Measured before changing anything. The ticket's two halves needed opposite
fixes, and the first one made the second worse.
TOO COMPLEX. Variety was gated on fleet size alone, so a player who had
grown early met two kinds of trouble in the first wave they ever saw - a
fleet of four opened on two lancers and three chasers. Each roster entry now
carries a min_wave as well, so the openings teach one enemy at a time
whatever the fleet already looks like.
That alone pushed wave 1 against a fleet of six from a mixed six to SEVEN
chasers: budget that used to buy a lancer now bought two more chasers. So an
early wave also has a size ceiling, 2 + wave_number * 2. Wave 1 is four
chasers at any fleet size; the cap stops binding by wave 6 and nothing about
later balance moves.
before wave 1 fleet 4 -> 2 lancers, 3 chasers
wave 1 fleet 6 -> 1 sniper, 2 lancers, 3 chasers
after wave 1 fleet 4 -> 4 chasers
wave 1 fleet 6 -> 4 chasers
ARRIVE AT THE SAME TIME was literal: the whole wave spawned inside one frame
as a closed ring around the fleet, which reads as a wall rather than as an
attack. The first hull still lands immediately so a wave is never felt as
late, and the rest follow every 0.45s. Same enemies, same bearing, same
total - they simply do not all exist at once.
Four existing cases objected, and each was right to: they encode intents
that still hold LATER - a large wave must be varied, fleet growth must open
more kinds, a wave can field a lancer at all, and killing a wave must bring
the quiet back. The first three now ask at a wave number where variety is
permitted rather than being weakened. The fourth runs the arrivals out
before killing anything, and gained an assertion that doing so ADDS enemies
- which fails if the staggering ever collapses back into one frame.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
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