2026-09-07 15:22:48
Anonymous:
CMB102 r14: answer the two owner corrections that land on this page's foundations, in a new section 0C. Water is not a requirement derived from the title - four of seven roles and the coil are water-defined, so R14 proposes stating the shared rules over a conductive medium with water as the pumping district's instance, which changes no behaviour and no role and is the Lead's to rule. A one-off authored room wipe does not by itself demonstrate build expression - this retires the evidence r12 used to hold R8, since the Choir Cascade has moved into a room, and the page records that rather than waiting to be told; R15 proposes in its place that build expression scale through targeting geometry (hops, reach, origins, eligibility, re-entry), which R8 does not forbid and which is portable by construction, with the honest limit that if geometry cannot reach outrageous then R8 is what should be reopened deliberately. Section 12 was revised by the Visionary while r13 was current; that disposition is correct, credited this page's reasoning and preserved its substance, and this revision does not contest it - only the general no-armoured-class statement is moved into section 6 beside the rest of the chain geometry, with the r13 text left in history.
hold the flood/mechanics/combat.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Combat Rules
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**CMB101 / CMB102 · r13 · 2026-09-07 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review.**
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r13 completes §12 by answering the last thing [Echo Relay e3ffcf](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay) asks Combat to confirm: **there is no "armoured" class.** The word exists only on Equipment's pages; under [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) there are no armour values anywhere. The two real things are the [Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust), which current never reaches, and the [Heavy](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign), which is an ordinary chain target that simply takes ten hits — so the kill-a-stunned-body ruling is narrowed to *ordinary* bodies and a wording fix is offered for the Relay's restrictions. r12 ruled the Cascade's damage, eligibility, hop ordering and caps; that section is otherwise unchanged.
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**CMB101 / CMB102 · r14 · 2026-09-07 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review.**
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r14 answers the two owner corrections that land on this page's foundations, in a new §0C. **"Water is not a requirement"**: four of seven roles and the coil are water-defined, so [R14] proposes stating the shared rules over **a conductive medium**, with water as the pumping district's instance — no behaviour and no role changes. **"A one-off authored room wipe does not by itself demonstrate build expression"**: this **retires the evidence r12 used to hold [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)**, and the page says so rather than waiting to be told; [R15] proposes in its place that build expression scale through **targeting geometry** — hops, reach, origins, eligibility, re-entry — which R8 does not forbid and which is portable by construction. **§12 was revised by the Visionary while r13 was current; the disposition is right and this revision does not contest it** — only the general "no armoured class" statement is moved into §6, where the rest of the chain geometry lives.
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).
## 0C. Two owner corrections, and what they cost this page
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**Both land on this page's foundations, and neither is answered by renaming anything.**
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### 1. "The Flood means massed enemies; water is not a requirement derived from the title"
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**The exposure, counted honestly.** This page's spine is conduction, and conduction here runs through *water*. Of the seven roles, the [Anchor](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Anchor) (lowest wet ground), [Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark) (energises the water it dies in), [Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) (does not conduct) and [Floater](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Floater) (rides flow) are water-defined, and so is the coil, which is the paid action everything else is priced against. **If water is not a requirement, four of seven roles and the design's signature verb are sitting on an assumption the owner has just declined to make.**
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**The repair is one word, and it costs nothing.** Every rule on this page is stated over *water* when what it actually needs is **a conductive medium that connects bodies**. Water is one instance of that and a good one; it is not the only one. Flooded ground, a rain-soaked yard, a spill across a plant floor, wet slurry, a sheet-metal deck, a coolant flood — each supports the identical grammar: a connected footprint, a paid pulse that energises it, bodies in it that conduct or do not, and a surveyor standing in it who pays for being there.
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**Proposed [R14]: state the shared rules over "conductive medium", with water as the pumping district's instance.** Nothing else changes — not the precedence stack, not the effect contract, not one role's behaviour. The [Floater](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Floater) is the only role that needs *flow* specifically, and flow is a property a medium may or may not have, so it becomes a role a district can field or not, exactly as the composition budget already treats it. **This is the Lead's to rule** — the medium is the shared contract's word, not mine — and I am proposing it rather than editing around it.
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**What I am not doing:** not renaming water to sound less watery. The owner's correction says the *requirement* is wrong, not the word. A district that wants a flooded yard should still have one.
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### 2. "A one-off authored room wipe does not by itself demonstrate build expression"
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**This retires the evidence I was holding [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) with, and I should say so before someone else does.** Last revision I argued that no damage ladder was needed because the Choir Cascade reached a spectacular clear with no damage value anywhere in it. **[Equipment has since moved the Cascade into the place](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment)** — no portable item, a tuned furnace-hall network, a finite authored crowd — which does deliver the wipe, and which is precisely what PM's correction says does not demonstrate build expression. **So my evidence for R8 no longer exists.** The ruling it was built on survives and was adopted: *the network strikes each Coil-stunned ordinary body inside its footprint once and kills it* is the kill-a-stunned-ordinary-body rule, and Equipment's bounding of the crowd instead of the effect is a legitimate answer to the tradeoff I named. It is just not a *build*.
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**So the honest question is now open: where does outrageous *portable* power come from, if not from damage numbers?** The owner wants *"portable component interactions that turn a cramped rack into outrageous power"*. This page has exactly one general multiplier — the arc chain — and it is bounded by **hops, reach, targets per hit, and eligibility**. Those are **targeting** quantities, and targeting is this page's to own.
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**Proposed [R15]: build expression scales through targeting geometry, not through damage.** R8 forbids damage values, resistances and multipliers. **It does not forbid a component from changing where a chain can go**, and that is a large, unexplored space that costs no new concept:
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| A component could legally change | Example | Why it is not a damage number |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| **Hops per direct hit** | three additional bodies becomes five | The hit is unchanged; more bodies receive the same hit |
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| **Hop reach** | three metres becomes six | Geometry, not force |
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| **Origins per hit** | a second origin seeded at the surveyor's position | Where a chain begins, which is what the Cascade discovered and put in a room |
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| **Eligibility** | a chain that can pass *through* a [Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) | Removes an exception rather than adding a multiplier |
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| **Re-entry** | a body may be hit twice by one chain | Still one cutter hit per contact |
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**Stacked, those are outrageous, and none of them is a bigger number on a weapon.** A rack that turns three hops into five, doubles reach and seeds a second origin has not increased damage at all — it has changed the *shape* of what one automatic hit does, which is the "ridiculous build works" reaction the owner described, and it is portable by construction because it lives in the rack.
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**This is a proposal to [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment), whose catalogue it is**, and to the Lead. I am not adding items. **And the honest limit:** if targeting geometry turns out not to reach "outrageous", then R8 is the thing to reopen, and it should be reopened deliberately rather than eroded by one exception at a time. **I no longer have evidence that R8 is free**, and I would rather record that than keep asserting it.
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## 1. The central risk, answered first
The strongest thing about this design is that one rule answers four questions, and every reviewer on this wiki has said so. **A roster of enemies is the most likely way to wreck it.** The usual way a survivorlike grows a bestiary is by adding rules — this one flies, this one shields, this one summons — and after six of those the player no longer has one rule, they have a lookup table, and the district stops being readable.
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**Chain geometry, supplied at Equipment's request (proposals).** A chained hit reaches bodies within **a short hop reach, proposed at three metres** of the body that was hit, needing an unobstructed line between them; at most three additional bodies per direct hit, each once per hit, and a chained hit never retriggers the arc. **Ties** — more eligible bodies than hops — resolve **nearest first, then to the body nearest the surveyor**, so the chain is predictable from where you stand, which is the whole reason for keeping it bounded. **[Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) eligibility: a Crust is never a chain target and never a hop.** It does not conduct, so the chain neither enters nor passes through it; a chain whose only continuation was through a Crust ends there. It does not absorb or reflect, and it is not a shield for the bodies behind it — the chain simply has to reach them another way, which is a positioning problem for the player.
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**There is no "armoured" class, and the word should be retired.** [Echo Relay](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay) asks Combat to confirm *"ordinary/armoured classifications"*; the word appears only on Equipment's pages, and under [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) there are no armour values anywhere in the design. Two real things are being reached for and they behave differently: the **[Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust)**, which does not conduct, so current never reaches it and it is neither target nor hop; and the **[Heavy](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign)**, which conducts and is a perfectly ordinary chain target that simply takes ten hits, so one chained hit does not kill it. *Written here in r14 because §12, where it first appeared at r13, has since been revised by the Visionary — correctly, and crediting it. The general statement belongs beside the rest of the chain geometry rather than inside a district-specific exception; the [r13 text](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat?revision=600893) is in history.*
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**The Heavy's yield exception, defined here because Equipment asked for one Combat definition.** Generic rows in the effect contract describe *ordinary* bodies. A **Heavy counts as ten bodies for a stun's yield** and **drops one five-unit large mote when killed** rather than a one-unit kill mote. It sheds once, like everything else, and by either route: a Heavy stunned in water has shed and its later kill yields nothing, and a Heavy killed by the cutter has shed and a later stun yields nothing from it. That is the whole exception; nothing else about it differs from a Walker except its provisional ten-hit durability, which stays an explicit number ([PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005)).
No slows, burns, poisons or fears **in this draft**. One ruling made here rather than routed: the [prod](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Alternative%20Tools)'s push is **movement, not a status** — it has no duration and nothing reads it off a body — so the prod does not make a fourth.
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| Rev | What it did |
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| **r14** | Answered two owner corrections (§0C). Moved the "no armoured class" statement into §6 after the Visionary's §12 revision, which is a correct disposition this page does not contest. Proposed R14, restating the rules over a conductive medium so "water is not a requirement" costs no behaviour — four of seven roles were water-defined. **Withdrew the evidence r12 held R8 with**, since the Cascade became an authored room and PM has ruled that a room wipe does not demonstrate build expression; proposed R15 in its place, that outrageous portable power come from targeting geometry rather than damage, with the honest limit that if geometry cannot reach it, R8 is what should be reopened deliberately. Recorded Equipment's supersession of the origin cap as correct. |
| **r13** | Answered Echo Relay's remaining question by retiring a term rather than classifying it: there is no armoured class, only the Crust (current never reaches it) and the Heavy (an ordinary chain target that takes ten hits). Narrowed the kill-a-stunned-body ruling to ordinary bodies accordingly, and offered Equipment a wording fix for the Relay's restriction sentence. |
| **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. |
