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gogobee/internal
prosolis 159daf8fc8 Phase 2b (lever): wounded-entrant surprise-nick clamp
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>
2026-05-15 10:27:29 -07:00
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