2026-09-07 14:23:24
Anonymous:
CMB102 r12: rule the four things Equipment's Echo Relay assigns to Combat for the Choir Cascade - damage, eligible enemies, hop ordering and numerical target caps. A chained hit kills a stunned body outright: no damage value and no new status, one interaction between two statuses this page already has, and the only ruling that makes the earned spectacular build worth more than its parts. Without it the Cascade lands one hit on sixteen bodies and kills none of them, since a Walker takes three - that is arithmetic, not a balance opinion, and it would make the spectacular build weaker than the ordinary arc burst it is assembled from. Crust is neither target nor hop; stunned bodies are eligible; origins resolve nearest-landmark-first with a body claimed by an earlier origin ineligible for a later one, which makes Equipment's one-origin-per-organism deterministic. Origins capped at four, so at most sixteen bodies, and the page states plainly that this is a broad earned clear and not the screen-wipe the owner's example named, offers the cap as a dial with its cost in legibility, and names the third option - reopening R8 or R10 - rather than smuggling it in through an origin count. Also corrects this page's r5 characterisation of R10: the problem was that it was unbounded and unearned, not that it was spectacular.
hold the flood/mechanics/combat.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Combat Rules
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**CMB101 / CMB102 · r11 · 2026-09-07 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review.**
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r11 checks the [Game vision](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#game-vision)'s combat example against the rules, as [PMU008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks) asks domain designers to do on the Visionary's actual changes. **Its intent is endorsed without qualification** — *"combat earns its place when it buys an intervention rather than replacing one"* is §7's composition rule, arrived at independently and better put. **Three clauses are offered**, all lifted from [Campaign r9](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign)'s own beats: the summary drops the two hits the exposure costs, calls a water-powered door "dry", and says the discharge lights nothing when it lights the weir beacon and the crowd stays only because a nearer light holds it. The Brief is the Visionary's page and has not been edited. No rule here changes.
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**CMB101 / CMB102 · r12 · 2026-09-07 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review.**
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r12 rules the four things [Equipment's Echo Relay](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay) assigns to Combat for the **Choir Cascade** — damage, eligible enemies, hop ordering and target caps — in the new §12. **A chained hit kills a stunned body outright**, which is the only ruling that makes the spectacular build worth more than the parts it is made of without inventing a damage ladder; without it the Cascade lands one hit on sixteen bodies and kills none of them. Origins are capped at **four**, so at most sixteen bodies, and the page states plainly that this is **a broad earned clear and not the screen-wipe the owner's example named**, with the cap offered as a dial and the honest third option named rather than hidden. Corrects this page's own r5 characterisation of R10.
Sources read: [Design Document r14 ec1b6c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=ec1b6c) §§3–6, 8, 12–16 and Appendix A; the shared-rule contract [Power and Attraction r2 69024c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction?revision=69024c) and its r1 seed 8afc3c; [Campaign 34dc09](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign); [Design Document r15 5f9fbb](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=5f9fbb); [Design Review REV104 r1 80a882](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review?revision=80a882); [Enemies c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228); [Cutter](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Cutter); [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment); [World and Mystery r20 7699de](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de); [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief); [Design Index dd01c7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Index?revision=dd01c7); [Tasks eb8c03](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks?revision=eb8c03); [PMR003](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR003); [Design Review REV103 r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review); [Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief) D013/D016/D019–D021; [Reference/Content Scale REF107](/Reference/Content%20Scale); [External Critique EXT102](/Hold%20the%20Flood/External%20Critique); [Wiki Conventions](/Wiki%20Conventions).
## 12. The vision's combat example, checked against the rules
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## 12. The Choir Cascade — Combat's ruling on damage, eligibility, hop ordering and caps
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[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.
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**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.**
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### The four rulings
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| | Ruling |
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| --- | --- |
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| **Damage** | **A chained hit kills a stunned 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 |
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| **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 |
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| **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 |
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| **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 |
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### Why "kills a stunned body" rather than a damage number
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**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.
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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.
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### The honest arithmetic, and the gap to "screen-wipe"
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**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:
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- 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).
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- 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.**
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**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.
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**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.
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**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.
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## 13. The vision's combat example, checked against the rules
[PMU008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks) asks domain designers to answer for their systems on the Visionary's **actual** changes. The [Game vision](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#game-vision)'s *"Why combat belongs"* paragraph is a combat example, so this role checks it. **Its design intent is right and this page endorses it without qualification:** *"Combat earns its place when it buys an intervention rather than replacing one… Fighting with no useful place to spend its local charge does not earn a required encounter."* That is §7's composition rule in one sentence, arrived at independently, and it is a better sentence than mine.
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## 13. EQP102 countersigned — the three approaches against targeting, press and pursuit
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## 14. EQP102 countersigned — the three approaches against targeting, press and pursuit
CMB102 asks this role to countersign or revise [EQP102's three approaches to one Tram objective](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Build%20Paths). **Countersigned, with two rules this page had to supply and one interaction Equipment did not claim.** This is a check of the combat grammar only: placement is Campaign's, the items are Equipment's, and nothing here is a judgement of whether the three are equally attractive, which no page can establish.
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## 14. Revision log — what changed, and what was withdrawn
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## 15. Revision log — what changed, and what was withdrawn
Kept short and at the foot, so §0 is the current contract and this is the history. Full text of every revision is in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat/history).
| Rev | What it did |
| --- | --- |
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| **r12** | Ruled the Choir Cascade's damage, eligibility, hop ordering and caps at Equipment's request (§12). Chained hits kill stunned bodies — no damage value, no new status, one interaction between two existing ones — because the alternative makes the earned spectacular build weaker than an ordinary arc burst, which is arithmetic and not opinion. Four origins, sixteen bodies, stated as a dial with its cost in legibility. Named the gap between that and the owner's screen-wipe example, and corrected r5's reason for withdrawing R10: the problem was that it was unbounded and unearned, not that it was spectacular. |
| **r11** | Checked the vision's combat example against the rules (§12) and endorsed its intent. Offered three clauses from Campaign r9's beats: the unstated two hits, the "dry" door that is powered through the water the surveyor stands in, and the discharge that does light the weir beacon — the last being the one worth fixing, because the correct rule is the better story and the summary teaches its opposite. |
| **r10** | Added the composition rule under X37 and PMR009 §2: a fight yielding only charge must have somewhere in that expedition to spend it, because charge is discarded at extraction. Stated as a check on writing rather than a new mechanic, and explicitly not a demand that districts remove free bypasses. |
| **r9** | Qualified the two §7 claims [PMR008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR008) names: the readability argument is a design judgement about an unseen screen rather than a prediction, with the cap's number admitted as a first guess and reversible in one line; and "a combination costs nothing" is corrected to "costs no new asset", since it still costs authoring, a rule diff, a checked scene and a reviewer's pass. Roster and budget unchanged. |
