Junkyard Gang Showdown question

[Easyprey]

Hi, y'all.

I was meaning to ask if anybody knows if there is some scaling involved in the junkyard showdown between Black Eels and Scrapper.

While I was doing an old playthrough I came upon a discussion that explained how to exploit the showdown in order to loot a few Protectorate corpses:

• pick to fight from old junkyard
• start fight an hide
• wait (reload) untill protectorate have it bad

Apparently sometimes the 4 protectorate soldiers should freeze after entering the Scrappers' hideout. I have never seen this happen though.

But, in that old playthrough, I managed to get serveral times where one, two or even three Cans where lying dead afterwards. (I was aiming for four, doh!)

Now that I'm doing a new melee playthrough, I gave a shot at it and this time the Protectorate soldier are just wasting everyone without losing more than 10% of shields (did a few reloads).
It doesn't really look like the Scrappers have the slightest fighting chance. I think they're non even drawing their weapons

So, what gives? Are the odds so unfavorable to the scrappers that they can't kill even one measly Protectorate?

That would kind of make sense, storywise, but if so, how did they manage to kill 3 Cans it in my old game?

My question is: has it something to do with my level\the game difficulty\something else I did?

[Albert Altmann]

Level is of no consequence, but difficulty might have an effect on the outcome. It's likely that Protectorate schmucks benefit more from higher difficulty settings due to their base stats, equipment, etc., which makes them outscale some shitty gangsters despite increased difficulty values being the same for them and gansters alike.

Could also just be plain variance. Perhaps you should conduct the showdown experiment a couple hundred times more for more comprehensive data

[Easyprey]

Level is of no consequence, but difficulty might have an effect on the outcome. It's likely that Protectorate schmucks benefit more from higher difficulty settings due to their base stats, equipment, etc., which makes them outscale some shitty gangsters despite increased difficulty values being the same for them and gansters alike.

Yeah, I thought of that too. I'll try to see if I have the old savegame available because I can't remember for sure if the old game was on Hard difficulty too or not.

Could also just be plain variance. Perhaps you should conduct the showdown experiment a couple hundred times more for more comprehensive data

I'll definitely try a few things.

[Easyprey]

Found 2 major differences:

Old game: I was lv 11, game difficulty was normal

New game : I'm lv 8, game difficulty hard

I can try to delay the showdown and see if I can level up. No idea if that has an impact though.

[Antalos]

Your character level doesn't matter, of course, but the difficulty of the game does, and in this case it turns out that the scrappers simply don't measure up to the Protectorate in stats and armor, that's all.

[Deep Driller]

Are the odds so unfavorable to the scrappers that they can't kill even one measly Protectorate?

More often than not they should kill at least one soldier. With SGS they somehow managed to kill two.

Although, and that is already explained above, game difficulty matters. Soldiers outmatch gangsters. If you start on easy/normal there's 90% chance of you getting at least one ally corpse, be that of SGS or Protectorate. Sometimes even Silas can get an unlucky crit and whole Eel party may appear dead.

Me personally always attacked with Eels. That always (again, depending on difficulty) resulted in one heavy trooper body. Probably them dogs and sniper at the entrance did it, I dunno.