What determines horde night difficulty?

[Sjustus548]

I know gamestage is what determines how difficult the horde nights will be but there are times where the difficulty seems to vary for some unknown reason.  For example, we will have a difficult horde night with several demolishers and radiated cops showing up but then the next one will only have regular cops and maybe one demolisher.  We didn't die so our days alive, zombie kills, and level have all gone up so I would assume a higher gamestage would make for a harder horde night.  The only thing I can think of is that maybe the gamestage has a range of horde night difficulties that it can draw from.  So sometimes it can go on the more difficult side and sometimes on the easier.  Not sure but would love to get some of your opinions and knowledge on this.  

[stample]

It is (kinda was) moderately random, where the "randomly chosen" zeds are picked from a pool of potentially harder zombies, but you might not get cops/demos/rad vultures etc. on any given hordenight.  That's the simple answer.

 

The complicated answer is the same as above, just understand that "randomly chosen" refers to a table that was generated in the past, for each small range of difficulty, and now exists statically in entitygroups.xml, starting with feralHordeStageGS1

 

If you look at your GS just before horde, you can actually see what horde you will get by finding where you fall in this table.

 

For example, if you are GS70, you'd get feralHordeStageGS69, which is the first horde that can have any radiated zombie (vulture in this case)

But if you were GS74, you'd get feralHordeStageGS74, which has no radiateds, but does have cops.