Did a recent update break haven defense missions?

Phoenix Point
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I’ve just started a new game with the (relatively) recent Necronomicon update, and the first haven defense mission I get to has an attacker rating of 1, a defender rating of 8, and spawns seven or eight (I’ve played it a couple times to make sure it wasn’t a one-off) enemies. Previously, attacker strength was a pretty close count of enemy number. Is that no longer the case? For a first defense mission, seven or eight enemies is pretty brutal, not even considering the frustration of panic chains from civilians running up and playing footsie with the melee aliens.

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Since Chtulhu patch (with the new Pandoran evolution) the first Pandorans you meet are very weak, almost oneshots for your soldiers. I think, that’s why there are more of them, probably to make not too easy. I assume it has also something to do with a form of strength points the AI has to field enemies. That said, you get many of the weak enemies in the beginning of the game and it gets lesser in quantity the more they evolve.
This behaviour feels actually not really good balanced for me. I got heaven defence’s in the later stages of the game with ‘only’ one Chiron and 3 highly evolved Arthrons. Compared to the early stages with up to 10 or more enemies, of course weaker, but … it feels wrong for me.

And finally, but on this point I’m not not entirely sure, waiting to let the defenders do their work and get an attack rating of 1 has IMO no effect on the strength of the enemies, AFAIK the starting rating is the one that counts. I don’t know if that was always the case, but I’m pretty sure that it is actually.

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Well, that certainly explains it. Thanks for the clarification. It feels like a terrible and frankly amateurish decision to have the fight carry no casualties as time progresses, but I guess someone on the dev team was worried about players parking on the node and waiting to get easier rewards. Wish they’d just scaled the rewards down over time instead to let the player make their own risk/reward decisions. Ah, well.

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Yes, you still have to try and see, no automated scaling.