Each zone's elite pool was a single SpawnWeight=1 over-tier boss, so
InterruptElite bracket rolls auto-picked that boss 100% of the time.
The post-2b tier-lethality trace named these one-shots (Warchief, Hag,
Roper, Young Red Dragon) as the dominant remaining death source.
Promotes one mid-tier alt per zone to IsElite (underforge gets two
since fire_elemental was itself a non-elite killer). Boss SW=1 stays;
alt SW 3-4 gives the boss ~17-25% elite-roll share. pickZoneEnemy also
excludes IsElite from the standard pool, so promotion softens standard
encounters by one mid-difficulty entry — each zone still has 3-4
standard entries left. Crypt-Valdris already dual-elite, untouched.
Promotions: worg, owlbear, aboleth_thrall, vampire_spawn,
salamander+fire_elemental, drow_elite_warrior, night_hag,
dragonborn_cultist, hezrou.
Phase 1 matrix delta (200 trials/cell, Fighter, centerline):
goblin_warrens: 0% → 3.0% completion (first non-zero T1 reading)
sunken_temple: 0% → 0.5%
dragons_lair: death 100% → 60% (40% starve — different failure)
underdark: death 100% → 90% (10% starve)
feywild: death 100% → 92% (8% starve)
T3 cells still 100% death — next pass is global supply/threat levers.
Tier-lethality trace shows Drow Elite Warrior + Dragonborn Cultist
spawning and being winnable, with arcs stretching to 7-10 encounters
instead of fresh-entry one-shots.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sweep the two knobs surfaced by Phases 2a/2b — retreatThreatBump
and clampSurpriseNick's wounded-entrant divisor — across a full
3×4 grid (bump ∈ {2, 5, 10} × divisor ∈ {3, 5, 8, 12}) at 200
trials/cell across every matrix zone.
Wiring is harness-only: clampSurpriseNick keeps its live shape and
delegates to a new clampSurpriseNickD(divisor) variant; the harness
profile gains RetreatThreatBumpOverride/SurpriseNickDivisorOverride
fields threaded onto expeditionHarness; resolvedRetreatBump and
resolvedNickDivisor pick override-or-live. Zero on either field
falls back to the shipped value so live runHarvestInterrupt is
untouched.
Sweep test: TestExpeditionBalance_Phase2_LeverSweep, -short skipped,
mirrors Phase2_CadenceCalibration's per-tier digest shape.
Outcome: across 24,000 trial-cells (12 lever combos × 10 zones
× 200 trials), every cell reports 0.0% completion / ~100% death.
The knobs are inert on the headline metric — even (b=2, d=12)
can't lift any tier off the floor. Confirms the post-2b
tier-lethality trace: remaining deaths are fresh-entry elite
one-shots (Warchief, Hag, Roper, Young Red Dragon), not chained-
interrupt cascades. Justifies Phase 2c (roster dilution) rather
than further tuning of these two levers.
Plan doc updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The post-2a tier-lethality trace showed the remaining 0% completion
was driven by chained surprise-round nicks on already-wounded fighters,
not by the elites themselves. Pattern from the trace:
fight day=5 Hobgoblin Warchief: hp_pre=24 → hp_post=14 WON
fight day=5 Goblin Archer: nick=6, hp_pre=8 → hp_post=0 LOST
The Warchief left the fighter at HP 14; the Goblin Archer's surprise
nick (6 HP) dropped them to 8 before combat resolved — and a standard
goblin then finished a fighter who should have survived. Same shape at
T2 (Dire Wolf nick 4 on hp=3), T3 (Fire Elemental nick 4 on hp=5),
T4-T5. The nick was acting as a hidden cascade multiplier, pre-empting
the combat engine on wounded entries.
clampSurpriseNick caps the nick at max(1, hpCurrent/5) when the
fighter enters wounded (HPCurrent < HPMax); at full HP the raw nick
stands. The existing 'nick < HPCurrent' KO-guard is preserved as a
backstop. /5 is the wounded-fighter lethality knob; tighter (/10) is
gentler, looser (/3) re-opens the cascade.
Live caller (runHarvestInterrupt) and harness (runHarnessFight) both
route through the new helper so the sim measures the same lever the
live caller applies.
Matrix delta is mild (encs +0.1-0.2 per cell, completion% still 0%)
but the tier-lethality trace stretches substantively: T1 trial 0 ran
5→8 encs / 5→7 days, T3 trial 1 saw a fighter survive multiple
chained interrupts at low HP that pre-2b would have ended on nick
alone. The remaining deaths are now legible as elite-one-shot fights
on fresh entries (Warchief, Green Hag, Roper, Young Red Dragon) —
that's the Phase 2c roster-gate signal.
Push-back on the original lever-order: the Phase 2a recap put roster
gate first, but the trace fingerprint named the wounded-entry nick
as the dominant cause-of-death in 4 of 5 tier traces. Doing nick-cap
first keeps Phase 2c's diagnostic clean and avoids re-tuning rosters
after another lever changes the shape under us.
Pre-existing failures unrelated to this change:
- TestAdv2Scenario_ZoneRunGoblinWarrens (advance regression, prior)
- TestMageSpellbookLineInRender (render assertion, prior)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
