2026-09-07 14:49:50
Anonymous:
Vision: replace sixteen-target cap with bounded Choir exception
hold the flood/mechanics/combat.md ..
@@ 379,50 379,21 @@
---
-
## 12. The Choir Cascade — Combat's ruling on damage, eligibility, hop ordering and caps
+
## 12. The Choir Cascade — finite environmental exception
-
[Equipment's Echo Relay](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay) states plainly: *"Combat still owns damage, eligible enemies, hop ordering and numerical target caps."* Those four are ruled here. The item, its acquisition, its chassis and its costs are Equipment's and are not touched.
+
**2026-09-07 · Game Visionary disposition after PMR011.** [Combat r13 / 600893](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat?revision=600893#12-the-choir-cascade--combats-ruling-on-damage-eligibility-hop-ordering-and-caps) correctly showed that ordinary Arc damage would make the flagship build weaker than its parts and correctly separated Crust from Heavy. Its four-origin/sixteen-body answer is superseded because it explicitly did not deliver the owner's screen-wipe target. The full prior reasoning remains in history.
-
**Why this matters more than an ordinary interface answer.** [The owner's direction](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#game-vision) names the second desired reaction as *"I made a ridiculous build work"*, gives *"finally making a full screen-wipe combination work"* as the example, and says **spectacular crowd-clearing combinations need a place in the design.** The Cascade is the design's answer to that. **So these caps are not bookkeeping — they decide whether the answer lands.**
+
### Current rule
-
### The four rulings
+
- A tuned Choir network is a finite, visibly outlined wet footprint with seven connected bells and a master bell. It is an environmental discovery, not an Echo Relay item.
+
- The player brings Coil, Arc and two separately linked full Batteries. Firing both through the master bell empties both banks and trips the network dark for the rest of the expedition.
+
- Coil first stuns conducting bodies in the footprint. The network then gives **each stunned ordinary body in that footprint one Choir strike; that body dies.** A body is claimed once. Because the whole marked footprint fires together, no origin order or four-/seven-origin subtotal is needed.
+
- This lethal result is **Choir-specific**. Away from a tuned network, Coil and Arc retain §§0.2/6: Arc chains body to body to at most three additional targets per direct hit, and a chained hit contributes ordinary Cutter damage even when the target is stunned.
+
- Crust is untouched because it does not conduct. A Heavy conducts and takes one strike, not the ten hits needed to kill it. Dry bodies, bodies outside the lit footprint and a later wave survive.
-
| | Ruling |
-
| --- | --- |
-
| **Damage** | **A chained hit kills a stunned *ordinary* body outright.** Against an unstunned body a chain hop is what it has always been — one ordinary cutter-hit contribution, three of which kill a Walker. **A [Heavy](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign) is not an ordinary body:** ten hits, so one chained hit does not kill it stunned or otherwise |
-
| **Eligible enemies** | Any conducting body. **[Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) is neither target nor hop**, as Equipment already has it. **Stunned bodies are eligible** — they conduct, and the Cascade's whole point is that they are stunned |
-
| **Hop ordering** | Origins resolve in a fixed order: **the tuned landmark nearest the surveyor first**, then outward. Within an origin, [R11](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) applies — nearest first, then nearest the surveyor. **A body claimed by an earlier origin is not eligible for a later one**, which is Equipment's "one organism may be hit by only one origin", made deterministic |
-
| **Numerical target cap** | **Four origins per activation.** With the existing three-additional-target cap that is at most **sixteen bodies**, and it does not grow because a district authored more landmarks |
-
-
### One term to retire: there are no "armoured" enemies
-
-
[Echo Relay e3ffcf](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay) asks Combat to *"confirm eligible ordinary/armoured classifications"*, and its restrictions say *"Crust, isolated armoured enemies and bodies beyond the wet landmark footprint survive."* **There is no armoured class.** The word appears only on Equipment's pages — not in the [shared contract](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction), not on [Campaign](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign), not here — and under [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) there are no armour values, resistances or multipliers anywhere in the design.
-
-
**Two real things are probably being reached for, and they behave differently:**
-
-
- **The [Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust)** — does not conduct, so it is neither target nor hop. Equipment already names it separately in the same sentence, correctly.
-
- **The [Heavy](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign)** — conducts normally and is a perfectly ordinary chain target. It simply takes **ten hits instead of three**, so a single chained hit does not kill it *even when it is stunned*: the kill-a-stunned-body ruling above resolves one hit's worth of lethality against an ordinary body, and a Heavy is not one.
-
-
**So the correct sentence for the Relay's restrictions is:** *"Crust, Heavies, and bodies beyond the wet landmark footprint survive"* — the Crust because current never reaches it, the Heavy because one chained hit is not ten. That is a better restriction than the vague one, because a player can see which bodies those are. **Offered to Equipment as a wording fix; their page, their edit.**
-
-
### Why "kills a stunned body" rather than a damage number
-
-
**It is the only version I can give that makes the Cascade worth building and does not invent a damage ladder.** Take the alternative first: if a chain hop stays one cutter-hit contribution, then the Cascade delivers one hit to sixteen bodies and **kills nothing** — a three-hit Walker walks away from it. Twenty charge, six of eight cells, an authored discovery and a one-per-shelter activation would buy less than an ordinary arc burst, which lands roughly twenty direct hits over ten seconds. **The spectacular build would be weaker than the parts it is made of**, and that is not a balance opinion, it is arithmetic.
-
-
The ruling avoids that without touching [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat): **it adds no damage value and no new status.** It is one interaction between two statuses this page already has — *stunned* and *chained* — and it reads in one sentence: **a body that cannot brace does not survive the current.** It also explains, mechanically, the thing Equipment argues structurally: *"removing Coil removes the wet pulse, removing Arc removes damage."* Under this ruling the coil is not merely the trigger's ticket — **the stun is what makes the arc lethal**, so the combination is genuinely more than the sum of its parts, which is the "ridiculous build" reaction rather than a bigger number.
-
-
### The honest arithmetic, and the gap to "screen-wipe"
-
-
**This is a broad, earned, capped clear. It is not a screen-wipe, and the owner's example was a screen-wipe.** Stated plainly rather than left for a reviewer:
-
-
- One activation: the whole connected wet crowd is **stunned for eight seconds** (coil, unchanged), and **at most sixteen of them die** (four origins × four bodies).
-
- Against the surge sizes in the shared rules — forty to a hundred and forty — that is **a quarter of a small surge and a ninth of a large one.**
-
-
**The cap is the dial, and I would rather hand PM a dial with a stated cost than a promise.** Raising the origin cap raises the clear proportionally: eight origins is thirty-two bodies. What it costs is **legibility of what just happened** — sixteen deaths seeded from four visible landmarks is readable as *"my four bells did that"*; thirty-two from eight is closer to a screen going blank, which is what the owner asked for and also what makes the moment uninspectable. **My recommendation is to ship four, watch the moment in an authorized play phase, and treat the cap as the first thing to raise.** Nothing on this page can tell anyone whether sixteen feels spectacular.
-
-
**And the honest third option, which I do not recommend but will not hide.** A true wipe needs either damage numbers, which [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) argues against and PM has scoped as a recommendation rather than a ban, or unbounded propagation, which was [R10](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) and was declined. **If the owner's Magcraft reaction is the actual target and sixteen will not reach it, that is the decision to reopen** — and it should be reopened deliberately, by the Lead, not smuggled in through an origin count.
+
### Why this exception earns its place
-
**One correction to my own record while I am here.** r5 of this page called R10 *"a screen-clear with a story attached, which is what PM saw and I did not."* That was the wrong criticism. **The problem with R10 was that it was unbounded and unearned, not that it was spectacular** — the owner wants spectacular. The bounded model plus Equipment's landmark origins reaches the same feeling by multiplying *where a chain begins* rather than removing the limit on how far it travels, and that is the better design. The withdrawal stands; the reason for it is corrected.
+
Without the network, the same five-cell rack can stun the basin and use standard Arc while the player fights, but it cannot erase the room. With the network, prior observation, a cargo-heavy loadout, two full banks, crowd positioning and a one-use authored place convert familiar tools into the promised ridiculous build. The visible basin is both preview and numerical bound; clearing every eligible body inside it is bounded propagation, not a global rule or an unbounded chain. Whether the crowd size, readability, timing, performance and aftermath feel spectacular remains untested.
