A player reported city 7 as flat-out unbeatable — and this wasn't the first time we'd heard that about that specific city. So instead of nudging a number and hoping, we tabulated every city's (wave count, difficulty modifier) pairing to actually find the outlier.
Turned out city 7 is the only city in the entire rotation where a heavyweight difficulty modifier (HEAVYWEIGHTS, +35% enemy HP) lands on the game's longest city length (15 waves). Every other tough modifier sits on a normal 10-wave city. That meant city 7's boss was inheriting the full modifier and the steepest part of our late-wave scaling curve at the same time — its boss carried 39% more HP than the closest comparable fight. Not a bad run. A real hotspot.
The fix pulls a city's own modifier back toward neutral specifically for how much it affects its own boss's HP — strong modifiers get dampened, weak ones get nudged up, and cities with no modifier at all are untouched. City 7's boss dropped from 4683 HP to 4031. Still a genuinely tough fight, just not a disproportionate one.
Then city 8 showed up wearing the same problem, upside down
A few runs later: five deaths in a row on city 8, always the last wave. The reported feeling was "getting overwhelmed" — and the numbers backed that up too, just from the opposite direction. City 8's boss HP was actually low. The problem wasn't the boss at all.
City 8 carries FRENZY — the fastest enemy spawn rate of any modifier in the game, plus a speed and elite-chance bump on top. And in this world, it happened to land on the game's shortest city length: 5 waves. A modifier that needs a few shop visits' worth of AOE and DPS to actually answer was given the least amount of time in the game to build any.
The fix this time was structural rather than a dampening curve: we re-mapped which modifier lands on which city length so the modifiers that need buildup time (fast spawns, speed, elite density) can never land on the shortest cities, while the tankier, slower modifiers — the ones that don't need a build-up runway — absorb that slot instead. Verified across every world in the game, not just the one that got reported.
The smaller stuff that shipped alongside it
- Picking up a healing pickup while already at full HP used to just do nothing. It now converts into a small resource bonus instead of going to waste.
- Leaderboards are now Normal-difficulty only — Easy and Hard run different enemy-scaling curves, so mixing all three into one ranking wasn't a fair comparison.
- Closed a few gaps in how we budget expensive glow effects when a lot of enemies are on screen at once — a handful of enemy types and effects were quietly skipping that budget and paying full rendering cost regardless of how busy the fight was.
None of this is dramatic on its own. But "the numbers say this city is fine" turning out to mean "we're checking the wrong number" twice in one week is exactly the kind of thing worth writing down — for us as much as for you.