2026-09-06 21:36:42
Anonymous:
CMB101 r4: answers PMR004 section 2 on both written encounters, which had real errors. Encounter A wrongly let a fixed-powered channel go inert one second after the coil pulse; the yard has been lit since 7:30, so the channel is energised throughout and insulation is the entry fee rather than a hedge. Encounter B's bank arithmetic left two empty banks where the rules leave one full one, and ignored the cohort arriving after the discharge; both cohorts, both bank states and the burst's actual yield are now shown, and the scene ends on a rule nobody had used - charge left in a battery is lost at the dock, so the last decision is whether to dump a bank that is already worthless. The Grounder beat now runs the retarget test before spreading. The Crust's harmless-confusion claim is withdrawn. The elites recommendation is rescoped as a price list rather than a prohibition. Roles, roster merge and campaign arc unchanged.
hold the flood/enemies.md ..
@@ 1,7 1,7 @@
# Hold the Flood — Enemies and Encounters
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**CMB101 · r3 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — first submission of this role.**
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r3 reconciles this submission with DES104, which the Lead published while it was being drafted: §0 is new, and the base role is **renamed from Drifter to Walker**, the Lead’s name for the same role. r2 adopted this page from PM's seed and answers the assignment on it: six behaviour roles, two contrasting mixed encounters checked against the declared rules, an elites-and-bosses recommendation, and the early/middle/late campaign arc. The shared grammar the roles are written against is on the new [Combat Rules](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) page. **Renamed in r3: Drifter → Walker**, throughout, to match the Lead's Campaign page; the reason is in §0.1 and the r2 wording is in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/history). r2 removed nothing but PM's r1 assignment brief, which is preserved in [r1 c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228) and pointed to under *Set aside, for the record*.
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**CMB101 · r4 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — first submission of this role.**
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r4 answers [PMR004 §2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004), which found real errors in both written encounters. **Encounter A wrongly let a fixed-powered channel go inert; Encounter B's bank arithmetic left two empty banks where the rules leave one full one, and ignored the cohort that arrived after the discharge. Both are corrected and re-checked, and the Crust's “harmless confusion” claim is withdrawn.** The joint effect table PM asked Combat and Equipment to produce is on [Combat Rules §0B](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), along with four withdrawals. r3 reconciles this submission with DES104, which the Lead published while it was being drafted: §0 is new, and the base role is **renamed from Drifter to Walker**, the Lead’s name for the same role. r2 adopted this page from PM's seed and answers the assignment on it: six behaviour roles, two contrasting mixed encounters checked against the declared rules, an elites-and-bosses recommendation, and the early/middle/late campaign arc. The shared grammar the roles are written against is on the new [Combat Rules](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) page. **Renamed in r3: Drifter → Walker**, throughout, to match the Lead's Campaign page; the reason is in §0.1 and the r2 wording is in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/history). r2 removed nothing but PM's r1 assignment brief, which is preserved in [r1 c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228) and pointed to under *Set aside, for the record*.
### 0.5 Two gifts from DES104 that this page did not have
- **The prod** (Campaign §4: "pushes and never kills") is the best answer to the [Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark) anyone has proposed, including me: a Spark is only dangerous when killed, and the prod is a weapon that does not kill. It also answers the Spark's hardest constraint, that the cutter cannot be withheld ([R6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)) — the prod gives the player a way to move a body out of reach instead of shooting it. **Under R6 it must publish its targeting rule**: what it selects, whether it can be withheld, and what its line looks like. **And one ruling I make on my own side rather than route:** displacement is *movement*, not a status. It has no duration and nothing reads it off a body, so [R7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)'s list stays closed at three.
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- **The cable reel** (Campaign §4: "lays a conductor between two wet points across dry ground") makes [R10](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) more consequential, not less: a player who can join two wet places can also decide how far an arc chain travelling through energised water reaches. That is a good interaction, and another reason the Lead should rule on R10 explicitly rather than leave it to be inferred from clause 1.
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- **The cable reel** (Campaign §4: "lays a conductor between two wet points across dry ground"). *r3 argued this made [R10](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) more consequential; **r4 withdraws R10**, so what the reel actually does for combat is change which water is one connected body — which changes what a single coil discharge stuns and what it sheds, and that is interaction enough.* It also, usefully, gives a district a way to make a dry chokepoint stunnable without a district-scale valve.
### 0.6 The merged roster, and what it costs
@@ 98,7 98,7 @@
| **[Anchor](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Anchor)** | Nothing. It is already standing in the water when you arrive | Walks to the lowest wet ground and stays | A permanent contact hazard on the wet route; unmoved by any routing you do | Kill it; drain its channel with a field pump; route around | A bundle for the pump, or the time and health to kill, or the longer road |
| **[Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier)** | Loose charge within reach — a mote, your battery, a planted beacon's battery | Walks to the nearest loose charge and takes it | It comes to you regardless of light, and it eats your harvest | Spend the charge; plant a beacon as a decoy; kill it and take the mote back | Spending is irreversible; the beacon costs two slots and a battery |
| **[Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust)** | A dispatch, like a Walker | Walks to the beacon; **does not conduct** | It stands unstunned inside your stunned crowd, and it ends an arc chain | The cutter, and where you stand | It is the one body you must kill by hand, while collecting |
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| **[Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark)** | Being killed while standing in water | Energises the connected water for 1 second | Your own automatic weapon does this to you | Insulation; kill it from dry ground; leave it alone | A slot, or a worse position, or leaving a body alive behind you |
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| **[Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark)** | Being killed while standing in water | Energises the connected water for 2 seconds — dangerous to the surveyor, and to nothing else | Your own automatic weapon does this to you | Insulation; kill it from dry ground; keep out of its reach | A slot, or a worse position, or the ground you would rather be standing on |
| **[Grounder](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Grounder)** | A powered cable run within reach | Climbs it and grounds it; the beacon on that run flickers, then goes dark | Your routing plan expires while you are elsewhere | Kill it; re-switch the panel; plant your own beacon; take the long way | Crossing the crowd you parked, or moving the crowd onto yourself, or two slots, or time |
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@@ 117,8 117,8 @@
| 8:00–8:25 | They wade down the channel toward the beacon. The player waits on the dry bank, outside pursuit range. The cutter has no target and fires at nothing. | Stack lines 1 and 3 |
| 8:25 | About 44 are in the water — 40 Walkers and 4 Crusts. The player steps into the channel edge and discharges the coil. Battery 10 → 0. | GDD §5: a discharge spends the whole battery, and to reach a channel you must be in it |
| 8:25 | **The stun takes 44 bodies: 40 Walkers and the 4 Anchors.** The 4 Crusts standing in the same water do not conduct and do not stop. | [R7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat); [Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) |
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| 8:25 | **The shed: one 5-unit large mote per complete ten stunned. 44 stunned → 4 large motes, 20 units**, lying along the stunned mass. The four Anchors are now spent and stop glowing; the channel's charge is gone for the rest of the expedition. | GDD §4 clause 4, §5; [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| 8:26 | The water goes inert. The insulation was load-bearing for exactly that one second. | **[R3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) — open question C1; this beat is where it bites** |
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| 8:25 | **The shed: one 5-unit large mote per complete ten stunned. 44 stunned → 4 large motes, 20 units**, lying along the stunned mass. The four Anchors are now spent and stop glowing; the channel's charge is gone for the rest of the expedition. | Contract clause 4; [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| 8:25–8:33 | **The channel does not go inert, and never was inert.** The panel has been on yard since 7:30, so this channel is on a live circuit and its water has been energised the whole time — which is why GDD §5's electrician stands in it *in insulation*. The coil's own eight seconds of powered water add nothing the player was not already standing in; the discharge's contribution is the stun. **Insulation is the entry fee for this whole encounter, not a hedge against one second.** | Contract clauses 1–2; GDD §3 (1 health/second in energised water, insulated excepted); GDD §5. **Corrected in r4 — [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) found r3 letting a fixed-powered channel expire with the coil pulse, which was wrong.** The reading that fixed power energises the branch's water is open question C10 |
| 8:26–8:33 | Seven seconds of stun left to collect in. The battery is empty and holds ten, so **at most two of the four motes can be banked**; the other ten units cannot be taken however fast the player moves. | GDD §5 (a battery holds 10; a full one takes nothing) and §6, which states this break-even in the same words |
| 8:26–8:33 | Six Crusts are loose — four of them standing among the stunned bodies. Any within pursuit range chase. Each takes three cutter hits. The cutter fires at the **nearest** body, which among 44 stunned Walkers is usually not the Crust closing on you; the target line shows which one it has picked. | Stack line 1; GDD §3; [R6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
| 8:33 | Stun ends. The 40 Walkers resume toward the beacon. **The four Anchors do not move.** The channel is still occupied, and re-routing will not change that. | Stack lines 2 and 3 |
@@ 132,12 132,14 @@
- **Shed.** 44 ÷ 10 = 4 complete tens → 4 large motes → 20 units. ✔ *(The "one per complete ten" rounding is a proposal; the source states the ratio but not the rounding.)*
- **Bankable.** Capacity 10, so 2 motes. This reproduces GDD §6 exactly: "a discharge spends ten, a stunned surge of forty sheds twenty, and a single battery can hold only ten of them". ✔
- **Anchors shed?** They were stunned in connected water, so yes — and they are therefore spent for the expedition, which is why the channel is worth nothing on a second visit that hour. ✔ Consistent with once-per-organism.
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- **Is the channel energised, and by what?** By the panel, from 7:30, for as long as the yard is lit — not by the coil, whose eight seconds are contained inside that. **r3 said the water went inert one second after the discharge, which contradicted its own setup; [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) found it and it is corrected above.** ✔ *(subject to C10, the reading that fixed power energises a branch's water; nothing else in the scene changes if the Lead rules otherwise, except that insulation becomes optional and the encounter gets easier)*
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- **Do the Anchors take damage standing in energised water all expedition?** No. Under the intensity rule in [§0B](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), energised water harms the surveyor and does nothing to organisms; only a bank-strength discharge reaches a body, and it stuns rather than damages. ✔
### What the encounter is actually for
**The six Crusts convert "collect everything" into "collect exactly two and leave."** The third and fourth motes are worth nothing to a one-battery rack, so a player who understands the battery cap takes two and walks out before the Crusts close. A player running the **harvester** rack — two batteries, GDD §5 — genuinely wants all four, and must therefore accept Crust contact to get them. **The composition prices the loadout without a single stat existing anywhere in it.** That is the whole argument for [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) in one scene.
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**What preparation changes.** Without insulation the discharge costs one health under R3, which is survivable — the insulation slot is bought for the *water*, not for the discharge. Without knowing what an Anchor is, the player throws the panel expecting a clear channel and is wrong. Without knowing what a Crust is, they step into the mote line expecting 44 stopped bodies and meet four that never stopped. **Neither mistake kills; both cost the harvest**, which is the right severity for a mid-campaign lesson.
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**What preparation changes. Rewritten in r4; r3 had this wrong.** Without insulation the player cannot run this encounter at all: the yard is lit, so the channel is energised, and every second in it costs one health from five ([§0B's intensity rule](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) and open question C10). The insulation slot is not a hedge, it is the entry fee — and that is the shape GDD §5's electrician rack already has. Without knowing what an Anchor is, the player throws the panel expecting a clear channel and is wrong. Without knowing what a Crust is, they step into the mote line expecting 44 stopped bodies and meet four that never stopped, and that mistake costs health rather than only the harvest, because a Crust resists the stun a spent Walker still receives.
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@@ 150,7 152,7 @@
| Time | What happens | Which rule says so |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 11:20 | The causeway beacon begins an irregular flicker, plainly not the dispatch pulse, which travels the *thin* cable from the panel. The forecast marks the causeway branch failing. Two bodies are visible on the thick cable at the causeway's interior end, off the ground. | [R9](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) (position identifies the role) |
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| 11:40 | The beacon goes dark. Line 3 stops applying to the held crowd and line 4 starts: **about 110 bodies spread along the causeway both ways**, including toward the causeway dock — the player's default way home. The ring stops being a ring and becomes a lengthening line. | GDD §4: with no reachable lit beacon a crowd spreads along its branch, both ways; [R2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| 11:40 | The beacon goes dark. **The crowd first re-evaluates line 3 and looks for another reachable lit beacon** — and finds none, because the panel's positions are exclusive, so with the panel on causeway the yard beacon is dark. Only then does line 4 apply: **about 110 bodies spread along the causeway both ways**, including toward the causeway dock, the player's default way home. The ring stops being a ring and becomes a lengthening line. | Stack lines 3 then 4; contract clause 2 (the panel powers one branch at a time, or none). **Corrected in r4: r3 went straight to spreading, which [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) rightly flagged as skipping the retarget test** |
| 11:40 | The player has four options and about twenty seconds to choose. Three are live; one is closed by the rack they packed. | below |
| 12:00 | Third dispatch, to whichever branch the panel now names: **140 bodies — 122 Walkers, 8 Carriers, 10 Sparks.** | GDD §4 |
@@ 167,26 169,27 @@
| Time | What happens | Which rule says so |
| --- | --- | --- |
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| 11:42 | Panel → yard. Yard beacon steady, hatch open. The spread causeway crowd retargets and begins crossing. Forecast updates both rings. | GDD §4; [R2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| 12:00–12:30 | 140 enter the yard channel: 122 Walkers, 8 Carriers, 10 Sparks. The player is on the dry bank, insulated. | GDD §4; composition budget: 122/140 = 87% Walkers, two non-Walker roles, Sparks placed in water ✔ |
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| 12:00–12:25 | The Carriers do not go to the beacon. They walk to the nearest loose charge, which is the player's two full batteries. The forecast draws the surveyor as their target. | Stack line 2; [Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier) |
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| 12:25 | About 100 are in the water. Discharge. Coil battery 10 → 0. **Stun takes every conducting body in the connected water — Walkers, Carriers and Sparks alike.** | GDD §5; [R7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| 12:25 | **100 stunned → 10 large motes, 50 units.** The coil's battery is empty (holds 10) and the arc's is full (takes nothing). **At most 10 of the 50 units can ever be banked.** | GDD §5; the once-per-organism yield |
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| 12:26–12:33 | Collection, against opposition: the eight Carriers are stunned for the same eight seconds and then walk to the motes and take them. Motes the player does not reach are not merely fading — they are being carried off, and killing the thief drops the mote again. | [R5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| 12:33 | Stun ends. The crowd recovers, packed in the channel and the doorway. | GDD §13's stated 8 s |
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| 12:33–12:43 | **The burst.** Arc battery 10 → 0 over ten seconds; cutter hits chain body to body. These bodies have already shed, so the burst returns **no motes** — it is a pure spend, exactly as GDD §13 says. | GDD §6, §13 |
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| 12:33–12:43 | **The Sparks.** Each Spark the chain kills in the water energises the connected channel for one second, and while the water is energised the chain travels through the water as well as body to body — so it reaches every conducting body the channel connects, not only the ones adjacent in the chain. With ten Sparks spread through the crowd, the channel is re-energised repeatedly across the burst. | **[R10](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), open question C7 — the largest single power spike in this submission and the one most in need of a ruling** |
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| 12:33–12:43 | The player is on the bank and insulated. An uninsulated player standing in that channel takes one health per second of energised water and dies inside the burst they triggered. | GDD §3; [R3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| after | Both batteries are empty. The Carriers still alive have nothing to walk toward and revert to line 3, the yard beacon. **Spending the charge is also how you stop being the target.** | Stack lines 2 and 3 |
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| 11:42 | Panel → yard. Yard beacon steady, hatch open. The spread causeway crowd retargets and begins crossing. Forecast updates both rings. | Contract clause 3; [R2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| 12:00–12:30 | 140 enter the yard channel: 122 Walkers, 8 Carriers, 10 Sparks. The player is on the dry bank, insulated. Two cohorts, because the difference matters below: **100 are in the water by 12:25** (including 5 Carriers and 7 Sparks); **40 arrive between 12:25 and 12:30** (3 Carriers, 3 Sparks). | Contract clause 3; composition budget: 122/140 = 87% Walkers, two non-Walker roles, Sparks placed in water ✔ |
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| 12:00–12:25 | The Carriers do not go to the beacon. They walk to the nearest reachable loose charge, which is the player's two full banks. The forecast draws the surveyor as their target. | Stack line 2; [Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier) |
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| 12:25 | About 100 are in the water. Discharge. **Coil bank 10 → 0.** Every conducting body in the connected water stuns for eight seconds — Walkers, Carriers and Sparks alike, including the 5 Carriers in that cohort. | GDD §5; [R7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |
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| 12:25 | **100 stunned → 10 large motes, 50 units.** Those 100 are now spent. The coil bank is empty and holds ten; **the arc bank is full and takes nothing**, so **at most 10 of the 50 units can ever be banked**. | Contract clause 4; the collection rule |
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| 12:25–12:33 | Collection, against opposition. The player banks **2 large motes, 10 units: coil bank 0 → 10.** The other 8 large motes are contested by the **3 Carriers who arrived after the discharge and were never stunned**; whatever they reach they carry, and killing one drops it back. The rest fade. The 5 stunned Carriers cannot compete for a harvest they were stunned in — which is worth stating, because it is where [R5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) does and does not bite. | [R5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat); motes fade in seconds |
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| 12:33 | Stun ends. The 100 recover, spent, packed in the channel and the doorway. The 40 late arrivals are **unshed**. | GDD §13's stated 8 s |
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| 12:33–12:43 | **The burst.** Arc bank 10 → 0 over ten seconds. Each cutter hit conducts to **at most three additional bodies, each once per hit, each hop needing proximity and line of sight**; the arc never energises the water. Kills among the spent 100 return nothing. Kills among the unshed 40 drop 1-unit motes — **and nothing can take them**: the coil bank is full at 10 and the arc bank is being drawn. They expire on the ground, visibly. | [Arc A1](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Arc), adopted in [§0B](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat); the drawn-bank rule |
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| 12:43 | **Bank state: coil 10, arc 0 — one full bank, not two empty ones.** So the surviving Carriers do not stop: the player is still the nearest reachable loose charge, and spending the arc did not buy safety. **r3 claimed both banks ended empty and that the Carriers therefore lost interest. That was an arithmetic error and [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) found it.** | Contract clause 4 |
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| 12:43+ | **And the last decision of the expedition falls out of a rule nobody had used yet: charge left in a battery is lost at the dock.** The coil's ten units are worth exactly nothing the moment the player extracts, so spending them costs nothing at all. A second discharge into the channel stuns everything in it for eight seconds — the 100 are spent and shed nothing more, but the **40 unshed late arrivals shed 4 large motes, 20 units** — and empties the bank, which is also what stops the Carriers following. The choice: **dump and run**, taking the stun and the clear road and banking nothing, or **dump and collect**, breaking even at ten units back for ten spent and paying for it in exposure with the evacuation window running. | Contract clause 4: "charge left in a battery at extraction is lost at the dock"; once-per-organism |
### Checking this scene against its own rules
- **Composition legal?** 122 of 140 Walkers = 87%, above the floor. Two non-Walker roles in the surge (Carrier, Spark); three in the district counting the Grounders, at the limit. Grounders are placed on a cable run rather than counted in a surge. Sparks enter water, not dry ground. ✔
- **Does the beacon go dark legally?** A Grounder removes power from a run; a beacon with no power is dark; a dark beacon draws nothing. No new meaning is given to a beacon, no dispatch is caused, and the panel's monopoly on the intake is untouched. This is the argument that R9 sits inside [World r20](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de)'s contract, and it is the argument World should check. ✔ *(pending C5)*
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- **Does the crowd really spread both ways?** Yes — GDD §4 states that with no reachable lit beacon a crowd spreads along its branch, and specifically that "off darkens both: every crowd spreads along its own branch, toward the docks as much as the interior". A Grounded branch is the same state arrived at differently. ✔
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- **Does the crowd really spread, and is that step skipped?** **Corrected in r4.** [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) is right that darkening a beacon does not by itself make a crowd spread: the crowd first re-evaluates line 3 and retargets to **any other reachable lit beacon**. It spreads only when there is none. Here there is none, and the reason is the panel: contract clause 2 makes the panel's positions **exclusive** — one branch at a time, or off — so with the panel on causeway the yard beacon is dark, and grounding the causeway's leaves nothing lit. That is why line 4 applies, and it is a fact about this district's topology rather than about the Grounder. ✔
- **Stun and shed arithmetic.** 100 in water → 10 complete tens → 10 large motes → 50 units. Coil battery capacity 10, arc battery full and being reserved for the burst → 10 units bankable at most, 40 not. ✔
- **Does the burst fit inside the stun?** **No, and deliberately not.** The stun is 8 s and the burst is 10 s, so the burst is spent from 12:33 on a *recovering* crowd, not a stunned one. This is the correction [PMR003](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR003) item 1 required of GDD §13 and which r13 supplied; this scene is built on the corrected sequence rather than re-introducing the error. ✔
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- **Does the burst return charge?** No. Every body in the channel shed at 12:25, and a shed body yields nothing further. The burst is funded entirely by the surge before it. ✔
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- **Does the burst return charge? Corrected in r4.** Not from the 100 stunned at 12:25, which are spent — but the **40 that arrived after the discharge have not shed**, so chained kills among them do drop 1-unit motes. r3 said the burst returned nothing, which ignored the late cohort; [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) asked for the cohorts to be separated and they now are. **Those motes are still lost**, for a different and more interesting reason: the coil bank is full at 10 and the arc bank is being drawn, so nothing eligible can take them. ✔
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- **Bank states, end to end.** Start: coil 10, arc 10 (20). 12:25 discharge: coil 10→0. Collection: coil 0→10 (2 large motes; the rest expire or are carried off). 12:33–12:43 burst: arc 10→0. **End: coil 10, arc 0.** r3 asserted two empty banks and drew a conclusion from it about the Carriers; both were wrong. ✔
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- **Is the closing dump legal?** Yes, and it costs nothing: a discharge needs a full linked bank, the coil's is full, and contract clause 4 says charge left in a battery at extraction is lost at the dock. The 100 spent bodies shed nothing more; the 40 unshed ones shed 4 large motes. ✔
### The contrast that makes the point
@@ 216,13 219,15 @@
The assignment asks for an assessment only with a reason. Mine is against creature bosses and against stat elites, and for two elite-*shaped* things that fit this design.
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**Scoped, after [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004).** PM is right that the owner's brief bans none of this, and that a compact grammar is a proposal rather than proof the alternatives are bad. So read what follows as *what a boss would cost this particular design and what I would build instead for less* — not as a prohibition, and not as a claim that bosses are bad in general. If the owner wants one, the design can have one; the reasons below are the price list.
+
**Against creature bosses**, for three reasons specific to this game rather than to taste:
1. **A boss is a damage race, and this game has no damage curve.** No XP, a fixed cutter, and an arc bounded three ways (GDD §6). To make a boss killable you would either invent a stat ladder — contradicting the no-XP bet and the Expansion Brief's warning about damage-bonus catalogues — or make it a machinery puzzle, in which case it *is* a machinery puzzle, and the design already has those and does them better. The relay room is the proof.
2. **A boss is understood once and then repeated.** This design's promise is the opposite: "the same place means something different once you know what its light means" (GDD §7). A set-piece that is solved and then re-executed inverts the one thing the game is selling.
3. **Asset cost.** A boss is a unique body, unique animation and unique cues. GDD §14 already records one enemy sprite as the project's first likely approval request. A boss per district would multiply the one line item PM has been asked to worry about.
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**Against stat elites** — a bigger, tougher, faster Walker — because that is precisely the "more health or a new tint" the Expansion Brief forbids, and because under [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) there is no health to add.
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**Against stat elites** — a bigger, tougher, faster Walker whose only distinction is the numbers — because that is the "more health or a new tint" the Expansion Brief warns about. **Narrowed in r4:** this is not an argument against different hit counts, which R8 permits and which [Campaign](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign)'s Heavy uses well for a stated economic reason (§0.2). It is an argument against a body whose *only* answer to "what does it change" is a number.
