Both scaling levers counted seats. partyEnemyHPScale gave +15% boss HP for any
roster >= 2, and partyActionExpectation lifted the enemy from 1 to 2.4 attacks a
round. A seat COUNT charges the same for an under-levelled friend, a hired NPC,
and a true peer — so a below-median body cost a full seat's worth of boss and did
not give a full seat's worth back.
Measured, once the companion's free full-heal was taken away and he became honest:
hiring him was WORSE than going alone (66.1% against solo's 69.0%). That is this
bug, and it has been live for every under-levelled friend anyone has ever invited.
Seats now carry a SeatWeight, and both levers scale on the summed weight of the
LIVING seats rather than on a head count. The weight is level-based, priced against
the leader, times a discount for a hireling (no subclass, no magic items, gear that
is never Masterwork — the layers a player accrues and a hireling never will).
Level, and deliberately not a power score: an HP-x-damage proxy would rank a cleric
below a fighter and quietly make every mixed HUMAN party easier, which is a
difficulty regression smuggled in under a bug fix.
The safety argument is one property: **a peer weighs exactly 1.0**. So the curves
interpolate between the integer knots the P8 sweep tuned — (1, 1.0), (2, 2.4),
2n-1 from 3 up — and every integer input returns exactly what it always returned.
Solo is byte-identical, a party of same-level humans is byte-identical, both
goldens hold unmoved, and only an UNEQUAL roster lands between the knots. That is
the entire point of the change.
It also finishes §2(b): a seat that is down now buys the enemy nothing. §2(b) fixed
the head-count half; a corpse still carried its full weight until this.
Measured, 640 runs/arm, same grid:
solo 69.0% (unchanged — corpus intact)
+ Pete 76.8% (+7.8pp)
+ a human cleric peer 77.6% (+8.6pp)
band solo +Pete lift
trailing (<40%) 10.0% 31.0% +21.0pp
middle 58.9% 76.8% +17.9pp
leading (>=70%) 93.5% 99.2% +5.7pp
Help, never a carry: he rescues the players who were drowning and barely moves the
ones who were already fine — and he stays below a real human of the leader's level,
which is the invariant a hireling must never break.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
A party of N used to face one enemy swing a round against a single seat, so
each member absorbed ~1/N² of the solo incoming and cleared 100% of every T5
cell. The enemy now takes enemyActionsThisRound() attack-actions, each
re-targeted at a fresh standing seat, in both combat engines:
- auto-resolve (simulatePartyRound): enemyRoundSwings loops the actions,
re-rolling each target's pet procs.
- turn engine (stepEnemyTurn): enemyAttackAction resolves one full SRD
multiattack per action; step() no longer blanket-stamps the enemy turn to
one seat, since a party's enemy now hits several.
The action count is a fractional expectation realised as a per-round coin-flip
(2.4 for a duo, 2N-1 for N>=3), because the integer lever is too coarse at small
N -- against a duo, 2 actions is a ~91% faceroll and 3 a ~45% grinder, with
nothing between. A light party-only enemy HP scalar (x1.15) trims the martial
ceiling that action count alone leaves at 100%.
Solo is exempt on both levers (1 action, no RNG draw; x1.0 HP), so
TestCombatCharacterization is byte-identical and the d8prereq corpus still
compares. Sim band (party of 3, T5, HP scaled): fighter 70->90%, cleric-led
27->72% -- monotonic by party size, no composition worse than soloing.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017mEwUmmS7aQTP2NQXj6rUa
Five bugs found reviewing n1-restoration end to end.
beginCombatTurn settles any phase the engine owes before reading whose turn it
is. That settle can end the fight — and the old code then answered "you're not
in a fight" and returned. The terminal status was already persisted, so nothing
ever paid the party out: no XP, no loot, no death recorded, no run teardown. The
reaper cannot recover it either, because listExpiredCombatSessions filters on
status='active'. Close the fight out there, the way the !fight start path and
the reaper already do.
A party member was permanently soft-locked when their leader extracted and never
resumed. seatedExpeditionFor (the guard) spans 'extracting'; expeditionForMember
(what !expedition leave resolved through) saw only 'active'. So the member was
refused any new adventure by the guard and told "No active expedition" by the
command the guard points them at, with nothing sweeping stale rows and only the
leader able to clear one. Resolve the exit through the same lookup as the gate.
updateSupplies overwrites supplies_json wholesale, and expeditionCmdAccept folded
a member's packs onto a snapshot read before the coin debit, unlocked. Handlers
run one goroutine per event, so two invitees accepting genuinely interleave and
one member's packs vanish. advUserLock cannot help — it is keyed by sender, so
racing members take different mutexes. Add advExpeditionLock and re-read the pool
under it. Closes accept-vs-accept; the six other updateSupplies callers still
race and are written up separately.
runHarvestInterrupt picked an elite enemy and elite narration off a local `elite`
flag, then passed a hardcoded false as isElite to closeOutZoneWin. dropZoneLoot
gates masterwork on isBoss||isElite, so beating an elite interrupt skipped the
masterwork roll and took standard treasure weight — while the same elite fought
via !zone paid out correctly.
arenaSeasonRollover marked its job complete even when recordArenaSeasonTitle
failed, and JobCompleted short-circuits every later run for that quarter, so a
transient SQLite BUSY lost the crown forever. Defer completion on failure; the
insert is ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING against PRIMARY KEY (season, kind) and a past
season's data is frozen, so the retry is safe.
Also: drop dead partySurvivors, collapse the zoneCombatRoster alias into
fightRoster, route partyCasualtyLine through joinNames, fold four copies of the
expedition column projection into expeditionSelectCols, stop replyDM sending a
blank DM, and correct two doc comments describing a path that no longer exists.
Deliberately not fixed, with reasons, in gogobee_code_review_followups.md — most
notably that both turn-based close-outs skip grantCombatAchievements and
persistDnDPostCombatSubclass, which the auto-resolve paths run.
Only elite and boss doorways seated a roster. Everything else -- exploration
rooms, patrol encounters, harvest interrupts -- resolved through SimulateCombat
against ctx.Sender, and P6d made the walk commands leader-only. So on a 38-room
T5 expedition a party of three fought together twice and the leader soloed the
other ~35, then died alone while two untouched members stood at full HP.
The plan said the N-body core was already there and only the callers passed one
player. It wasn't: SimulateCombat built a one-seat roster internally. But the
resolution primitives already read st.c -- the cursor's Combatant -- because the
turn engine has called them that way since P3. Only the round loop needed
widening.
combat_engine_party.go carries it: simulateParty, simulatePartyRound,
roundInitiative, enemyTargetSeat. Every roster short-circuit collapses for one
seat, copying P3's solo exemptions, so the RNG draw order is unchanged and
SimulateCombat is now simulateParty([]Combatant{p}, ...).Seats[0].
TestCombatCharacterization is byte-identical; TestSimulateCombat_IsTheOneSeatPartyCase
pins the delegation event-for-event across 40 seeds.
zone_combat_party.go carries the callers' half: runZoneCombatRoster fans out the
character-scoped close-out (HP, XP, achievements, subclass, heal items burned,
Misty's repair) per seat, while loot, threat, kill records and death stay with
whoever knows the room. runZoneCombat remains the explicit solo entry point --
the arena calls it, and an arena bout must never drag in a party.
Death is read per seat off HP, never off the fight's terminal status: a timed-out
party can still have lost somebody, and a solo player at 0 HP has already ended
the fight, so PlayerEndHP <= 0 is exactly the old !TimedOut rule.
Preserved deliberately: a solo player can win at 0 HP (a retaliate aura kills the
swinger on the killing blow, and resolvePlayerAttack returns before enemyDown is
consumed) and is not marked dead. A party marks its downed seats dead on a win,
which is what finishPartyWin always did.
Solo T5 re-sweep is unregressed (fighter 47-73%, cleric 20-33%). Party of 3 now
clears 100% of every T5 cell, which is P8's problem: the enemy takes one turn per
round and swings at one seat, so a party of N deals xN damage and each member
takes ~1/N^2 of the solo incoming. An HP scalar cannot close that -- it restores
the fight's duration, not the enemy's action economy.
