  We present numerical relativity simulations of cosmological scenarios in
which the universe is smoothed and flattened by undergoing a phase of slow
contraction and test their sensitivity to a wide range of initial conditions.
Our numerical scheme enables the variation of all freely specifiable physical
quantities that characterize the initial spatial hypersurface, such as the
initial shear and spatial curvature contributions as well as the initial field
and velocity distributions of the scalar that drives the cosmological
evolution. In particular, we include initial conditions that are far outside
the perturbative regime of the well-known attractor scaling solution. We
complement our numerical results by analytically performing a complete
dynamical systems analysis and show that the two approaches yield consistent
results.
