Liberated territory read as empty. No patrols by design, and nobody
else either - so the safest part of the map was also the deadest, and
coming home felt like arriving nowhere rather than arriving somewhere
held. It also left the palette doing all the work of telling the bands
apart, when the population is the more legible signal: who is standing
in the street tells you whose street it is.
Militia mirror AMBIENT_PATROLS the other way up - thick at home,
thinning fast, none past the contested band, because a friendly face on
the frontier would be a safety net the setting is not supposed to have.
Driving across the map now reads 14, 14, 11, 5, 0 against enemies 0, 0,
3, 4, 4.
They are placed by checking who holds the ground they would stand on
rather than the band the player is in - near a border those are
different answers - and they leave when the line moves over them, or
when the player has driven far enough that they are only ambience
following him about.
There is a quieter consequence. Pursuit already called a chase off when
a hunter had insurgents on its doorstep, so running for your own lines
now genuinely works. The rule existed; there was nobody around to
trigger it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A patrol drove at 14 m/s whether it was on its rounds or chasing. A
healthy car does 29. Being hunted therefore meant holding W until the
95m sight radius did the rest: no cornering, no routing, no decision
anywhere in it.
Chasing cars wind up to 21 m/s, which sits deliberately between the
two - faster than anyone averages through a grid of junctions and
buildings, slower than the car's top end on a clear run. A long trunk
straight is an escape and the lanes are not, so the road hierarchy is
under real pressure for the first time: the fast conspicuous road is
the one you want when they are behind you, and it is the one they will
be looking on next time.
They also go round buildings now instead of through them. Line of
sight was already blocked by them and movement was not, which made
"break line of sight and change direction" advice the world did not
honour.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Cover is now a state you can lose. Suspicion builds while enemy eyes are on you,
squared with proximity so one patrol beside the car outweighs a crowd across the
street, and blocked by buildings like everything else. It cannot build at all
behind your own lines. Ramming, being shot at and running somebody over skip the
meter and land in full.
At the top of it you are hunted: nearby enemies drop what they were doing and
come, and keep joining as you drive past fresh patrols, since a chase you could
outrun by passing more of them would be no chase. Being hunted is also now the
only reason the enemy shoots at you — a target is a state, not a property of the
road you happen to be on.
Two ways out. Break line of sight for fourteen seconds, with any glimpse
resetting the clock; hunters drive to where they last saw you rather than where
you are, so turning a corner and changing direction is the move. Or let your own
side occupy them — hunters are patrols, not fanatics, and enough peeling off
ends the chase outright. Escaping leaves suspicion at 0.6 rather than zero: they
know there is a car worth looking for.
Tuning a test caught: the post-escape value sat a hair above the "suspicious"
threshold, so the afterglow expired within a second and the rule may as well not
have existed. Decay slowed to match, so cover is earned back by being dull
rather than by turning one corner.
Verified end to end in the running game: loitering beside a patrol in occupied
ground filled the meter and pulled three hunters, fleeing out of sight cleared it
after exactly fourteen seconds, and a visible player was closed on from 61m to
12m while taking hits.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A patrol working a road now takes a little off the district around it as well,
at roughly a tenth of the rate it takes off the road. Deliberately feeble: any
faster and sitting still while patrols came and went would quietly launder your
reputation, and district heat exists precisely to be the part you cannot patrol
away. Passed as a position rather than a district id, so the unit sim still does
not need to know how areas are gridded.
Adds a debug panel under ?debug=1 with buttons to wear the car down or patch it
up. Driving a wrecked car is something you want to try while driving, not while
typing at a console. An earlier version of the console helper took an amount and
ignored it, which would have made it silently useless.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Three fixes, all from watching it run.
Cars stuck against buildings. routeTo dropped the node a route starts from,
which is fine for a unit standing on it and wrong for anything re-routing from
mid-segment: its first leg became a straight line to a node two hops away,
across buildings and open country. Routes now include their start node so a unit
rejoins the road before setting off.
No patrols anywhere. They only existed as a reaction to the player's own tracks,
so hostile territory was empty until you had personally made a road notorious.
Enemy ground now carries standing patrols by how dangerous it is — none behind
your lines, five on the frontier — spawned onto their roads so the territory has
them the moment you arrive.
This surfaced a second bug: dispatched units were culled at 546m from the player
while dispatch origins reached 600m, so a patrol or engineer could be deleted on
its first step and simply never turn up. Anything with an assignment is now kept
regardless of range; its expiry still bounds it.
Barricades appearing instantly. Crossing a heat threshold placed concrete on the
road with nobody involved. Construction is now staged: an engineer is dispatched
for the barricade, another for the tower, and heatProps is driven by finished
builds rather than by heat levels. It still refuses to close a slab around a car
parked in the gap.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Nothing on a road simply appears any more. A road that turns notorious gets a
patrol dispatched to it: it starts at a junction a few hundred metres away,
drives there, sweeps the road for about a minute, and while it works the road it
brings the heat down — then leaves. Checkpoints are built rather than placed. At
turret level an engineer is sent, the tower rises over forty seconds of someone
standing on site, and a gunner mans it once it stands, up on top so he clears his
own barricade. Let the road cool and the whole thing is abandoned. heat.ts now
only pours concrete; everything living has to arrive.
Civilian traffic routes across the network with somewhere to be, people wander on
foot, and both scatter when shooting starts.
Skirmishes break out between the two armies on contested and occupied ground
regardless of where the player is. Rounds are real objects in flight rather than
instant hits between combatants — that is the point of the feature. If shots
resolved instantly, driving through a battle would cost nothing and "the only
road to the target runs through a firefight" would not be a decision. Strays hit
bystanders, civilians and the player alike; buildings stop them, so cover means
something; hits go through the same wear model as a crash, so being shot costs
ceiling too.
The enemy does not shoot at an undercover driver by default. They open up only
past the line and only on a road they have already checkpointed.
Reload was being counted in stepUnits while firing lived in stepCombat, so combat
stepped on its own never reloaded. A test caught it; ownership now sits with the
module that fires.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
