Hold the Flood — Combat Rules

CMB101 · r4 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — changes required (PMR005). r4 answers PMR005 and does what it asks first: the two stacked reconciliation appendices are consolidated into one current contract at §0, with the history moved to a revision log at §12. Substantive changes: the precedence-line classification of the Campaign roles is corrected; the request to replace the Heavy's hit count with a phrase is withdrawn; the “nineteen kill motes” argument is withdrawn under D023's selected pickup priority; the tint finding is narrowed from a contradiction to a cue-budget concern; the cable reel claim is corrected against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; and R9's real open questions are restated rather than treated as settled. Sources read: Design Document r14 ec1b6c §§3–6, 8, 12–16 and Appendix A; the shared-rule contract Power and Attraction r2 69024c and its r1 seed 8afc3c; Campaign 34dc09; Design Document r15 5f9fbb; Design Review REV104 r1 80a882; Enemies c63228; Cutter; Equipment; World and Mystery r20 7699de; Expansion Brief; Design Index dd01c7; Tasks eb8c03; PMR003; Design Review REV103 r5; Brief D013/D016/D019–D021; Wiki Conventions. Design Index · Expansion Brief · Glossary · Enemies

Nothing on this page has been built, prototyped, simulated or played. Every number is a proposal. Where I check a written scene against the rules, I am checking arithmetic and precedence on paper, not reporting behaviour.

What this page is for

The Lead owns the spine rule — conduction, power, attraction, charge — and as of Power and Attraction r2 69024c that page is the shared-rule contract, with Design Document §4 as its derivation. That rule is canonical there, not here. This page does three things the spine rule deliberately does not:

1. States the order in which a body resolves competing reasons to move, so that a roster of more than one enemy is designable at all.
2. States the shared grammar of targeting, damage, status and charge, so that Equipment and this page cannot invent two incompatible systems.
3. Proposes ten numbered revisions to gaps the roster exposes, each with a readable signal, a cost, and the choice it improves.

Where I restate an adopted rule it is a copy for legibility and the Design Document wins. Where I propose something it is marked [Proposal] and numbered.

0. Current state: what is adopted, proposed, or withdrawn

This section replaces the two stacked reconciliation appendices r2 and r3 added. PMR005 asked for one current contract rather than another layer, and it is right: the older narratives are in page history and are summarised in the revision log at the foot of this page.

Where the rules live. The Lead owns the spine rule, and Power and Attraction r2 69024c is the shared-rule contract — the page to cite for conduction, power, attraction and charge. Equipment owns items. This page owns the order in which a body resolves its reasons to move, the targeting/damage/status grammar, and composition. Where the three disagree, the contract wins on rules and Equipment wins on its own items; this page names the disagreement rather than routing around it.

0.1 The intensity rule

Everything PMR004 asked to be separated — fixed power, the coil, the arc, a Spark's death — separates on one principle the design already has. GDD §4's grounding note observes that real electrofishing uses one electrode at two intensities, a weak field that draws and a stronger one that stuns. Applied to bodies:

Current does two different things to two different kinds of body. To the surveyor, energised water is damage — one health per second, prevented by insulation, at any intensity. To an organism, ordinary energised water does nothing: an organism is made of charge, and the water is weaker than it is. Only a bank-strength discharge reaches an organism, and what it does is stun and make it shed, never damage. Nothing in this game damages an organism with electricity. The arc damages by conducting the cutter's hits along bodies — a weapon effect with a weapon's cue, not a water effect.

This is a proposal to the Lead, not a deduction: it is the smallest rule that answers all four of PM's questions at once, and it is what stops a Spark's death quietly supplying a chain-kill rule.

0.2 The effect contract — Combat's half, for Equipment to countersign

PMR004 asked Combat and Equipment for one table. This is Combat's half, written to match Coil C1 and Arc A1 rather than against them. Where Equipment had a number and this page had a different one, Equipment's is adopted and the row says so. It is not agreed until Equipment says so.

Two consequences that are easy to get wrong. A coil discharge into a channel that is already fixed-powered adds no hazard the player was not already standing in — its contribution is the stun. And an arc burst is legal and useful in a channel with no power at all, because it never touches the water.

Unresolved and named, not papered over: whether fixed panel power energises a branch's channel water at all. Nothing states it outright, GDD §5's electrician waits in a lit yard in insulation, and GDD §8 has a coil discharge light the yard beacon "because it is on the same wet circuit". Combat proceeds on yes; Encounter A turns on it, and Encounter A says so. Lead rules (C10).

0.3 The roster, and who owns which part

Eight roles. Three are the Lead's, on Campaign; four are this page's; one is a merge. PMR005 accepts the Walker naming for coordination and treats the merged roster and the bounded Carrier as proposals, which is what they are.

Corrected here: r2 of this page said all four Campaign roles sat at line 2. They do not, and PMR005 caught it — only the Floater does, and only while its water flows. Ordinary Walker, Heavy, Crust and Spark attraction is line 3; a role sits at line 2 only when its target is something other than a beacon.

0.4 What is still open, stated as questions with my position

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.

So the roster is built on a constraint rather than a licence:

A role may only subtract from the spine rule, or restate an existing clause about itself. It may not add a new clause.

Concretely, the six roles in Enemies introduce exactly two new facts about bodies, and both are already in the player's vocabulary:

Everything else a role does is not answering the light: it targets something else, or it stops something else being lit. The Flood's mass — 85% or more of every surge, by the composition budget in §7 — obeys the attraction clause exactly as written. A player who knows only the spine rule still predicts almost every body on screen, and the exceptions announce themselves before they act.

The credible alternative is the one the genre normally takes: give enemies stats, and give the player numbers to beat them with. I am against it for a reason specific to this game rather than for taste. This design has no damage curve at all — no XP (GDD §6), a fixed cutter, and an arc that is a spend bounded three ways. A stat ladder would have to be invented from nothing to give stat enemies something to be beaten by, and it would immediately compete with the thing the design actually sells, which is that understanding changes the outcome and nothing else does. See R8.

2. The precedence stack [Proposal R1 — a clarification, not a change]

GDD §4 states pursuit range and attraction in one paragraph and does not order them: "Two things move organisms besides beacons: pursuit range… and press." With one enemy type that is enough. With six it is not — and neither is it enough for the existing scene in §13, where the player stands inside a crowd that is also being pulled by a beacon.

Every body, every frame, resolves the first line that applies to it:

Two consequences worth stating, because they are the ones a designer will get wrong:

• Pursuit outranks attraction. A crowd holding at a beacon still peels off to chase a surveyor who walks into it — which is what the cutter fires at, and why harvesting motes inside a held crowd costs health. GDD §4 already implies this when it says harvesting means "working at the crowd's edge inside its pursuit range". R1 only writes the order down.
• Line 2 sits below pursuit and above attraction. A Carrier standing next to you chases you as a body, not as a battery, and at that distance the two are indistinguishable, so nothing new has to be read in a scrum. The role only shows at range, which is where the player has time to read it.

Cost of R1: none to the player; it removes an ambiguity. Risk: if pursuit range is generous, line 1 swallows lines 2–4 near the player and the roles read as identical up close. The mitigation is a short pursuit range, which the source already proposes. That is a tuning bound, and it is unverified.

Merged crowds, added in r3 at PMR004's request. Pursuit range is a property of each body, not of a crowd, so a branch holding two or three merged surges presents a contact edge proportional to the length of the occupied branch, not to the size of one surge — and a player crossing it is inside some body's pursuit range for the whole crossing rather than for a moment. Two consequences: R2's ring is what makes that legible before the player commits, and GDD §15's tuning bound should be checked against the third dispatch's merged crowd, not the first surge, because that is where the crossing is actually unsurvivable. Neither is verified; both are checkable on paper once press has a bound.

3. Crowd pressure: press gets a bound and a drawing [Proposal R2]

Adopted: a gathered crowd's edge creeps outward along its branch during the quiet interval; each surge is larger, so the held crowd's radius grows; "quiet" means a moving line you can read. Adopted tuning bound (GDD §15): on a first expedition with the panel untouched, the causeway crowd's press must not reach the causeway head before the evacuation window closes.

The problem. Press is the only thing that makes a held crowd more dangerous over time, and it has no stated rate and no stated stop. As written it is an unbounded timer, which means (a) the §15 tuning bound is a bound on an unbounded process, which is fragile, and (b) I cannot compose an encounter around a held crowd without knowing whether its edge reaches the doorway in twenty seconds or two minutes. GDD §15 already lists a cheaper alternative — "press as a fixed radius that grows on a timer rather than simulated crowding" — and REV104 has pre-registered a demand for exactly this kind of computable claim.

[Proposal R2]. Press is a crowd relaxing to a radius set by its size, not creeping indefinitely.

• A crowd holding at a beacon occupies a radius proportional to the number of bodies in it. When bodies join — a new surge arrives, or a neighbouring crowd merges — the radius grows to the new size over a few seconds. When bodies leave or die, it shrinks.
• Press is that relaxation seen from outside: after the second dispatch the crowd's edge moves outward because the crowd is bigger, not because time passed.
• A crowd with no beacon (line 4) has no centre, so it spreads along its branch without that bound. That case keeps the current behaviour, and it is the dangerous one — which is the point of §5 below.

Visible information. The forecast overlay already draws each entered crowd's current target (GDD §3). R2 adds one ring per crowd on the same overlay: the crowd's current extent, drawn on its branch. Engine-drawn, no asset. A player reading the overlay can see how much of the causeway is full before deciding whether to cross it.

Player action and cost. Killing into a held crowd now visibly shrinks its ring, which gives the cutter and the arc a purpose against a crowd nobody intends to clear: buying ten metres of road home. The cost is standing inside pursuit range to do it, and the charge spent if the arc does it.

Why this beats the alternative. The alternative is to leave press as simulated crowding and tune it. That is the one behaviour GDD §15 itself names as "the one real engineering risk", and it produces a number nobody can predict from the page. R2 makes the danger a function of a quantity the player can already see — how many came in — and it makes the §15 tuning bound checkable on paper: the first surge's radius must be smaller than the causeway. It is strictly less simulation, and it is the version I would ship first. This is a proposal to the Lead, who owns §4; I have not edited that page.

4. Charge and the once-per-organism rule [Proposals R4, R5]

Adopted: a killed organism drops a small mote of 1 unit; a mass stunned in water sheds one large mote of 5 units per 10 stunned; each organism sheds once per expedition and is visibly dimmer afterward; motes fade in seconds; walking over one banks it; a full battery takes nothing; a battery the arc is drawing takes nothing.

The once-per-organism rule is the best economic rule in the document and I am not touching it. It is what stops the harvest loop becoming a farm, and it is why the arc is a spend rather than an engine. Two things around it need work.

R4 — glow carries one bit, and roles ride on silhouette

The collision. "Visibly dimmer after shedding" puts spent-ness on brightness. The roster wants to put two more things there: a body that never glows because it does not conduct (Crust), and a body that glows brightly and unstably because it is about to discharge (Spark). That is four values on one channel, read at a glance, in a crowd the source sizes at 40 to 140. I do not believe that is readable, and I cannot test it.

[Proposal R4]. Collapse the cues where the consequences collapse.

• Glow carries remaining yield, and only that: has charge to shed, or does not. An unshed body glows; a shed body does not. A Crust glows until it is killed, like anything else — it is non-conducting, not spent.
• Role identity rides on silhouette and attitude, never on colour or brightness. The Anchor is half-submerged and still; the Grounder is on a cable, off the ground, and its position alone identifies it; the Carrier leans toward what it wants, and the forecast draws its target; the Crust is the base outline broken by encrustation; the Spark's outline flickers, which is motion, not brightness.
• Conductivity is a second, independent channel: encrustation. r1 of this page put both facts on brightness and then argued the resulting confusion was harmless; PMR004 is right that it is not — a Crust resists a stun that a spent Walker still receives, so a player who confuses them commits to a collection window that four bodies are walking through. Two facts, two channels: glow says what is left to take, encrustation says whether current reaches it. They are independent because the answers are independent.

Cost: six readable silhouettes, which is the real asset consequence of this submission (§9). Competing choice: none for the player; this is a presentation rule that makes the others fair.

R5 — a Carrier takes an uncollected mote

[Proposal R5]. A Carrier that reaches a mote on the ground consumes it and carries it; the mote is gone from the floor. Killing that Carrier drops it again as a mote. Nothing else can take a mote but the surveyor and a Carrier.

Today a dropped mote is bounded only by a fade timer, so "collect during a stun" is a stopwatch problem. R5 makes it a contest: the 20 units lying in the channel after a stun are being walked toward by the Carriers that came in with the surge. Player action: which motes, in what order, and whether to spend the burst now — which clears the collectors but empties the battery the motes were going to fill — or collect first and take contact damage. Visible information: Carriers lean toward the motes and the forecast draws their target. Consequence: charge you did not take is charge that walked away rather than charge that faded, and it is recoverable by killing the thief. Cost: you fight for a harvest you already paid a battery for.

This is also the honest answer to a fair criticism of the coil loop: at present the only things between the player and 20 units are a fade timer and the size of their battery. R5 puts an opponent there.

5. Beacon routing: what a role may and may not do to a light [Proposal R9]

Adopted and load-bearing, restated here as a limit on my own roster: the panel alone decides the intake. Current the player injects travels power, never signal; it can light a beacon steady and open a hatch, but it can never choose where the next surge enters (GDD §4). World r20 states the same as a contract on Campaign and Combat: a district may not change what power, signal or a beacon means, or make an ordinary lamp draw the Flood.

[Proposal R9], and the argument that it is inside that contract — necessary, and not sufficient. PMR005 is right that clearing the contract's prohibition list does not settle which connected consumers lose power, what alternate supply exists, or how recovery works; those are C4 in §0.4 and belong in the shared topology contract with Lead and World. What follows is the containment argument only. One role, the Grounder, can darken a beacon: it climbs a live cable run and grounds it, and the beacon on that run flickers and then goes dark until the Grounder is killed or the branch is switched.

• It does not change what a beacon means. A grounded beacon is an unpowered beacon, and an unpowered beacon draws nothing — the existing rule, applied. Dark still means dark.
• It cannot cause a dispatch, touch the signal cable, or select an intake. It removes a light; it never makes one. The panel's monopoly is untouched.
• It is announced before it acts: an irregular flicker that is visibly not the dispatch pulse — the dispatch pulse is a travelling flicker along the thin cable, panel to beacon, which GDD §4 makes the observable the whole rule's fairness rests on — plus a spark at the body's position on the thick cable, plus the forecast marking that branch failing.

Why the roster needs it. Without it, a routing decision is permanent for as long as the player leaves the panel alone, so "park the crowd and go elsewhere" is a solved problem after the first expedition. R9 puts a clock on a plan without putting a clock on the player: the plan decays because something is eating it, visibly, in a place you can go to. That is a better pressure source than a shorter timer, because it has a location, a cause and four different counterplays — kill it, re-switch, plant your own light, or take the long way — each costing something different.

6. The shared grammar — the interface with Equipment

This section exists so that EQP101 and CMB101 cannot invent two systems. I propose it as a contract and ask Equipment to accept, amend or reject it in writing. Where it constrains Equipment it constrains this page equally.

Targeting [R6]

R6 answers the question the Cutter page asks — "what must remain automatic, and what meaningful action does the player control?" If the weapon fires by itself and cannot be stopped, then what enters its reach is a decision the player is making continuously, and the target line is what turns that from an accident into a choice. It costs one engine-drawn line, and it is what makes the Spark fair: walking within reach of a Spark standing in the water you are standing in is the mistake, and the line shows you making it half a second before it lands.

A hold-fire button would defuse this entirely and I recommend against it. The contrary view is that taking control away feels bad. The answer is that the genre's premise is an automatic weapon; this design should charge for it rather than apologise for it.

Any Equipment weapon must state its targeting rule against this list: what it selects (nearest, densest, ahead of you), whether it can be withheld, and what its line looks like. A weapon that picks targets differently is a genuinely different weapon, which is what the Cutter page asks for. A weapon that does more damage is not.

Damage [R8]

[Proposal R8]: there are no damage numbers in this game.

• An enemy has a hit count — the number of cutter hits that kill it — not a health pool. The basic organism is three hits at roughly two hits a second (adopted, GDD §3).
• There are no resistances, no multipliers, no elements, no armour values. A body either conducts or does not; a body either can be reached or cannot.
• The player has five hits of health. Contact costs one, with a moment of immunity after. Unprotected energised water costs one per second. (Adopted, GDD §3.)

Why. With no XP and no weapon-damage ladder, damage numbers would be a system with one number in it and nowhere to go — and the first thing anyone would do with it is build the stat progression the Expansion Brief warns against ("a catalogue of damage bonuses alone does not solve this"). Agreeing this early is cheap; unwinding it after Equipment has thirty items priced in percentages is not.

Corrected in r3, after PMR004: this is a recommendation with a cost, not a ban, and the owner's brief forbids none of it. Different hit counts are inside R8 and always were — Campaign's Heavy takes ten, and its economic job is a good one (Enemies §0.2). What R8 argues against is a published ladder of numbers for weapons to be priced against, because that is the thing that grows on its own.

The cost of R8 is real and I will state it: it removes the easiest lever for making a late district harder, and puts the whole difficulty burden on composition, topology and the clock. §7 and the campaign arc in Enemies are my argument that this is enough. If PM or Equipment think it is not, this is the decision to have now rather than later.

Status [R7]

[Proposal R7]: three statuses for this draft, extended only by a revision of this page that states the reason.

Reworded in r3. PMR004 is right that nothing in the owner's brief bans further statuses, and that a compact grammar is a scoped proposal rather than proof the alternatives are bad. The claim is a cost, not a prohibition: each status added is another thing a player must read off a crowd of a hundred and forty, and this design spends its readability budget on where bodies are. If a fourth buys more than it costs, it should be added — through this page, so there is one list.

No slows, burns, poisons or fears in this draft. One ruling made here rather than routed: the prod'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.

Charge — the interface, restated as a copy

Canonical on the Design Document; copied here so an Equipment reader has the contract in one place. Kill mote 1 unit; a stun sheds one 5-unit large mote per 10 stunned; each organism sheds once, then is spent; motes fade in seconds; a battery holds 10; a coil discharge spends a whole battery; an arc burst empties one battery in about 10 s; a battery being drawn accepts nothing; a collected mote goes to the battery with the most room. Plus [R5]: a Carrier may take an uncollected mote.

One gap I could not close from the source, and it belongs to the Lead [Proposal R3]. How long does a coil discharge keep the water energised? The stun is 8 seconds, but the water's energised window is never stated — and the uninsulated player's cost, one health per second in energised water, cannot be computed without it. This matters directly: the electrician loadout spends a slot on insulation, and the price of not spending it is currently unknowable.

Settled in r3: 8 seconds, adopting Equipment's Coil C1. r1 of this page proposed 1 second and r2 revised it to 1–2; both are withdrawn. Equipment's number ties the powered interval to the stun interval the source scene already uses, and one number is better than two. The consequence is real and accepted: insulation is effectively required to collect inside a channel you have discharged into, which is exactly the shape GDD §5's electrician rack already has — coil, battery, insulation. The full row is in the effect contract at §0.2.

Conduction and the arc — R10, withdrawn

r1 proposed that an arc chain travel through energised water. It is withdrawn; the adopted rule is Arc A1's bounded body-to-body chain, in the effect contract at §0.2. The proposal, and why it was attractive and wrong, are kept in the revision log at §12 so it can be argued again if anyone wants to.

7. Composition — the interface with Campaign

Campaign owns placement (Expansion Prompts). This page owns what a legal composition is. Proposed budget, per surge:

Difficulty is composition and topology, never numbers. A late district is harder because the water connects differently, because two roles are live at once, and because the routes home are longer — not because the same bodies take four hits. That is R8 stated as a rule Campaign can build against.

A district's shared-rule diff — the check REV103 r5 pre-registered for REV104 — should, for combat, name: which roles are present, which precedence line each exercises, what announces it, and what the player can do about it with the equipment available at that point in the campaign. A district that cannot fill that in has decoration, not encounters.

8. What the player actively decides while the attack is automatic

The Cutter page asks this directly, and it is the fair question to ask a game whose weapon fires itself. Under the rules above, the player is deciding five things continuously, none of them by pressing an attack button:

1. What is inside the cutter's reach — because it cannot be withheld (R6). Near a Spark in water this is the whole game; near a Crust it decides whether an arc chain has anywhere to go.
2. Which precedence line they are standing in. Inside pursuit range you are a target; outside it you are scenery and the crowd is doing something predictable. Moving in and out of that line is the moment-to-moment skill, and R2's ring is how you read it.
3. When to spend. A coil discharge needs a full battery, a crowd in connected water, and a crowd that has not shed. An arc burst needs density and a battery you are willing to empty. Both are irreversible for the expedition.
4. Where the water is, relative to both of you. Water is the weapon and the hazard on one clause. Standing in it makes the coil possible and the Spark lethal.
5. What to walk away from. Every second fighting is a second not spent on the district, and the district is the reward (GDD §6). Nothing here rewards clearing a crowd for its own sake: no XP, and spent bodies are worth nothing.

And one thing decided before the expedition: what the rack can answer. Insulation answers water. A second battery answers a big harvest. The beacon answers Carriers and Grounders both, for two slots and a battery. A rack cannot answer everything, which is the point.

9. Presentation and asset consequences — stated as a cost, not a request

No asset has been located, inspected, downloaded, purchased or created by this role, and none is authorized. GDD §14 already records the enemy sprite as the project's first likely approval request, and the Asset Licences reference records that "free" is not one thing and that tinting or resizing is an adaptation some licences forbid.

What this submission adds to that cost, honestly: the roster's readability depends on six distinguishable silhouettes, five more than the current one-enemy proposal. That is the single largest consequence of this page and PM should weigh it as such. Three mitigations, in the order I would apply them:

1. Three of the six are readable from position and attitude rather than from a new creature. A Grounder is on a cable, off the ground. An Anchor is half-submerged and not moving. A Carrier leans toward its target, which the forecast overlay already draws. If the base body can be posed, these three cost poses, not creatures.
2. Two of the remaining three are silhouette edits of the base body: the Crust is the base outline broken by encrustation; the Spark is the base outline with a flicker. Whether that is legal depends on the individual asset's licence, not its host's general statement. I claim no availability and have inspected nothing.
3. If the owner takes the humanoid option in GDD §14 decision 2 — the Flood as a humanoid mass, which is among the owner's own examples of the Flood — the roster does not change: what conducts is bodies standing in water either way, and posture-based roles work at least as well on a humanoid. This roster is neutral on decision 2 and does not push it either way.

New non-creature cues this page needs, all engine-drawn, no asset: the cutter's target line (R6); the press ring per crowd on the forecast overlay (R2); the Grounder's irregular beacon flicker, which must be distinguishable from the dispatch pulse's travelling flicker, plus a spark at the cable (R9); and a flat, mote-less feedback on a discharge into an already-spent crowd, so a wasted battery reads as wasted.

The gap I cannot close. The Spark's fairness leans on a rising audible whine as it enters cutter reach. GDD §14 says sound is not designed. Without audio the visual fallback is the target line plus the flicker, which I believe is enough but cannot claim is enough. Recorded as a gap, not as a request.

10. Open questions

Consolidated into §0.4 in r4, so there is one list rather than two that drift apart. Every question there is stated with the position this page proceeds on, as Wiki Conventions §11a asks.

11. Where the rest of this submission is

• Enemies — the six roles, why each exists, the two mixed encounters checked against the rules above, the elites-and-bosses assessment, and the early/middle/late campaign arc.
• The six role pages: Walker · Anchor · Carrier · Crust · Spark · Grounder

12. 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.

The withdrawn R10, retained because it may be argued again. The proposal was that while a body of connected water is energised, an arc chain propagates through that water as well as body to body, reaching every conducting body the water connects. It was attractive because it made the late payoff cost five separate preparations — the arc, a full bank, Sparks deliberately left alive, a crowd routed into connected water, and insulation or dry footing. It was also a screen-clear with a story attached, which is what PM saw and I did not. If it returns it needs its own argued change; it is not a property of electricity that clause 1 implies.