N3 widened the combat *roster* from 1 to N but never widened the action model,
the scaling model, or the test net to match. Building the hireable companion
walked into all three. Only one of the four defects found was the companion's;
the rest have been live in prod for every human party since N3.
The party golden did not exist (§5)
Solo combat is pinned exhaustively (7468 lines); the entire N-body layer had
nothing. That is why a healer class that cannot heal shipped without a test
going red. Adds party_characterization.golden (9 scenarios x 5 seeds, incl.
weak and dying seats) and TestPartyCharacterization_OneSeatIsStillSolo, so the
N-body path can never quietly stop being a superset of the balance corpus.
Regenerate only on purpose: -update-party.
No action could target another seat (§1)
Every heal in the engine was self-scoped. A party cleric could not put one hit
point on a friend. Adds turnActionEffect.AllyHeal/AllySeat, `!cast <spell>
@user` and `--target @user` -- the latter has been advertised in !help and
silently swallowed by parseCombatCast since SP2 ("reserved for SP3"). The auto
picker uses it too (simPickAllyHeal), so away-players and engine-driven healers
behave like competent ones. It will not raise the dead.
Corpses kept buffing the boss (§2b)
enemyActionsThisRound counted len(st.actors), dead included -- so a party that
lost a member kept paying for them, and the survivor faced a boss still swinging
at two-player cadence, alone. A death spiral with the arrow pointing the wrong
way. Now counts livingActors(). Party golden moved deliberately for this.
An engine-driven seat was a bool any command could clear (§3)
autoDriveCombat drives a party by dispatching each seat's turn AS that seat, so
a companion's own auto-played move arrived at beginCombatTurn looking like a
player returning to the keyboard and cleared the latch that was moving him. He
then stood in the fight doing nothing while the boss he had inflated killed
everyone. ActorStatuses.EngineDriven is now a persisted seat property that no
command clears, and the driver calls driveEngineSeat instead of impersonating.
"The party" could be empty (§4)
A solo expedition has no expedition_party rows, so asking the roster who was in
the party answered "nobody" -- and every caller fell back to something plausible.
That is how the companion got hired at level 1 for exactly the player the feature
exists for. expeditionParty()/partyHumans() always include the owner.
The companion himself (!expedition hire [class] / !expedition dismiss)
Day 1, leader only, costs coins, role-fills the gap, globally exclusive. He is an
NPC seat and must never become a player: no player_meta, no dnd_character, no
inventory, no DM room -- mint him a player_meta row and
ensureDnDCharacterForCombat will auto-build the news bot a real character, and
he starts appearing in the graveyard and filing death notices about himself.
Mail and seats are different sets: he fights, he does not get written to.
Measured on millenia, n=750/arm. Before these fixes he was -28pp -- worse than no
companion at all. After: solo 48.5% -> 63.9% clear (+15.3pp), with +28.0pp for
trailing players and +2.0pp for leaders. Help, never a carry.
The solo golden is byte-identical throughout: solo combat provably did not move,
and the balance corpus is intact.
Known gap: the companion cannot cast (castActionForSeat loads a sheet from the DB
and he has none by design), so a hired Cleric is still just a bad fighter.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
The P8 diff scaled the enemy's max HP ×1.15 for parties at persist and
per-turn rebuild, but the !fight command's own template stayed unscaled:
the entry banner reported the pre-scale HP, and the opening-round settle
resolved the enemy against the wrong MaxHP ceiling (regen clamp, bloodied
threshold). Mirror the scalar for the banner and align the in-memory
template before the settle. Solo scales by 1.0, so it is untouched.
Also extract enemyActionPlan() so both combat engines share the one
load-bearing action-count computation instead of duplicating it.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017mEwUmmS7aQTP2NQXj6rUa
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
DerivePlayerStats builds MistyHealProc / CrowdRevengeProc onto every turn-based
combatant, but stepRoundEnd had no counterpart to endOfRoundForSeat, so neither
was ever read. The buff (Misty's heal) was silently lost. The debuff (her
crowd's revenge) was an exploit: a player who declined Misty escaped it entirely
by fighting with !attack instead of letting the room auto-resolve -- no
discovery required, just press the button.
Hoisted both procs out of endOfRoundForSeat into shared helpers
(mistyCrowdRevenge, mistyHeal) and a seatEndOfRound hook that runs the pair in
the auto-resolve order. endOfRoundForSeat now calls the helpers; stepRoundEnd
calls seatEndOfRound per seat, after the poison tick so a heal can answer the
round's damage. A one-sided debuff-only hook would have been a second parallel
sibling of the kind deferred item D warns about, so the heal ships with it -- a
player-favourable discovery mechanic, consistent with the lift-trailers stance.
Both helpers short-circuit before st.randFloat() when their proc is unarmed, so
a character with no Misty history draws no dice: the sim corpus and
combat_characterization.golden do not move.
seatCombatResult now reads MistyHealed back off the misty_heal event (as
combat_pet_save always has), so combat_misty_clutch is reachable turn-based.
combat_sniper_kill stays unreachable -- Arina's proc is a pre-combat one-shot
with no round-end seam.
renderAllySeatEvent renders crowd_revenge as unattributed damage: an ally sees
the hit but not Misty's name, keeping the grudge the owner's own discovery.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017mEwUmmS7aQTP2NQXj6rUa
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.
