Guardians are a highlight again. Every fifth wave belongs to a guardian — except over time it had stopped feeling like one. Measured across real runs, relative to the pressure of the wave before it:
| Wave | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 | 30 | 35 | 40 | 45 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before | 1.27 | 0.51 | 0.36 | 0.26 | 0.19 | 0.16 | 0.16 | 0.13 | 0.12 |
| Now | 1.27 | 1.34 | 1.35 | 1.31 | 1.29 | 1.30 | 1.31 | 1.35 | 1.34 |
On wave 5 it was a highlight; on wave 45 it was an eighth of the wave before it: a seven-second fight, hull stayed at 100 %, no lives lost.
- The cause was a stray early exit in the wave-building code: a guardian wave contained exactly one enemy and nothing else. A normal wave’s pressure, though, grows from two factors — hull per enemy times enemy count. The guardian only ever got the first one, so it fell further behind wave after wave. A one-time buff would only have delayed the point where it drifted off again.
- Escort. The guardian now brings along a share of the previous wave (up to 35 %, ramping up from wave 5). That ties it to the same enemy-count curve as every normal wave, and the fight now tests positioning instead of just hull. Wave 5 is deliberately left untouched — it already worked there.
- Its own hull scales up too (+10 % per wave from wave 5 on). That keeps the guardian the heavyweight of its own wave instead of disappearing among its escort. The fight now takes 12 s on wave 10 and around 30 s on wave 45, instead of a flat seven seconds throughout.
- Its three phases are now visible. They already existed, but at seven seconds it just blew straight through them. Every phase change now brings a banner, a shake and a brief window of invulnerability — the same treatment the Core has had for a while.
- The Core costs something again. Measured, it used to die in twelve seconds: the goal of a 35-minute run was the most harmless enemy in it, its four phases lasting three seconds each. With 2.5× hull and 60 % of the previous wave as escort, it’s now around thirty seconds — a good seven per phase. This applies to the sector only; there aren’t enough runs against the Orbit Core yet to say anything definite.