The objective beacon now goes out once the cargo is dropped or the survey is
done. The target is no longer somewhere the player needs to be, and the bases'
own beacons take over for the trip home.
The front moves from two independent sources. Mission completions push it
forward, weighted by what the job was worth, and that contribution decays over
about seven minutes so ground won is not held for free. On top of that the line
drifts on its own in both directions, which the brief is explicit about: ambient
drift is what makes this a war rather than a level, and it is the only mechanism
for the enemy's attention being pulled elsewhere.
Drift is a sum of slow waves, not a random walk. A first attempt at a damped
walk moved 3m in four minutes, because white noise scaled by dt averages itself
out. Waves at incommensurate periods are unpredictable in practice, bounded by
construction, and reproducible from the seed, so a test can assert that a region
changed hands while the player was away. Most of the movement is shared across
boundaries, since a front advances as a whole; independent per-band waves were
squeezing bands into the ordering clamp.
Crucially the map no longer reads live state. Intel now records who held each
cell when the player last stood in it, and the minimap draws that, with the
border inferred from where remembered control changes rather than from the
front's true position. Otherwise the map would quietly hand the player a live
readout of a line that is supposed to move behind their back. Stale roads are
drawn faded, so untrustworthy notes look untrustworthy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things, all tangled together enough to land at once.
Regions. A single directional front cuts the map into liberated, contested,
occupied and frontier. Heat accrual behind your own lines is exactly zero, not
merely small — a trickle would eventually fortify your own back garden, and
would mean the safe area quietly punished you for using it. Decay is judged by
whoever holds the road, not whoever holds the ground the car is standing on.
Modelled as one front rather than blobs of territory because the brief wants the
line to move in both directions, and Phase 4 can then just slide the offsets.
Territory is signalled by tone, never by the world announcing itself: crossing a
border eases the fog, light and palette between four looks. Phase 3's gate is
telling occupied from liberated without being told, so the HUD line naming the
band is debug scaffolding like the heat numbers.
Minimap. There was no way to tell where a target was. The map is drawn from
Intel, not from the world: the road network's shape is always faintly visible,
but only roads actually seen carry remembered heat, only ground actually driven
through is filled in, and the front line is dashed in only where both sides of
it have been explored. Adds a coarse fog-of-war grid to Intel, plus an
eight-point compass arrow in the HUD.
Base huts. The building was centred on the junction, so the starting hut sat
directly over the car and hid it. Huts now stand off the junction, in whichever
direction is furthest from tarmac, and are solid.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four allied bases, placed by greedy farthest-point so no choke point can strand
the player, with the first at the spawn junction so the loop is available at
once. Missions hand in at any base, not the issuing one.
The board offers known and new targets side by side and describes each route in
words. Crucially it never reads heat directly — it reads sim/intel.ts, a record
of what the player has actually observed and when. Notes age while roads keep
escalating unwatched, so a known route is knowable, stale, and never a promise.
Recon missions survey everything within 130m, which is how a new target becomes
a known one without driving every road there.
New targets pay 1.8x. That multiplier is the phase's tuning dial: too low and
nobody takes the unknown, too high and nobody takes the known.
Payment is parts, which repair the car. To keep "decline, not reset" intact,
each subsystem gains a ceiling that falls permanently with damage — repairs
restore up to what the car is still capable of, never to what it was. Without an
economy the board's rewards had no stakes; with one, the risky job is what keeps
the car running a while longer.
Adds Dijkstra over the road graph, taking a cost function so a "safest route"
preview is a small change later.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
