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 roster refactor (N3 parties) has to prove it doesn't move solo
combat, or the d8prereq balance corpus dies with it. The existing
golden pinned 22 scenarios; it missed everything the refactor is most
likely to disturb:
- ExtraAttacks (the lever J1 moved) and the rest of the 2026-05-16
class-identity mods: sneak attack, hunter's mark, divine strike,
thorn lash, crit threshold, first-attack bonus, assassinate,
berserker rage, spirit weapon, arcane ward, heal charges
- the race passives (lucky reroll, orc rage, poison/fire resist)
- all 13 Phase 13 bestiary slice 3+4 effects, none of which had a
pin: evade, block, advantage, retaliate, regenerate, survive_at_1,
stat_drain, debuff, max_hp_drain, spell_resist, reveal_action,
fear_immune, ally_buff
- phase-scoped ability gating and the environment hazard path
22 -> 57 scenarios, 2047 -> 7468 golden lines. The pre-existing golden
is a byte-exact prefix of the new one, so no existing pin moved.
Enemies are sized per scenario (tanky/hardHit) so per-hit and
per-swing riders accumulate instead of dying in the opening round, and
abilities proc at 1.0 so the pin captures the effect, not the roll.
Verified every new scenario emits its distinctive event.
Splits SimulateCombat into a thin wrapper over simulateCombatWithRNG, a
deterministic core that accepts an optional *rand.Rand. Production passes
nil (package-global rand, behaviorally identical); the new test seeds it
per scenario.
Adds TestCombatCharacterization: 23 curated scenarios x 5 seeds, with the
full event stream + result summary serialized to a stable text form and
diffed against a golden file. This locks current auto-resolve behavior
before the shared-primitives extraction for the turn-based engine — any
perturbation fails loudly and forces a deliberate -update + diff review.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Replaces hardcoded tip scenarios with solver-frequency-backed decisions, adds
equity range display, fixes bet-size matching tolerance (25% threshold), and
adds comprehensive test coverage for scenario validation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
