Hold the Flood — Combat Rules

CMB101 · r2 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — first submission of this role. r2 adds §0: every proposal re-checked against the Lead's shared-rule contract Power and Attraction r2 69024c and Campaign 34dc09, which landed while r1 was being written. R3's recommendation is revised (one to two seconds, not one) and one objection to the Campaign page's Heavy is withdrawn; nothing else changed. The base role is renamed from Drifter to Walker. New page otherwise; it supersedes nothing. It states the shared combat grammar that Enemies and the six role pages are written against, and proposes ten numbered revisions (R1–R10) to gaps and collisions the roster exposes. 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 closed 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. Checked against the shared-rule contract (added in r2)

The Lead published the shared-rule contract Power and Attraction r2 69024c and Campaign 34dc09 while r1 of this page was being written against Design Document r14 and PM's r1 seed. The contract is now the page to cite for conduction, power, attraction and charge, and this page cites it below wherever r1 cited GDD §4. The rules did not change; the address of the rules did.

Every proposal on this page re-checked against the contract, honestly:

| | Status after the contract | | | --- | --- | --- | | R1 precedence stack | Still needed, and needed harder. Contract §3 states the retarget-or-spread precedence and states that "pursuit is local and short, and a crowd's outward pressure (the press) is separate from it" — but it still does not order pursuit against attraction, and the Campaign page now proposes three further roles (Floater, Heavy, Static) that each need line 2 to exist. R1 is now the stack that the Lead's own roster requires, not only mine | | R2 press bounded by crowd size, drawn as a ring | Still open. The contract names the press and separates it from pursuit; it gives it no rate and no stop | | R3 the energised window | Position revised. Contract §2 says a coil discharge "energises the water the surveyor is touching for the seconds the charge lasts" — plural, where r1 of this page proposed one second. Revised recommendation: one to two seconds, and in all cases shorter than the eight-second stun, so that collection inside the water stays possible without insulation being compulsory. If the Lead prefers a window as long as the stun, insulation becomes mandatory equipment for the coil and Encounter A's collection beat changes; that is a defensible design and it should be chosen rather than left as "seconds" | | R4 glow carries one bit; roles ride on silhouette | Partly agreed, and it exposes a disagreement between the Lead's two pages. Contract §8 says "enemy variants by size and tint"; Campaign §4 says of the same roster "readable by size, silhouette or spark, not by tint alone" and "health and tint are not roles". Campaign §4 is right. R4 goes one step further and is reported, not imposed | | R5 Carriers take uncollected motes | Unaffected. Now part of the Static/Carrier merge in Enemies §0.3 | | R6 unwithholdable cutter, visible target line | Unaffected and newly load-bearing. Campaign §4 adds a second weapon, the prod, which "pushes and never kills". Under R6 it must publish its targeting rule: what it selects, whether it can be withheld, and what its line looks like | | R7 three statuses, closed | Holds, with 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. The list stays at three | | R8 no damage numbers | Narrowed, and one objection withdrawn. Campaign §4's Heavy takes ten hits — a hit count, which R8 permits, not a health pool with modifiers, which it does not. The Lead's economic argument for heavies persuaded me and is recorded in Enemies §0.2. The one clause I still ask for is that the resistance be stated as "cannot be cleared by the cutter in useful time" rather than as a published hit-count ladder, because a ladder is what Equipment will price weapons against | | R9 a role may darken a beacon | Passes the Lead's own published test. 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. Still needs the explicit ruling (C5) | | R10 an arc chain travels through energised water | Still open, and more consequential. Campaign §4 adds the cable reel, which "lays a conductor between two wet points across dry ground" — so a player can now decide how far energised water reaches, which is exactly what R10 turns into reach for the burst. This is a reason to rule on R10 explicitly rather than let it be inferred from clause 1 |

The composition budget in §7 now covers eight roles, not six. The merged roster and its asset cost are in Enemies §0.6; the per-district and per-surge caps here are unchanged, so no expedition asks a player to read more than four kinds of body at once.

Naming. The base role is Walker, the Lead's name, published first. This page's r1 called it Drifter; the role page is at Walker and Enemies/Drifter is a pointer.

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.

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 exactly one bit: has charge to shed, or does not. An unshed body glows; a shed body does not. That is all a player needs from brightness, because the only decision brightness informs is is there anything to take here.
• 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.
• A player who confuses a spent Walker with a Crust loses nothing — both mean "no charge here". A player who confuses a Crust with an unspent Walker is punished, and the crusted outline is what prevents it. The one confusion that costs is carried by the strongest cue.

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. 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 closed 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 explicitly warns against ("a catalogue of damage bonuses alone does not solve this"). Closing the door now is cheap; closing it after Equipment has thirty items priced in percentages is not.

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]: the status list is closed at three, and Equipment may not extend it without a revision of this page.

No slows, burns, poisons or fears. Three is a small number on purpose: this design's interest is in where bodies are, not in what conditions they carry, and every added status is another thing to read off a crowd of a hundred.

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.

I propose 1 second, so that an uninsulated discharge costs 1 health — a real but survivable mistake — and so the water is inert for the 8 seconds the player spends collecting inside it. If the Lead prefers the water to stay hot for the whole stun, insulation becomes close to mandatory for the coil, which is a different and defensible balance of the rack. It should be chosen, not left blank. My recommendation is stated rather than routed (Wiki Conventions §11a); I proceed on 1 second and the encounters in Enemies say where it is load-bearing.

Conduction and the arc [R10] — a consequence of clause 1, made explicit

[Proposal R10]. While a body of connected water is energised, an arc chain propagates through that water as well as body to body, so it reaches every conducting body the water connects, not only the bodies adjacent in the chain.

This is not a new clause. Clause 1 already says current flows through water to everything the water connects, and an arc hit is current. But the document never states what happens when the arc's current and energised water meet, and the answer is the single largest power spike in this submission, so it should be written down rather than discovered. This is a proposal to the Lead, who owns clause 1.

Where it bites: a Spark killed in water energises that water for 1 second (R3's window, the same quantity). A burst run through a channel crowd that still contains living Sparks therefore keeps re-energising the channel, and the chain stops being local. That is the late-campaign crowd-clearing payoff, and it costs five separate preparations to reach: the arc, a full battery, Sparks deliberately left alive, a crowd routed into connected water, and insulation or dry footing. Encounter B in Enemies walks it through against these rules.

If the Lead rejects R10, the roster still works: the Spark remains the role that makes the automatic weapon a liability, and the late payoff falls back to the adopted coil-then-arc double in GDD §13. R10 is the upside, not the foundation.

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, and what I would rule

Stated as positions, not as tickets (Wiki Conventions §11a). None blocks the roster; each names what I proceed on.

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