Area heat. Road heat alone rewarded a strange kind of play: work one part of
town hard but take a different street every time, and nothing ever got hot. A
second, coarser pool now accrues from being inside a district at all — on-road
or off — and bleeds into every road running through it, including ones never
driven. Deliberately capped below the barricade threshold: a hot district gets
roads patrolled, but concrete still takes somebody actually using that road. It
also decays slower than road heat, because one patrol re-secures a road while a
district's reputation lingers.
Surfaces. Off the route the car now makes about 40% of its road top speed, loses
grip and scrubs momentum in a fifth of the distance, so the road hierarchy is
something you feel rather than something the map merely claims. A first tuning
made off-road a 12 km/h crawl, which removed the choice instead of pricing it —
going round a checkpoint cross-country has to stay a legitimate move.
Speed. Heat scales with how fast you were going, not just how far, and stops
rewarding ever-higher speed past a point so the answer is never one exact number
on the clock. With the road classes, that makes the routing decision real: the
trunk fast and noticed, or the lanes slow and ignored.
Save format goes to v2 for the district pool; older saves are refused rather
than half-restored. Also fixes a population test that hardcoded densities since
tuned, and README claims about patrols and AI that Phase 6 made untrue.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Steering. The falloff with speed was linear, so the car had already lost a third
of its lock by 20km/h — exactly the speed you take a right-angle junction at, on
a map made of right-angle junctions. It is quadratic now, which leaves low
speeds nearly untouched and still calms things down at pace, plus a faster rack
and a little more lock. Pinned with a test that drives an actual quarter turn and
measures its radius. A first attempt asserted that fast corners take longer,
which is simply false: a fast car swings through ninety degrees quicker, just
across far more tarmac. Radius is what a corner costs you.
Contact. Units were points that ignored everything, so there was nothing to hit.
Vehicles now carry kinematic bodies and ramming one is a real collision that
damages them and shoves you. People get no collider on purpose — a capsule means
snagging on pedestrians or launching them — so you drive through them and they go
down, and running over a civilian is counted for later.
Territory. Liberated ground covered more than half the map because the player
started in the middle of it, so most of the world was safe by geometry. The
starting base is now at the friendly edge and the bands are anchored to give
roughly 15/25/27/33 across liberated, contested, occupied and frontier. Measured
in the running game rather than guessed, since the axis runs diagonally across a
square and area is not linear in depth.
Also fixes a fragile test that compared reward rates across whichever targets a
board happened to offer, and so mostly measured route length rather than the
novelty premium it claimed to check.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mission types. Four of them, differing in pacing and risk rather than in the
noun on the board: a quick supply drop, a retrieval whose danger is all on the
return leg, a long stationary intel transmission in the open, and a cheap survey
whose payoff is the map. Retrieval carries cargo that impacts damage, and pays
for what arrives rather than what you set off with, which makes the drive home a
different problem from the drive out.
Radio. Chatter framing the player as an undercover driver being talked at by
people busy elsewhere. Every line is triggered by something actually happening
in the sim — crossing a border, a road you personally made notorious, a car past
saving, or the front genuinely drifting. The enemy-has-other-priorities line
fires off measured drift, so the brief's ambient-drift-is-the-mechanism idea is
said out loud without ever showing a number. Topics carry cooldowns and never
repeat a sentence back to back; a test caught that they could.
Field work. Past the line, with nothing in hand, a wounded stranger or a contact
or a strippable wreck occasionally turns up. Deliberately not on a board: no
route preview, no comparison, no shopping between them. Take the detour in front
of you or drive on. They never appear behind your own lines, where a safe errand
would defeat the point.
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>
