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>
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