal point.

The result was that the hordes became drastically overpowered versus the player drastically underpowered.
That was because the scaling increased the power of the enemies not just by that factor, but instead by the increased attack multiplied by the increased defense multiplied by the increased horde size multiplied by the tactical advantages of the higher gamestaged horde configurations. If you ever played something like Heroes of Might and Magic, you have a pretty good idea about the effect of the enemy attribute vector of [number;attack;defense;tactic].

That behavior was reported as a bug in those past days. And, obviously, got fixed.

In the current version, despite that "scaling" factor still being displayed, what you may deduce from the following log entries is that this scaling is no longer actually applied. It's just a relict from past days, which the apprentice from the funpimps forgot to remove.

 

[Space4Ace]

I somewhat assume that this is not really an error, but as it contradicts what is set and documented ingame, i post it here as a bug report...

In a horde night in the wasteland at gamestage about 358, maxalive set to 64, difficulty "insane", in the current alpha (Release 2.0 b295),...

* the ingame log correctly logged the gamestage (358, scaling 1,567, resulting GS 560),
* but the game engine then chose a first wave of "feralHordeStageGS337"
* and stopped spawning at the 30th enemy

* second group was "feralHordeStageGS346"
* third group was "feralHordeStageGS354"

The chosen waves correspond to the 'gamestage stage="354"' entry in "gamestages.xml".

Thus, it seems the "scaling" doesn't get applied, despite being logged, and the number of spawns stops at 30, hard coded (as it was in the previous alpha v1.4).

@faatal worked on this so if you tag him (well, I just did) he might see it and reply (if he's not too busy working on a 100 others things of course).