Stages, encounter pressure and scaling

Normal stage bindings retain passive targets. Opt-in fixtures separately implement credit-funded group arrivals and boss reinforcements; their shooter can fight/search. For example, a future purchase after a clear follows its credit profile's interval, while the normal production path still uses legacy pacing. These are separate modes, never two schedulers stacked on the same encounter.

The current authored sequence contains four entries but only three unique scene names. The first stage is Verdant Relay; later prototype maps remain part of the foundation rather than a finished production campaign.

Stage position	Scene	Purpose/status
1	VerdantRelay	Hand-authored first-stage iteration
2	PrototypeStageTwo	Second prototype layout
3	PrototypeArena	Greybox/foundation layout
4	PrototypeStageTwo	Reused layout
Later	PrototypeStageTwo	Current source clamps to final sequence entry

Encounter loop

The retained stage trigger is 40 eligible kills before boss admission. Survivors remain; boss defeat clears adds without kill/loot credit and begins the checkpoint flow. In the opt-in credit mode, exploration finances/work are discarded and a separate boss profile starts only after live boss birth. Director nonboss admission limits are at most 16; the singleton boss is outside that count. Legitimate finite children may exceed it and then block purchases (ledger contract; actual splitting still planned). See the latest population amendment; the research's earlier universal 17-actor cap is superseded for this direction.

Legacy production pacing

The retained non-credit path alternates build, high-pressure and recovery beats. The following source defaults are not the new credit director's schedule; actual scene overrides still matter. For example, a lower recovery cap pauses new admissions without deleting survivors.

Beat	Duration	Interval multiplier	Alive cap
Build pressure	20 s	0.8	10
High pressure	25 s	0.36	16
Recovery	15 s	1.6	5

Early-stage source interval multipliers are 2 / 1.6 / 1.3 for stages 1 / 2 / 3; stage 4 onward defaults to 1. Higher interval multipliers mean slower spawning. Lower caps pause replenishment without deleting living actors or accumulating an unbounded spawn backlog.

Toughness and difficulty

Source health scale is min(8, 1.20^(stage−1)); source outgoing-damage scale is min(3, 1.08^(stage−1)), with bounded stage exponent handling. Normal/elite/boss profiles and attack-specific overrides are additional channels. Do not multiply legacy hidden elite fields as well as shared profile values.

Gameplay difficulty also depends on pack admission/arrival, player positions, cover, enemy composition, control and build economy. Four-player hardware/feel acceptance remains a separate test concern.

Source: sequence asset, stage resolver, pacing rules, encounter director, run scaling.