The economy as it is
Material comes from trees: a squad fells a forest tile in four seconds for four material, and the tree grows back in two minutes. A tank carries eight. Walls, roads, bridges, mines and pillboxes cost one or two; a boat five. Depots resupply armour, fuel, shells and drones; since game 4 a depot makes one thing a second for all who draw on it and holds twenty of each kind, so a depot is a well that can run dry under a crowd and refills on its own. A pillbox holds eight shells for its owner and regains one every ten seconds. Structures go on pads: a power plant powers a zone of eighteen tiles; a refinery is a fuel and shell stop that halves the side's fuel burn; a workshop repairs and mends; a data centre is fire control and radar. Scoring pays a kill 100, a capture 25, an interception 5 and two points every ten seconds for each structure held; game 4 added rewards for going forward, which chapter 6 showed the search will farm. The upgrades proposal of 18 October (PROPOSAL-UPGRADES) adds supply, a side's second count earned from holdings and kills, and sixteen things to buy with it; it was traced once and never built.
Nothing in this is finite. Shells and drones appear at depots from nowhere, for ever. That is what makes a sixteen-minute elimination game work, and what makes a thirty-minute one shapeless.
The design: four stocks, one of them renewable
| Stock | Source | Finite? | Spent on | The structure that improves it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| wood | forest tiles, felled by the squad; regrows | no | roads, walls, bridges, boats, pillboxes | the harvester: a works on a pad by a forest; the squad's harvest near it yields six, not four, and the tile regrows in one minute |
| ore | deposits: a new map object, a few per map, each with a fixed stock | yes | shells (smelted), pillbox and structure armour plate | the smelter: a works that turns ore into a depot's shell stock, one a second; without one a depot's shells do not refill |
| oil | wells: a map object with a fixed stock | yes | fuel, drone batteries | the refinery: already a works; now it turns a well's oil into the side's fuel and halves the burn, as it does |
| supply | holdings and kills, as the proposal has it | earned, not mined | upgrades; and trade | the depot stores upgrade |
Zero-sum is the point: the ore and oil on a map are the ore and oil there is. A side that takes a deposit denies it; a side that loses its smelter runs its guns dry over minutes, not seconds; a long match becomes a contest over three or four places on the map rather than a crowd at the depots. Trees stay renewable so a side can always build, if slowly, and nobody is locked out of the game.
Logistics: workers, and what a hit costs a pillbox
A base today is a depot, what stands near it, and whatever tanks happen to be there. The design gives it a crew: workers, a base's own squad, who never board a tank. They do three things, in order: carry (smelted shells from the smelter to the depot, fuel from the refinery, shells from the depot to the base's pillboxes), repair (what the workshop's slow mending does not reach), and build (what the city's plan says next). Roads speed them; a base with no road to its smelter is a base whose guns run dry in a siege. Workers are an abstraction a world can run cheaply: a stock in transit with a travel time along the route, drawn as a small figure on the road.
A pillbox's ammunition then has a source and a fate. It fills from its depot by the workers, not from nowhere; and when the pillbox is hit, its stored shells go up: the stock falls to zero, the blast is drawn, and the pillbox fights on with only what the workers bring and what it makes itself (one shell in ten seconds, as now). A besieged pillbox is a dangerous thing for a minute and a quiet one after, which is what a siege is, and why cutting the road matters.
How a city develops
A base grows through four shapes, each the squad's and the workers' work on top of the last, and each what the builder role and the base cycle already try to make today:
- A camp: a depot held, two pillboxes brought home, a ring road begun.
- A town: a power plant on its pad, a harvester by the wood, walls at the gate, the castle's two pillboxes inside and posts on the road out.
- A works town: a smelter at the nearest ore and the road to it, a refinery at the nearest well, the depot's stores upgraded, the workshop mending.
- A city: the data centre's fire control and radar, concrete walls, a gatehouse, a dock if there is water, supply roads to the allies' towns.
The order is a plan, not a script: the team's posture leans it (Defend buys plating, Connect buys roads, Economy buys stores), and the brain's improvement slot (upgrade_vs_mend) already exists to weigh an upgrade against a mend.
The quartermaster
Paul's "one teammate stays back issuing the city-building commands while defending" is a role. A person's team already has a builder on Auto whose castle goes round the person's depot, and the guard now keeps building while the castle is unfinished (crew_stay). The quartermaster is that builder given the city's plan and the workers to carry it out: it stays within the base's alarm, defends when the base is threatened, and otherwise issues the next item of the plan, buys upgrades with supply by the team's posture, and asks the fleet for ore and oil ground when a stock runs low. It is a roles version (quartermaster) and a city_plan choice (camp, town, works, city) on top of the builder that exists, which is why it comes after the stocks and before the trade.
Trade, from the game Paul described
The trade mechanics he pasted (ports trade with ports and factories with factories; a payout that grows with distance and is highest between allies; trade units that spawn by themselves and are captured or protected; an embargo for five minutes on an attack, or for good by choice) map onto this game as supply: two depots of allied sides joined by road or water trade supply by the distance between them, with the allied rate above the team rate above a side's own; a convoy is a stock in transit the workers run and a raider can take; attacking a trading partner embargoes the pair for five minutes. The three-way rule already keeps alliances a choice rather than the end of the game. Trade gives a reason to hold a road and to keep an ally, which is what goal 3 (command, not only driving) and goal 5 (longer matches) have both lacked ([82], [83], [86]).
The staged plan, and what each stage costs
Every stage is a rule change: a GAME_VERSION bump, the evidence started anew, every dial promoted before it suspect, and a census before and after. That is expensive, which is why the stages are few and bundled, and why each has its proof written first.
| Stage | Game version | What changes | Proof, written before the run |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. The pillbox's stock | 5 | a hit pillbox loses its shells; a pillbox refills only from a depot within reach that has stock (the workers, abstract) | pillbox shots a match fall; a besieged base is taken more often; the guarded-base family still holds at 65% |
| 2. Ore and the smelter (built, 2 November) | 6 | deposits on the maps; the squad harvests ore; the smelter; depots make shells only from ore; the harvester | a match of 30 minutes has a shape (holdings decide it); shells a match fall by half; a side without ore loses its guns within five minutes |
| 3. Workers and the city (built, 2 November) | 7 | workers as stock in transit; the city's four shapes; the quartermaster role and the city plan; oil and the refinery's source | building rises without the walk reward; supply as the proposal has it; the upgrades |
| 4. Trade (built, 2 November) | 8 | allied depots trade supply by distance; convoys; the embargo | alliances form in bots' matches; a trade road is defended |
Stage 1 is one session and touches step_pillboxes, step_depots and the pillbox's resupply; its only new state is nothing (a stock that falls to zero). Stage 2 is the large one: a map object, a terrain or object kind, a structure kind, and the depot's rule. The map files that carry deposits are new files; the old ones play as before until they are given deposits.
What was built on 2 November: stage 2
Game 6 is in treadcore (LR 128). Deposits are a map object (deposit x y [stock]; a map that places none gets one for every second start, six tenths of the way to the centre, 120 ore each). On an ore map a depot makes no shells and a refinery's shell stop is dry; the squad mines a deposit with the farm order (six seconds, four ore, eight aboard); a tank within three tiles of its side's working smelter unloads; the smelter makes a shell a second into the nearest depot of its side within thirty tiles. The smelter and the harvester stand on open ground beside their resource, not on a pad, and need no plant; a harvest within eight tiles of a working harvester yields six and the tree returns in a minute. In the brain, ore_low and ore_reach inside RANGES, the ore run (the guard whenever the depot is short, every tank once after a fill-up), the smelter built by the side's nearest tank with the material, and a tank that leaves a dry depot after ten seconds. The proof written above was read in part: on the naval map for ten minutes the fleet's own bots built five smelters, mined forty ore and smelted thirty-six shells, and no tank waited at a dry depot past eight seconds; a short census had teams mine and smelt 12 and 20 while the team that did neither scored between them, so the economy is not yet the score. The thirty-minute shape and the halving of shells a match are the fleet's censuses to read, and they begin again at game 6.
What was built the same night: stages 3 and 4
Game 7 (LR 129): wells of oil pumped as deposits are mined and unloaded at the side's refinery, which fuels the depots an oil a stop and leaves a trickle without; the workers as stock in transit, a smelter's shells and a depot's shells for its pillboxes on a figure that walks the map's route, five at a time, lost to a splash, taken by a tank that drives up; supply as the proposal had it, spent as one side, the depot's stores its first purchase (F6); the guard as quartermaster, building the town, the works and the city as far as city_plan allows, the zone taken power plant first; the oil run beside the ore run; the top strip as the stocks page. Game 8 (LR 130): each depot sends a convoy of supply to its nearest partner of the side every minute, by road or over the water between ports, both ends paid by the distance; a convoy is a worker a raider takes, and the scripted brain raids one it sees. Five logistics gauntlets (G13 to G17: ore to the smelter, oil to the refinery, the convoy comes through, the raider takes the convoy, the chain from the deposit through the factory and the port to the city) with the reward terms a training course can name, and seventeen new senses so a net can learn them; the maps industry, island and naval carry their own deposits and wells. The full account, with what each gauntlet read for the scripted brain and the nets, is The Zero-Sum Economy. Not built: the embargo (allies cannot hurt each other, so there is nothing to embargo until a betrayal is a thing), fuel fully zero-sum, the proposal's other upgrades, a stocks page of its own. The same night (LR 131) the learned tank's squad head was wired and a net trained on the five courses, its squad head begun at zero, passed every one held out; the report's addendum has the three runs and the margin that explained the first two. By morning (LR 132) the clone trainer takes the squad head's mask, a scenario can name a fleet map, and the same net read 0 of 10 among nine on those maps, dead in the first minute; the Quartermaster, style 16, is on the fleet's census. Its census (LR 133): the net's team mines more ore and pumps more oil than the rules' teams and smelts a tenth of theirs, since a team of nets builds no smelter; −30.7 a seat. A mixed team (one Quartermaster, two of the rules, bot_mix) and the first minute at 400 generations went to the fleet (LR 134) and came back the same afternoon (LR 136): the first minute at 400 generations reads what the start read (14 of 20 on two maps, none on naval, where the course has no pillbox in reach), its net the better one on the gauntlet and shipped as first-minute.bin; one Quartermaster beside two of the rules costs −5.1 a seat where sixteen cost −30.7, and the team's smelted line is two thirds of the rules' with the ore the same: the net mines and does not deliver even when its side's smelter stands, and adds oil nothing uses. The saving is the rules' leader and guard. The squad head's next course is the delivery, not the mine.
What the training data should carry
The census logs each team's built, road, kills and deaths already (chapter 6 read them). For the economy they need ore mined, shells smelted, fuel refined, supply earned and traded, convoys taken, and minutes a pillbox stood empty, so that the score's blind spots do not repeat: the trade guard's floors extend to these, and a persona (Venice) can be judged on what it is for.
Links
PROPOSAL-UPGRADES.md · Too Many Shots · DESIGN.md · GOVERNANCE.md section 5 (a change to the rules wants a trace) · real-time strategy economies and balance [82]–[89].