2 Commits

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
prosolis	27b9de5936	Companion: he carries his wounds, rations his slots, and heals himself ... Three defects, all the same mistake, all found by sweep and not by tests: the companion has no database row for a thing to persist onto, so the thing "arrives fresh next time" — which for a resource means infinite. 1. His spell slots refilled every fight. The ledger went on his combat SEAT, and a seat is per-session. A human rations one pool across a 30-room run and gets it back at camp; rationing it IS the caster's game. Now on expedition_party.companion_slots_used, refreshed at camp. (Worth ~0pp alone — a run holds only ~2 real fights, so the pool never binds. I predicted this was the whole answer. It was not.) 2. His BODY refilled every fight. buildFightSeats seated him at Stats.MaxHP and the close-out skipped him — "he arrives fresh next time", said the comment. That is an infinite body: he soaked a share of every fight's incoming and then reset, while the humans beside him bled all the way to camp. THIS was the carry. Now expedition_party.companion_hp; healed at camp; a dropped companion returns on 1 HP rather than as a corpse, because there is no companion-death rule and inventing one inside a bug fix would be a second feature. 3. No autopiloted caster had ever healed ITSELF. simPickAllyHeal skipped `i == seat` and bailed on !IsParty(), so a solo cleric carried cure_wounds for a whole run and never once cast it. Now simPickHeal: heal whoever is worst off, which is sometimes you. Measured, 640 runs/arm, like-for-like (the leaders whose role-fill gives Pete a Cleric, against a human Cleric follower of the leader's own level): solo 69.0% + a human cleric 77.6% (+8.6pp) + Pete 66.1% (-2.9pp) The reference arm is the point. Against SOLO even a mace-only Pete looked like a carry — but parties are designed to be safer, so solo is the wrong yardstick. Against a human peer the real bug appeared: a gearless, level-penalized hireling was out-clearing a fully-geared human cleric of the leader's own level by 15pp, because he was the only combatant in the game who healed to full between fights. With the free lunches gone he is honest, and honestly a net negative — which is exactly the plan's §2 diagnosis, unmasked: a below-median seat cannot pay for its own enemy scaling (+15% boss HP and 2.4 enemy actions a round instead of 1). §2(a) is next, and the sweep now argues FOR it; before this commit it would have made things worse. Self-heal moved solo 66.1% -> 66.2%, so the balance corpus is undisturbed and no re-baseline is owed. It is also NOT the answer to §6 — casters reach for a healing consumable first and the sim stocks them, so a human rarely falls through to the spell. Pete carries no consumables, so it is his only heal. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy	2026-07-11 14:56:19 -07:00
prosolis	d538f91cf7	Combat engine: pay off the N-body debt, and hire Pete ... 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	2026-07-11 12:39:01 -07:00