2026-09-06 21:42:16
Anonymous:
CMB101 r5: answers PMR005. Withdraws the Heavy wording request and the nineteen-kill-motes argument that supported it, recalculated under D023's shelter-selected pickup priority - the Heavy's case is real but rests on the large mote and the blocked route, not on that number. Narrows the tint finding: PM is right that the two quoted sentences can both be true, so the contradiction claim is withdrawn and the cue-budget concern underneath it is stated instead. Corrects the cable reel against Equipment U6. Checks Encounter B against the Carrier's stated twelve-metre range rather than asserting the range changes nothing, and names the fourth option the bound creates. Corrects the escort-that-does-not-give-up line. Adds a revision log at the foot so the body reads as the current proposal.
hold the flood/enemies.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Enemies and Encounters
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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 Both are corrected and re-checked, and the Crust's “harmless confusion” claim is withdrawn.** The joint effect table PM asked Combat and Equipment to produce is on [Combat Rules §0B](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), along with four withdrawals.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*.
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**CMB101 · r5 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — changes required (PMR005).**
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r5 answers [PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005). **The Heavy wording request is withdrawn** (PM declines it, and is right that a number is inspectable where a phrase is not); **the “nineteen kill motes” argument behind it is withdrawn** under [D023](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief)'s selected pickup priority; **the tint finding is narrowed** from a contradiction to a cue-budget concern; **the cable reel claim is corrected** against Equipment's actual revised definition; **the Carrier gains one complete behaviour definition** with a stated twelve-metre acquisition range, loss-of-target condition, pursuit precedence and beacon fallback, and Encounter B is checked against that distance. r4 corrected both encounters after [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004); the full history is in the revision log at the foot of this page.
[R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) says there are no damage numbers, and §1 below says none of my six has more health than another. A body that takes ten hits looks like exactly the stat enemy the Expansion Brief warns about, and that was my first reading.
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**It is not, and the Campaign page's own argument is the one that persuaded me:** under the collection rule two empty batteries fill together, so a two-battery rack needs about nineteen kill motes before its first discharge, and heavies are how a district that hands the player two batteries early can pay for them — a walking large mote, five units at a time. That is a systems job, not a difficulty knob, and it solves a real problem in the charge economy that nothing in my roster addresses. Recorded as being persuaded, by the Lead, on this page (Wiki Conventions §11f).
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**It is not, and the Campaign page's argument persuaded me:** a Heavy is a walking large mote, five units in one pickup where the cutter earns one at a time, and it blocks a route while it does it. That is a systems job, not a difficulty knob.
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**The clause I still ask for.** State the Heavy's resistance as *"cannot be cleared by the cutter in useful time"* rather than as a hit count of ten. Same behaviour, same few seconds of cutter, same decision — stun and pass, kill for the charge, or route around. The difference is that a published hit-count ladder is the first thing [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) will price a weapon against, and once one weapon is "good against heavies" the design has the damage curve it spent nine revisions not having. A wording request, not a design objection.
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**Corrected in r4.** r3 supported this with the Campaign page's "about nineteen kill motes before a two-bank rack's first discharge", which rested on most-room collection. **[D023](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief) selects shelter-selected pickup priority instead**, under which the player fills one chosen bank first — about ten kills, not nineteen. So the case for the Heavy is real but smaller than r3 made it, and it should rest on the large mote and the blocked route rather than on a number that has since changed.
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**The clause I asked for is withdrawn in r4.** r3 asked that the Heavy's resistance be stated as *"cannot be cleared by the cutter in useful time"* rather than as ten hits. **[PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005) declines it and is right:** replacing a number with a phrase makes the weapon and crowd consequences harder to inspect without removing the durability that caused the concern. **Keep the explicit provisional ten**, and let a reader-facing document summarise it. The underlying worry — that a published ladder is what [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) prices weapons against — stays as the scoped recommendation in [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), which is a recommendation and not a ban.
### 0.3 Static and Carrier — one role, and which half of each to keep
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**The Lead decides**, as integrator. This page proceeds on the merged version; the only beat that depends on it is Encounter B's, where the surge enters the channel the surveyor is standing beside, so a bounded range changes nothing there.
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### 0.4 One disagreement between the Lead's two pages, reported
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### 0.4 A cue-budget concern — narrowed in r4, because r3 overstated it
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r3 reported the contract's *"enemy variants by size and tint"* and Campaign's *"readable by size, silhouette or spark, not by tint alone"* as a contradiction between the Lead's two pages. **[PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005) is right that they are not — both can be true — and the finding is withdrawn as stated.**
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Contract §8 states the readable-state convention as *"enemy variants by size and tint"*. Campaign §4 states, of the same roster, *"readable by size, silhouette or spark, not by tint alone"*, and adds *"health and tint are not roles"*. The second is right, and the first is the older sentence carried forward from the one-enemy scope where "variants" meant something else. [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) agrees with Campaign §4 and goes one step further: glow should carry one bit only — has charge to shed, or does not — because spent-ness, non-conduction and imminent discharge cannot all ride brightness in a crowd of a hundred and forty. **Reported to the Lead as two sentences that should be one; not edited, because both pages are theirs.**
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**The concern underneath it stands, and is smaller and more useful.** Four different facts want a cue: which role a body is, whether it still has charge to shed, whether current reaches it, and whether it is about to discharge. **Brightness cannot carry more than one of them.** My proposal is glow = remaining yield, encrustation = non-conduction, flicker = imminent discharge, silhouette and position = role. **The Lead should state which redundant cues carry which fact.** No readability claim on this page is verified, and prose cannot verify one.
### 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"). *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.
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- **The cable reel — and a correction to what r2 and r3 said about it.** They quoted the Lead's original sketch, "lays a conductor between two wet points across dry ground", and used it to argue R10 mattered more. **Both are wrong now.** R10 is withdrawn, and [Equipment U6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) revises the reel to a **one-cell, six-metre reel limited to exposed power terminals on an already traversable path** — deliberately *not* an arbitrary wet-point connector, so that water and valves keep their significance. Against that definition the reel is a **power-routing** tool, not a conduction-topology one: it can bring a terminal's power somewhere a beacon or hatch can use it, which is a [Grounder](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Grounder) interaction, not an arc one.
### 0.6 The merged roster, and what it costs
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**Why this set and not another.** The design's spine has four clauses — conduction, power, attraction, charge. A roster that covers all four with the fewest bodies is the one that teaches the spine rather than decorating it. Anchor, Carrier and Grounder each deform **attraction** in a different direction (ignore it, replace its target, remove its source). Crust and Spark deform **conduction** in opposite directions (will not carry current, will not stop carrying it). Charge is deformed by Carrier a second time, through [R5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat). Power is deformed by Grounder. Nothing deforms **conduction inside the rack**, and that is deliberate: the rack is Equipment's, and an enemy that reached into it would be reaching across an interface.
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**The credible alternative I rejected.** The obvious sixth role, and the one most survivorlikes would pick, is a **tracker**: an enemy that, once it has seen you, pursues without limit and never drifts back, converting your mistakes into a growing tail. It is a good role and it would work here. I left it out because it is the one role on my shortlist that adds a clause rather than subtracting one — "some bodies ignore range" is a new fact about pursuit, where the other five are all "this body answers a different question". It is also the role most easily faked by a Carrier: a player carrying twenty units of charge *has* an escort that does not give up, and the way to shake it is to spend the charge, which is a decision rather than a footrace. If a later authorized phase shows the roster needs unrelenting pressure, the tracker is the first thing I would add and I would add it knowing it costs a clause.
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**The credible alternative I rejected.** The obvious sixth role, and the one most survivorlikes would pick, is a **tracker**: an enemy that, once it has seen you, pursues without limit and never drifts back, converting your mistakes into a growing tail. It is a good role and it would work here. I left it out because it is the one role on my shortlist that adds a clause rather than subtracting one — "some bodies ignore range" is a new fact about pursuit, where the other five are all "this body answers a different question". It is also the role partly covered by a Carrier: a player carrying twenty units acquires an escort within a Carrier's range, and the ways to shake it — spend the charge, or leave the range — are decisions rather than a footrace. **Corrected in r4:** r2 said "an escort that does not give up", which was true only of the unbounded Carrier that [§0.3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) withdraws. The bounded Carrier does give up, and a tracker would still be a genuinely different thing. If a later authorized phase shows the roster needs unrelenting pressure, the tracker is the first thing I would add and I would add it knowing it costs a clause.
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| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **[Walker](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Walker)** | A dispatch; then any lit beacon it can reach | Walks to the nearest lit beacon, holds, presses, chases within range | Mass. 40–140 per surge | Route it with the panel; thin an edge; stun it in water | Lighting a branch is what brings it there |
| **[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 |
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| **[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 |
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| **[Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier)** | Loose charge within its **twelve-metre acquisition range** — a mote, a bank with units in it, a planted beacon's battery | Walks to the nearest such source and takes it; reverts to ordinary Walker behaviour when none is in range | Inside that range it comes to you regardless of light, and it eats your harvest | Spend the charge; walk out of range; plant a beacon as a decoy; kill it and take the mote back | Spending is irreversible; walking out of range is usually walking away from the work; the beacon costs two cells and a bank |
| **[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 |
| **[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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### Checking this scene against its own rules
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- **Does the Carrier's twelve-metre range change this scene? No, and here is the distance.** [PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005) rightly refused to take that on assertion. The surveyor is standing on the dry bank *beside* the yard channel — that is where the coil is discharged from and where the motes are collected — and the surge enters the channel and wades down it past that position. Bodies in the channel are therefore within twelve metres of the surveyor for most of their walk, so the Carriers acquire and the beat is unchanged. **What the bound does change is the option that is missing from this scene:** under the unbounded version there was no way to shake them at all, and under the bounded one *walking away from the channel* is a real fourth answer — which costs the harvest, the discharge and the burst, i.e. the whole expedition's payoff. That is the choice the range exists to create. ✔
- **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)*
- **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. ✔
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## Set aside, for the record
r1 of this page was PM's seeded source summary of GDD r13 §§3–4 and 15, plus the CMB101 assignment brief. Its factual summary of the existing single enemy is superseded by §§1–2 above, which now state the same behaviour as the Walker role. **Its assignment text is deliberately not retained inline**, because this revision is the answer to it; it is preserved in full at [r1 c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228). Nothing else was on the page. The seed's ownership line — Combat and Enemy Designer intended owner, Lead interim — is now discharged: this role is staffed and this page is adopted.
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## Revision log
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Kept short, so the sections above are the current proposal and this is the history. Full text of every revision is in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/history).
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| Rev | What it did |
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| --- | --- |
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| **r5** | Answered [PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005). Withdrew the Heavy wording request and the "nineteen kill motes" argument under D023; narrowed the tint finding to a cue-budget concern; corrected the cable reel against Equipment U6's actual definition; gave the Carrier one complete bounded behaviour definition and checked Encounter B against the stated distance; corrected the "escort that does not give up" line in §1. |
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| **r4** | Answered [PMR004 §2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004), which found real errors in both encounters. Encounter A had 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 corrected and re-checked, and the scene now ends on a rule nobody had used — charge left in a bank is lost at the dock. The Grounder beat now runs the retarget test before spreading. The Crust's "harmless confusion" claim withdrawn. The elites recommendation rescoped as a price list, not a prohibition. |
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| **r3** | Reconciled with DES104, which the Lead published while r2 was being drafted: two rosters merged into one of eight, the base role renamed Drifter → Walker, Floater adopted unchanged and left to Campaign, Heavy accepted, Static and Carrier identified as one concept designed twice. |
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| **r2** | Adopted this page from PM's seed and answered the assignment on it: six roles, two encounters, the elites recommendation, the campaign arc. |
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| **r1** | PM's seeded source summary and the CMB101 assignment brief — [c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228). |
