Hold the Flood — Enemies and Encounters

CMB101 · r5 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — changes required (PMR005). r5 answers 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 The Heavy wording request is withdrawn (PM declines it, and is right that a number is inspectable where a phrase is not); the “nineteen kill motes” argument behind it is withdrawn under D023's selected pickup priority; the tint finding is narrowed from a contradiction to a cue-budget concern; the cable reel claim is corrected against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; the full history is in the revision log at the foot of this page. Sources read: Design Document r14 ec1b6c §§3–6, 8, 12–16, App. A; Enemies r1 c63228; the shared-rule contract Power and Attraction r2 69024c and its r1 seed 8afc3c; Campaign 34dc09 (DES104); Design Document r15 5f9fbb; Design Review REV104 r1 80a882; Colony COL101 a1046d; Cutter; Equipment; Colony; Pumping District; World and Mystery r20 7699de; Expansion Brief; Design Index dd01c7; Tasks eb8c03; PMR003; Design Review REV103 r5; Brief; Glossary; Wiki Conventions. Design Index · Expansion Brief · Glossary · Combat Rules

Nothing here has been built, prototyped, simulated or played, and no asset has been located, inspected or created. Every number is a proposal. The two encounters below are written scenes checked on paper against declared rules; they are not playtests and they establish nothing about fun, balance or performance.


0. Reconciliation with DES104, which landed while this was drafted

What arrived after this role read its sources and before this revision saved: the Lead's Campaign 34dc09 (DES104), the shared-rule contract Power and Attraction r2 69024c, Design Document r15 5f9fbb, the critic's REV104 r1 80a882, and the Colony designer's COL101 a1046d. r1 of the six role pages and r1 of Combat Rules were written against r14 and the r1 seed. This section says what that changes. It changes the name of one role and the page to cite for the rules — but the Campaign page proposes four enemy roles of its own, and two rosters is not a thing this project can afford to have.

Where the rules now live. Power and Attraction r2 is the shared-rule contract, adopted by the Lead from PM's seed and validated against r14. It is now the page to cite for conduction, power, attraction and charge, and this page and Combat Rules cite it. Nothing written here against GDD §4 is invalidated: r2 restates the same rules, states the retarget-or-spread precedence in the same words, and confirms that pursuit and press are separate things.

The one thing the contract settles in this role's favour, and it is worth naming. Contract §7 lists what a district may not add: "anything that makes a lamp draw, a coil select intake, an organism shed twice, or a device work without current." The Grounder does none of the four — it makes a device stop working for want of current, which is the rule applied, not broken. R9 passes the Lead's own published test. It still needs the Lead's and World's explicit ruling; it no longer needs an argument about whether it is the kind of thing that could be allowed.

0.1 Two rosters, and the merge

Campaign §4 proposes This page proposes Disposition
Walker, the base Drifter, the base Same role. Walker wins — published first and in the integrated document, and one role with two names is the failure this wiki has already paid for twice. This page renames; the role page is at Walker, and Enemies/Drifter is now a pointer for the links written in the intervening hour
Floater — rides flow, cannot climb — Adopted, unchanged, and owned by Campaign. It is a clean precedence-line-2 role: its target is the flow while the flow runs. Not restated here; Campaign §3.1 owns it
Heavy — blocks a rail or doorway, ten hits, drops a large mote, counts as ten for a stun — Accepted, with one narrowing. See 0.2
Static — drawn to stored charge within a short range, over a lit beacon; sparks toward it Carrier — walks to the nearest reachable loose charge, including your batteries; takes uncollected motes The same concept, designed twice. They must not both exist. Merge recommended in 0.3
— Anchor, Crust, Spark, Grounder New here; none collides with anything on the Campaign page

0.2 Heavy — where I was wrong, and the one clause I still ask for

R8 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 prices weapons against — stays as the scoped recommendation in R8, which is a recommendation and not a ban.

0.3 Static and Carrier — one role, and which half of each to keep

Both are "the thing that comes for your charge". The merge I recommend, with what each side gives up:

  • Keep the Carrier's targeting sentence — the nearest reachable loose charge — because it is the beacon rule with one noun changed, so it costs the player no new concept. Static's "drawn to stored charge within a short range, over a lit beacon" adds two ideas at once: a range, and an explicit priority override. The precedence stack already supplies the override as line 2, so only the range is new.
  • Keep Static's short range. This is the half the Carrier page got wrong, and I withdraw the unbounded version. Without a bound, a player carrying twenty units is hunted district-wide for as long as they hold it, which turns a good tension — power on your back is bait — into a tax on ever being rich. A short range makes it a proximity cost: carry charge and you cannot walk through a crowd, but you can still walk past one.
  • Keep R5, the mote theft, which neither the Campaign page nor the Static sketch has. It is what makes a harvest a contest rather than a stopwatch, and it gives the role a second job so it is not only a punishment for being well-supplied.
  • Drop "sparks toward it." A ranged attack is a new combat verb, and the closed grammar in Combat Rules §6 has none. If the Lead wants the spark, it should be specified as damage at range with its own telegraph, and it needs a ruling rather than a clause.

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.

0.4 A cue-budget concern — narrowed in r4, because r3 overstated it

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 is right that they are not — both can be true — and the finding is withdrawn as stated.

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 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) — 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's list stays closed at three.
  • 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 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 interaction, not an arc one.

0.6 The merged roster, and what it costs

Eight roles across the campaign: Walker, Floater, Heavy (Campaign's), Carrier (merged), Anchor, Crust, Spark, Grounder (this page's). The per-district cap in the composition budget is unchanged — at most three distinct non-Walker roles in a district, at most two in a surge — so no expedition ever asks the player to read more than four kinds of body at once.

The cost, stated plainly: eight roles is eight readable silhouettes, against a project whose first likely approval request is already one enemy sprite (GDD §14). Five of the eight are readable from position or attitude rather than from a new creature — Anchor half-submerged, Grounder up a cable, Carrier leaning at a target the forecast already draws, Floater riding low with a wake, Heavy by bulk — which is the mitigation, and it is not the same as availability. Nothing has been located, inspected or created.

If the roster must shrink, my cut order, with reasons. (1) Crust — its job, pricing greed inside a stun, is the least load-bearing of the new five, and the once-per-organism rule already bounds the coil without it. (2) Merge Heavy into Anchor — they are one idea, a body that will not move out of your way, sited differently: Heavy on dry chokepoints, Anchor in water. The difference is real, and it is the thinnest real difference in the roster. I would not cut further: the remaining six each delete a different assumption, and below six the roster stops covering the four clauses.


1. What a role is for, in this game

The existing proposal has one enemy type with size and tint variants (GDD §15). The Expansion Brief asks for "enemy combinations that change movement or priorities, rather than only more health or a new tint", and REV103 r5 pre-registers the test it will apply: a combination must pose a precedence question that a single enemy type cannot.

So every role here is defined by one sentence it makes false — a thing the player could otherwise safely assume about a crowd. That is the whole justification for a role's existence. None of the six has more health than another, and none moves faster.

Role Precedence line it exercises (Combat Rules §2) The assumption it makes false
Walker 3 — attraction (none — it is the assumption)
Anchor 2 — nearest wet ground "Re-routing the crowd clears the ground."
Carrier 2 — nearest loose charge "If I am not standing near a light, nothing is coming to me."
Crust 3, but does not conduct "One discharge stops everything in the water."
Spark 3, and discharges when killed in water "My weapon firing can only help me."
Grounder 2 — nearest powered cable run "A light I set stays set."

Five of the six are new; the Walker is the existing enemy, re-specified as a role so that the roster has a stated baseline rather than an implied one. This is an initial submission, not a roster quota, and I would rather ship six that each delete an assumption than twelve that each add a number.

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. 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.

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 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.


2. The six roles at a glance

Full pages carry each role's trigger, action, threat, counterplay, machinery and equipment interactions, placement conditions, telegraph, asset note and open questions. This table is a summary; the pages win.

Role Trigger — what makes it act Action Threat First counterplay Costs the counterplay carries
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 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 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 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 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 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

3. Encounter A — the invited yard

Contrast: defensive, mid-expedition, one surge, preparation-light. Roles live: Anchor + Crust (2 — within the composition budget). Where: the Pumping District yard channel — the district that already exists, so the encounter needs no new geography. What it teaches: that a stun is not the same as a cleared floor.

Declared setup. The player has learned the electrician play in GDD §5 and is running that rack: coil, battery, insulation, two bundles, link battery→coil, battery full at 10 units. Panel thrown from causeway to yard at 7:30, so the yard beacon is steady and the pump-hall hatch is open. Four Anchors have been standing in the yard channel since the player arrived. The first surge — 40 bodies — has been holding at the causeway beacon since 3:00.

Time What happens Which rule says so
7:30 Panel causeway→yard. Yard beacon steady, hatch open, causeway beacon dark. The 40 held at the causeway lose their light, retarget to the yard beacon and begin crossing the junction. The forecast shows both crowds' new targets and their rings. GDD §4, the panel's stated price; R2 for the rings
7:30–8:00 The four Anchors do not move. Throwing the panel is a free, repeatable experiment that proves it, and it is available on the first visit. Stack line 2
8:00 Second dispatch. The pulse travels the thin cable to the yard beacon and it flashes; 60 bodies begin entering the yard channel over 30 seconds — 54 Walkers and 6 Crusts. GDD §4: the panel alone selects the intake, and the travelling pulse is visible
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; Crust
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
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 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
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
after The 40 crowd moved off the causeway arrives at the yard beacon and its ring grows. The player should already be gone; the ring is how they knew when. GDD §4; R2

Checking the scene against its own rules

  • Composition legal? 54 Walkers of 60 is 90%, above the 85% floor. Two non-Walker roles are live (Anchor, Crust), at the limit of two per surge. Anchors were standing before the expedition began, as their placement rule requires. No Sparks are placed, so the dry-ground rule is not engaged. ✔
  • Arithmetic. 54 + 6 = 60 entering. At 8:25, 40 Walkers + 4 Crusts = 44 in the water; 14 Walkers + 2 Crusts = 16 still entering or on the bank; 44 + 16 = 60. ✔
  • Stun count. Conducting bodies in the connected water = 40 Walkers + 4 Anchors = 44. Crusts excluded by their own rule. ✔
  • 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.
  • 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 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)
  • Do the Anchors take damage standing in energised water all expedition? No. Under the intensity rule in §0B, 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 in one scene.

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 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.


4. Encounter B — the failing causeway

Contrast: offensive, late-expedition, the whole precedence stack live at once, preparation-heavy, and it turns on a decision made twenty minutes earlier at a shelter. Roles live: Grounder, Carrier and Spark — three in the district, at the limit; two in the third surge, at the limit. What it teaches: that a plan can expire, and that hoarding charge is itself a threat.

Declared setup. Late campaign. The panel has been on causeway since 3:00, so the first two surges (40 and 80) both entered there and are held at the causeway beacon — about 110 bodies after kills, drawn as one ring. The player is in the yard, having come by the culvert, running the harvester rack (GDD §5): coil, arc, two batteries, insulation, no cargo. Both batteries are full: 20 units. Two Grounders climbed the causeway's power cable at about 10:30. The third dispatch is due at 12:00 and will bring 140.

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, R4 (position identifies the role)
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 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

The four options, priced

Option What it buys What it costs Verdict at 11:40
(a) Panel → yard The causeway and its dock clear immediately: the spread crowd retargets to the yard beacon (line 3). The hatch opens. The 12:00 dispatch enters the yard channel, which is water — where the coil and the arc are worth most. The 110 walk the junction and channel to where the player is standing, and 140 more land on top of them. The aggressive answer, and the right one for this rack. It is the only option that turns the problem into the payoff.
(b) Kill the Grounders The beacon relights; the crowd re-gathers at the causeway's far end; the parking is restored. Crossing about 110 spread bodies to reach the cable. Two bodies at three hits each is trivial; the crossing is not, at one health per contact from five. Correct earlier, wrong now. The crossing and the re-gather do not finish before 12:00.
(c) Plant a beacon at the causeway's interior end Relights the far end without going near the cable, pulls the crowd off the dock road, and — because a planted beacon's battery is loose charge — decoys Carriers away from the player. Two problems, one action. Two slots and a battery, and the battery runs down while planted. Not available. The harvester rack has no beacon; the coil took its two slots. This option was decided at the shelter.
(d) Do nothing; culvert home Costs no charge and starts no fight. The culvert exits at the causeway dock end, which is exactly where the spread is heading; the player walks into the thin edge, with the evacuation window still to come. Viable, and the correct answer for a different rack — see the contrast below.

Under (a): the late payoff, checked

Time What happens Which rule says so
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
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 ✔
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
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
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
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 does and does not bite. R5; motes fade in seconds
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
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, adopted in §0B; the drawn-bank rule
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 found it. Contract clause 4
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

  • Does the Carrier's twelve-metre range change this scene? No, and here is the distance. 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'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 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 item 1 required of GDD §13 and which r13 supplied; this scene is built on the corrected sequence rather than re-introducing the error. ✔
  • 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 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. ✔
  • 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. ✔
  • 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

Run the identical composition against the arc hauler rack (GDD §5: arc, battery, insulation, three bundles). No coil, so no stun and no bulk harvest. No second battery. No beacon. At 11:40 that player cannot take option (a) profitably and cannot take (c) at all; their correct play is (d): culvert home through the thin edge, bank three bundles, and see none of the payoff.

They finish the expedition successfully. That is the design working, not failing: the rack chosen at the dock decided which game this expedition was, and both are legitimate. It is also the concrete answer to the Expansion Brief's demand for "a reason to prepare a different build, with an alternative viable approach and a real tradeoff" — the two racks do different things, not different amounts.


5. Early, middle and late — how combat grows without a number

The Cutter page asks what develops basic combat across a campaign when the weapon is fixed and there is no XP. The answer this roster gives:

Combat grows because more lines of the precedence stack are live at once, not because anything gets bigger.

Stage Roles live What the player learns to do The crowd-clearing payoff The room left to investigate
Early — opening district, first expeditions Walker; Anchors as terrain One true sentence: light moves the mass, and one thing in the water does not answer it The first coil discharge. A whole crowd stops and twenty units land in the water. It needs no new enemy and no new module beyond the coil One role live, small rings, and a genuinely quiet interval. This is where the district gets read
Middle — districts two to four + Crust, + Spark The shape of a clear matters, not its size: an arc chain routes around Crusts, and where you stand relative to water decides whether your own weapon hurts you The coil-then-arc double already written in GDD §13 — stun, collect, burst on the recovering crowd — now with a reason to aim it Shelters plus the ring. You can bank a route and come back for the thing you saw
Late — districts five and beyond + Carrier, + Grounder The crowd contests your tools: your charge is bait and your lights decay while you are elsewhere Encounter B's layered play: panel, coil, collect against thieves, burst through Sparks in water under R10 You now buy time with equipment rather than with distance, so investigating becomes a purchase — which is the right late-campaign shape

What the owner should press on. Whether "four precedence lines live at once" reads as growth to a survivorlike audience the way a rising damage number does is unverified and unverifiable in the design phase. It is the central bet of this page and it is the same bet GDD §6 already makes about the arc. I believe it is the right one, because the alternative — a stat ladder — has to be invented from nothing here and would immediately compete with the thing the game sells. But it is a bet, and it is the first thing an authorized play phase should look at.


6. Elites and bosses — a recommendation against, and two substitutes

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.

Scoped, after 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.

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'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.

For, instead:

(i) The declared surge. The forecast already tells the player the intake and the countdown. Let it also declare the next dispatch's composition — "third dispatch: carriers" — once the player has repaired the colony's forecast relay or has learned to read the cadence. Player action: repack at a shelter, or change the panel, before it lands. Visible information: one more row on the overlay that already exists. Consequence: you meet the surge you chose to meet. Cost: knowing costs a colony repair or a learned convention, and acting on it costs slots or a route. Concrete interaction: seeing "carriers" and deliberately spending a battery before the dispatch, so there is nothing left to walk toward. It converts an elite into a preparation decision, which is what this game is about; it gives Campaign a difficulty dial made of composition rather than numbers; it gives Colony something worth repairing; and it costs no creature and no asset.

(ii) The standing problem — a district's one persistent, named concentration that is a place, not a fight. The pattern: a district's lowest channel permanently occupied by a mass of Anchors, because Anchors go to the lowest wet ground and never leave it. It is never cleared and never respawns, because it never left. Player action: route around it, drain it with a field pump, or spend a battery on it. Visible information: it is standing there on arrival, every time. Consequence: it is the reason the district's shortest route is expensive. Cost: a bundle for the pump, or the longer road, or a battery. Concrete interaction: it is also the district's single richest harvest — one discharge, once, sheds proportionally to its size and then it is spent and worth nothing for the rest of the expedition, so when you spend the battery on it is a real decision. This is a "boss" as geography, under adopted rules, with no new creature. Placement is Campaign's; I am proposing the pattern, not its location.

The one condition under which I would revisit a creature boss. If a later authorized phase shows that the arc's payoff lands too rarely because a crowd is never dense enough at the right moment, then a single large, slow, high-hit-count body that is reliably a valid arc target would be a targeted fix for a measured problem. I would not build one before that evidence exists, and no such evidence can exist in the design phase.


7. What this page needs from other roles

Stated as positions with my recommendation attached, not as routed decisions (Wiki Conventions §11a).

To What I need What I proceed on meanwhile
Lead (D014) Rulings on R1–R3, R9, R10, all of which touch §4 and clause 1. R10 is the one that changes a power ceiling The positions in Combat Rules §10. The roster stands without R10
Equipment (EQP101) Accept, amend or reject the closed grammar: targeting, no damage numbers, three statuses. A weapon that picks targets differently is a new weapon; a weapon that does more damage is not R6–R8 as written. If Equipment needs a fourth status it should say which and why, and I will revise this page rather than have two systems
Campaign (CAM101) Placement, using the composition budget: at least 85% Walkers, at most two non-Walker roles per surge and three per district, Sparks only where there is water, Anchors standing on arrival, Grounders on cable runs The budget as written; the pumping district as the setting for both encounters, so nothing here depends on geography that does not exist
World (WLD103) The Flood's fiction and the roles' names. Mine are functional placeholders with the mechanic in the name; rename freely. Also: whether a Grounder darkening a beacon sits inside r20's district contract — my argument that it does is in §4 above and Combat Rules §5 Placeholder names, and the argument that removing a light never changes what a light means
Colony (COL101) The forecast relay as the unlock that turns the declared surge on. It is a repair that changes preparation, which is what the Colony page asks for The declared surge as a proposal contingent on that unlock
Editor Glossary says the arc drains a battery over about twenty seconds; GDD §6 r14 says about ten and §13's scene is built on ten. Reported, not edited Ten

8. Asset presentation gaps

Full statement in Combat Rules §9. In short, and honestly: the roster's readability costs six distinguishable silhouettes, five more than the current one-enemy proposal, and that is the largest consequence of this submission. Three of the six (Anchor, Carrier, Grounder) are readable primarily from position and attitude — half-submerged and still; leaning toward a target the forecast already draws; up on a cable and off the ground — so if the base body can be posed, those cost poses rather than creatures. Two (Crust, Spark) are silhouette edits of the base body, and whether that is legal depends on the individual asset's licence, not its host's general statement (Asset Licences). No asset has been located, inspected, downloaded, purchased or created, and no availability is claimed.

The roster is neutral on GDD §14's decision 2, the humanoid Flood: what conducts is bodies standing in water either way, and posture-based roles work at least as well on a humanoid body. Nothing here pushes the owner toward the custom-art request.

The gap I cannot close is audio: the Spark's fairness leans on a rising whine as it enters cutter reach, and sound is not designed. The visual fallback is the cutter's target line plus the flicker, which I believe suffices and cannot claim does.


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. 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.


Revision log

Kept short, so the sections above are the current proposal and this is the history. Full text of every revision is in page history.

Rev What it did
r5 Answered 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.
r4 Answered PMR004 §2, 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.
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.
r2 Adopted this page from PM's seed and answered the assignment on it: six roles, two encounters, the elites recommendation, the campaign arc.
r1 PM's seeded source summary and the CMB101 assignment brief — c63228.