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Aetheria/docs/aetheria-release-map.md
Meta Vens 83459f8445 Aetheria release: faction-play proof is four cuts; ammunition fact F14 
F14: only three weapons draw rounds, generation stocks none and stations
sell none, so the Zhestokost tender loop needs its weapons to draw a
commodity first (question zhestokost-ammunition). The proof splits into
four cuts along the primitives, each under a Hands budget.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-03 13:47:18 +02:00

35 KiB
Raw Blame History

Aetheria Release: Map

Date: 2026-10-03

This map holds body facts, the model page and rationale for campaign aetheria-release. It has no progress section, no per-cut sections, no rulings and no ledger: those are typed documents in the Eureka mind. Ends live in docs/aetheria-release-target.md. The Eyes inventory this pass started from is F:\Projects\aetheria-release-inventory.md, which is outside the repo.

Every anchor below is against origin/master f1dee184 and was read in a sparse scratch worktree on 2026-10-03, unless the line says otherwise.

Body facts

B1. No impact event carries a world point.

  • Entity.IncomingHit (ServerShared/Entity.cs:138) carries only the source.
  • ArmorDamage (:139) carries a schematic cell. ItemDamage (:140) carries the item. HullDamage (:143) carries the amount.
  • Zone.ShotCommitted and ShotResolved (Zone.cs:41-42) carry a ShotOutcome (FireControl.cs:1902-1930), which holds a schematic cell, bearing and lateral offset but no world point.
  • The world point of a direct hit is never computed. ApplyDirectHit (FireControl.cs:944-998) walks lanes in the schematic frame. A contact or delayed blast computes it at :1030 and :1043 and passes it to Detonate. Detonate (:1341-1414) has the world point and the share each entity took, and publishes neither.
  • So nothing can show a hit at the place it landed without recomputing FireControl's geometry.

B2. Weapon hits on a shield show nothing. ShieldManager.ShowHit (Gameplay/ShieldManager.cs:88) has one caller, ship-on-ship collision (:80). FireControl calls Shield.TakeHit and Break (FireControl.cs:952-956, :1378-1385) with no presentation hook. The inventory's "shield impact: present" refers to the shield-panel rig, which FieldTester drives in FieldShieldTest.unity. It does not run in the game.

B3. A capability event contract already exists for this. CapabilityEvents (ServerShared/CapabilityEvents.cs) defines AbsorbEvent (position, direction, magnitude, damage type) and one Subject per event kind. CapabilityPresentationBinder (Gameplay/CapabilityPresentationBinder.cs) wires IAbsorbPresenter components on an object and its children. The contract's own comment says the simulation will own and publish these events, and presentations will subscribe and decide nothing (ruling fork L, 2026-09-17). Today its only publisher is FieldTester. AbsorbEvent has no way to tell a shield absorb from a hull absorb.

B4. The weapons already announce what they do.

  • InstantWeapon.OnFire(shotId) (Behaviors/InstantWeapon.cs:272) fires only for a round that was not refused.
  • ChargedWeapon has OnStartCharging, OnStopCharging, OnCharged and OnFailed (ChargedWeapon.cs:87-90).
  • ConstantWeapon has OnStartFiring and OnStopFiring.
  • EntityInstance.SetEntity subscribes the effect managers to all of these (Gameplay/EntityInstance.cs:209-240).

B5. The Wwise-shaped audio path is dead at its source.

  • EquippedItem.SoundBank (Entity.cs:1353) is never assigned outside two tests (FireControlPerWeaponTests.cs:424, :672).
  • So every FireAudioEvent and SetAudioParameter call returns at its null check. The calls sit in InstantWeapon.cs:275, ChargedWeapon.cs:137,154,169,185, Reactor.cs:97, Thruster.cs:96 and AetherDrive.cs:170-172.
  • No production code subscribes to EquippedItem.AudioEvents (:1375).
  • WwiseSoundBinding and WwiseLoopingSoundBinding (WwiseSoundBinding.cs) have zero use sites.
  • GameData/SoundbanksInfo.json (2,648 lines) is read by no code. Only docs/build-delivery-cut.md:231 mentions copying it.
  • EntityInstance.cs:243-251 reads item.Data.SoundBank and does nothing with it.
  • Catalog fields that hold Wwise ids:
    • EquippableItemData.SoundBank (ItemData.cs:403);
    • AetherDriveData.RpmAudioParameter and TorqueRatioAudioParameter (AetherDrive.cs:44-48, keys 11 and 12);
    • Faction.OverworldMusic, CombatMusic and BossMusic (Corporations.cs:52-59, keys 13 to 15).

B6. Unity audio is switched off and has no listener. ProjectSettings/AudioManager.asset has m_DisableAudio: 1. A YAML grep found AudioListener: count 0 in ARPG.unity and in Main Menu.unity; the two test scenes have one each. The editor is Unity 6000.3.24f1 (ProjectSettings/ProjectVersion.txt).

B7. The 2021 sound library is on disk and usable.

  • The Wwise project is Aetheria-Economy_WwiseProject.wproj, WwiseVersion="v2021.1.1" and SchemaVersion="103".
  • Its 225 .wav are in LFS and present in the operator's checkout: Originals/SFX holds 731 MB.
  • The SFX include fire, hit and miss for cannon, ioncannon, lightingGun, machinegun and railgun. They also include charge and charge-fail, ship destroyed (two), and shield up, down and active. Overheat alarm, docking, undocking, wormhole, reactor states and sensor ping are there too.
  • Interface sounds are blip, equip, mouseover, pickup, putdown, and trade buy and sell.
  • Music: menu, Gen overworld and combat, Metal overworld, combat and boss, Daya overworld, Kawaii Future Bass. There are also 30 ambience layers.
  • The 20 Originals/Plugins/SoundSeed Grain sources feed a Wwise plugin, and their procedural behaviour does not carry over outside Wwise.
  • *.wav is an LFS pattern in .gitattributes.

B8. The camera has the tooling for shake; nothing uses it. com.unity.cinemachine 2.10.7 is in Packages/manifest.json. It ships CinemachineImpulseSource and CinemachineImpulseListener. A grep found no Impulse and no shake in Assets/Scripts. The follow camera is ActionGameManager.FollowCamera (ActionGameManager.cs:122).

B9. Graphics settings are not saved.

  • MainMenu.ShowGraphicsSettings's Back button (UI/MainMenu.cs:258-263) never calls ActionGameManager.SavePlayerSettings().
  • Gameplay's Back button does call it (:236-241).
  • PlayerGraphicsSettings (ServerShared/PlayerSettings.cs:63-67) holds keys 0 and 1.
  • PropertiesPanel.AddField(name, float read, write, min, max) exists (UI/Properties Panel/PropertiesPanel.cs:290).

B10. The lanes overlap the feedback files in these hunks (git diff origin/master...origin/<lane> hunk headers):

  • mining (83d8371e):
    • FireControl.cs at :72 and :522;
    • Entity.cs at :43, :198-240, :295-395 and :1075;
    • EntityInstance.cs at :236 and :410;
    • ActionGameManager.cs across :362-1432, including :1076-1100;
    • ZoneRenderer.cs and Zone.cs.
  • scenarios (aa3baf12):
    • Entity.cs at :204, :601 and :786-1003;
    • ActionGameManager.cs at :583, :732 and :801.
  • moddable-ships (a93625c2):
    • ActionGameManager.cs at :42-70;
    • ZoneRenderer.cs;
    • Packages/manifest.json, which adds glTFast.

feedback-1's edits are disjoint from these: FireControl.cs:944-1045 and :1375-1412, Entity.cs:138-150, and EntityInstance.cs:159-170.

B11. The headless tests compile only ServerShared. That covers Aetheria.Shared/Aetheria.Shared.csproj:20 and tests/Aetheria.Shared.Tests. A rule that must be pinned headless must live in ServerShared.

Model page

Kind Identity Lifecycle Authority
Impact (AbsorbEvent with a layer) Transient. The receiving entity's Capabilities stream, plus the shot. It is not stored. Published once per landed hit, before the hull damage is applied. It is never replayed or persisted. FireControl alone, in ApplyDirectHit and Detonate. Presenters only read it.
Impact cue Derived from one impact and the receiver. Computed at presentation time and discarded. Feedback (engine-free, ServerShared). Visual and audio presenters render it and do not re-derive it.
Player feedback preferences (shake, volumes) PlayerSettings global, player store, keys under GraphicsSettings (shake) and a new AudioSettings (volumes). Edited in the settings menu and saved on Back. A new key defaults on load. The player, through the menu. No runtime writer.
Presentation tuning (effect prefab, intensity scale, impulse shape, sound bank) A Unity component or asset in Assets/Content. Authored in the editor and versioned with the scene. The operator. It stays Unity-serialized by fork M (a).
Sound assets The file under Assets/Audio, copied from the Wwise Originals. Provenance is recorded per file. Added per cut. The Wwise project stays as the source archive until audio-route and audio-source-rights are ruled. The operator, on rights (audio-source-rights).
Ship content (ShipAuthoring with GLB) aetheria.ship_authoring id. GLB nodes carry an aetheria.id extra. Owned by the moddable-ships lane until it merges. The moddable-ships rulings (MQ1-MQ5). This campaign adds no owner.

No cell is empty for the two mapped cuts. The content rows defer to a lane this campaign does not own until question content-lane-owner is ruled.

Rationale

Why the impact is published by FireControl and not derived in Unity. B1 shows that the world point exists only inside FireControl's lane walk and blast resolution. If a presenter derived it, it would have to recompute lanes from the ShotOutcome. That rebuilds the second hit authority that fire control Cuts 3 to 12.4(b) deleted. So the owner of where a round landed publishes where it landed.

Why reuse CapabilityEvents rather than a new subject. The contract was ruled for exactly this (B3): the simulation publishes absorbs and presenters subscribe. Its binder already exists. Reusing it adds one field (the layer) instead of a second event family. It also brings the shield-panel presenters within reach of real hits later, with no new wiring.

Why the cue derivation lives in ServerShared. Intensity and shake are rules ("in proportion to the damage", "zero at zero preference"). B11 says only ServerShared is under headless test and Stryker.NET. Keeping the function engine-free puts the rules where mutation testing reaches them. Audio then renders the same cue (target: one cue, two channels).

Why native Unity audio is recommended (question audio-route):

  • The simulation already announces fire, charge, impact and death (B4 and feedback-1).

  • The Wwise path is dead at its source (B5).

  • Unity audio is only switched off (B6).

  • Of the Wwise project, what carries over is the wav files (B7). The 2021.1 project, its events, banks and SoundSeed plugin sources would need migrating to a Wwise release that supports Unity 6.

  • Wwise adds three costs:

    • a native plugin per platform;
    • a second authoring application;
    • a sound-bank build step. Its authoring console runs on Windows and macOS, not on Yggdrasil's Linux.

    Agents cannot easily author Wwise work units, and the operator's AquaSynth renders would have to pass through it.

  • Licensing is not the obstacle. Wwise is free under a $250K development budget, with no asset limit (Audiokinetic pricing page and indie-license blog). FMOD is free under $200K yearly revenue and a $500K budget.

  • What the middleware would buy is interactive music and parameter-driven mixing, authored by a sound designer. The release bar asks for neither yet.

  • Unity's limits are known: 32 real voices by default (AudioManager.asset m_RealVoiceCount), no authored containers or RTPC graph, and mixer assets that cannot be created from script.

  • Unity 6's AudioRandomContainer has no public scripting API for its clip list. The first cut therefore uses a small ScriptableObject sound bank with random pick and jitter.

Confidence: medium-high. It falls to medium if the operator expects a contracted sound designer working in Wwise, or adaptive music with transitions and stingers before release.

Why content runs in parallel. The release quota is met at the operator's pace, one hull a day, and that clock starts only when the first Tripo mesh flies. The steps in front of it are the operator's owed S2 play checks, the moddable-ships merge, and the add-on's package action. Each is cheap and none depends on feedback or audio. Serializing them behind audio would idle the slowest resource in the project.

Sources consulted for the audio fork:

Two claims were not verified from primary sources on 2026-10-03: which Wwise release first supports Unity 6000.x, and the scripting surface of AudioRandomContainer.

Faction play: the NPC scripting

The operator ruled on 2026-10-03 that the faction dynamics may elaborate the NPC scripting through the extension points she built into it (ruling npc-scripting-may-grow). Legacy-first still forbids CultMesh and daemon work. This section maps those extension points, names the smallest set of primitives that carries every dynamic in Game Design/Faction Play.md (AetheriaLore f3e0e6d), and gives the reasons for the four proof cuts (faction-play-1 to -4), which are typed specs in the mind. Anchors are against origin/master f1dee184, read with git show on 2026-10-03, unless the line names a lane.

Body facts

F1. NPC behaviour is a code-composed state graph, not a tree, a DSL or assets.

  • Agent (ServerShared/Agents/Agent.cs:14-80) holds one current BaseState. Each tick, Update (:47-56) runs the state, then takes the first StateTransition whose Condition() holds (:82-94: target state, condition closure, optional on-transition action).
  • BaseState.AddTransition(..., includeChildren, ignoreStates) (States/BaseState.cs:19-58) copies a transition onto every state reachable from the source. That is the interrupt mechanism: one call makes "a target appeared" fire from anywhere in the graph. It is the same idea as Halo 2's impulses.
  • Minion (Minion.cs:5-22) is the only Agent subclass. It composes root, patrol and combat in its constructor. Behaviour is authored in C#; there is no data-driven layer.
  • codex/scenarios makes AddTransition's walk state per call, because zones are built on several threads (its BaseState.cs hunk at :12-58).

F2. Tasks are the command slot, and only one task kind is wired.

  • Agent.Task (Agent.cs:22) holds one AgentTask (Tasks/AgentTask.cs:13-22). Minion enters patrol when Task is PatrolOrbitsTask (Minion.cs:10-12).
  • HaulingTask, Mining, StationTowing and Survey are data with no state that reads them. AgentTask.Priority and Reserved have no reader; they are the remains of a task board that is no longer in the tree (WanderTask and MatchVelocity were deleted in cc7f2c88).
  • PatrolOrbitsState (Tasks/PatrolOrbits.cs:10-31) and MoveToOrbitState (States/MoveTo.cs:31-37) are the only movement states. No state follows an entity, holds a standoff, or flees.
  • No task state returns to root when Task changes. Only combat's interrupt leaves patrol.

F3. Agents are made in one place and ticked before entities.

  • Zone.CreateAgent (Zone.cs:137-144) gives every non-player ship a Minion with a patrol over four random orbits. Zone.Update ticks agents (:185-186), then entities (:188), then FireControl.Step (:193).
  • codex/scenarios adds Zone.Admit(entity, piloted) as the only writer of Entities.Add and the only creator of agents (construction, run staging, warp arrival, undock, spawned turrets).
  • Agents are not persisted (AgentTask.cs:11). A loaded zone rebuilds them.

F4. Each ship perceives alone.

  • Entity holds VisibleEntities, VisibleEnemies, VisibleFriendlies, EntityHostility (Entity.cs:34-37) and EntityInfoGathered (:64).
  • Sensor.Execute is the only writer of EntityInfoGathered (Sensor.cs:157-189). Sensor.Ping (:110-125) boosts it and adds the pinger's own visibility.
  • Crossing TargetDetectionInfoThreshold moves an entity into the visible lists (Entity.cs:237-254).
  • FireControl.Designated requires source.VisibleEntities.Contains(target) (FireControl.cs:232-239). IsRevealed reads the observer's own EntityInfoGathered (:130-149). A ship cannot fire at, or aim at gear on, something its own sensors do not hold.
  • No group, squad or faction-level knowledge exists. Ship.HomeEntity (Ship.cs:26) has no reader.

F5. Hostility has a derived rule, a per-entity override and a grudge.

  • IsHostileTo (Entity.cs:535-553): an override decides outright. Otherwise a zone owner is hostile to trespassers (presence not permitted), and anyone is hostile to whoever is hostile to them. // TODO: Inter-faction hostility is at :547.
  • GetFactionRelationship (:556-563) answers Beloved for the own faction and Neutral for every other, except for the player's ship, which reads Galaxy.FactionRelationships. Ruling faction-relations-field fills this.
  • SetIff (:529-533) writes the runtime override. WatchForGrudge (:452-481) sets a sticky hostile override back on anything that turns hostile while detected. Leaving the zone clears overrides (:207). The override map is private: nothing outside Entity can ask whether a grudge is held.

F6. Target selection has four writers.

  • Minion.cs:14: the first enemy to become visible, when the slot is empty.
  • TurretController.cs:96: the first visible enemy ship.
  • The player's input (ActionGameManager.cs:377-403).
  • Entity clears it when the target leaves the zone or visibility (Entity.cs:201, :227, :298-299).
  • codex/mining turns Target into a TargetRef (asteroid chunks can be targets) written through SetTarget. It edits Minion.cs:14-21 and Combat.cs:28.

F7. Combat tuning is global.

  • CombatState.SampleDps biases range by GameplaySettings.AgentRangeExponent (Combat.cs:158, Settings.cs:242). Movement reads AgentForwardLerp and AgentMaxForwardDistance (Combat.cs:95, Settings.cs:243-244).
  • FireControl.AgentFires (FireControl.cs:93-99) compares hit probability with the global AgentMinHitProbability (Settings.cs:260). Its callers are Combat.cs:121 and TurretController.cs:81.
  • CombatState aims at the target's most dangerous revealed weapon through TrySelectTargetItem (Combat.cs:40-53).

F8. Faction.Personality is economy vocabulary, not combat doctrine.

  • Faction.Personality (Corporations.cs:28-29) maps PersonalityAttribute records (ItemData.cs:902-914: a name with low and high pole names) to floats.
  • The same records key CompoundCommodityData.DemandProfile (ItemData.cs:334-335), which is what a population with those traits wants to buy.
  • Neither map has a reader. A string probe of the working-copy store found the schema and no faction values; that probe is not proof.
  • So the attributes are population traits shared with demand. Encoding engage_on or target_priority as float bands in them, as Faction Play's lever table proposed, would give one record two meanings.

F9. Generation spawns individuals, not groups.

  • ZoneGenerator adds enemyCount ships of the nearest faction one at a time (ZoneGenerator.cs:334-340), plus neutral wanderers of one other faction (:342-356).
  • LoadoutGenerator.GenerateShipLoadout(hullFilter) (LoadoutGenerator.cs:35-50) fills every hardpoint (:189-231), so no generated ship is unarmed. Nothing marks a ship as a tender or a hauler.

F10. Hits carry their source only on the hull. IncomingHit (Entity.cs:138) fires with the shooter at FireControl.cs:962 and :1009, after the shield branches have returned, so a shot a shield absorbs reports no source. feedback-1 adds Capabilities.Absorb for both layers, without a source.

F11. Cargo moves between entities; jettison has no owner. Entity.TryTransferItems(target, item, quantity) (Entity.cs:693-725) moves commodities between cargo bays, and weapons draw ammunition from cargo through AmmoType (InstantWeapon.cs:187-192). Dropped items exist only as Unity pickups spawned on death (EntityInstance.cs:304-320), and the mining lane keeps pickups Unity-only (its pickups question, recommendation A). The simulation has no floating cargo to jettison into.

F12. Barks and pings already have a channel. Entity.SetMessage (Entity.cs:1275-1278) shows a line for MessageDuration. Entity.Sensor.Ping() is callable by anything that holds the entity.

F13. Agents are testable headless. IffAndCombatTests builds a Zone with ships and drives detection by writing EntityInfoGathered (tests/Aetheria.Shared.Tests/IffAndCombatTests.cs:51-92). Agents/ is under ServerShared, so the whole graph compiles into Aetheria.Shared (B11).

F14. Ammunition is real for three weapons, and nobody is stocked.

  • Only DeathCluster, FastBlast+- and pretty pretty bang bang carry an AmmoType; their refs were repointed in 515859cf (docs/cultcache-migration-cut.md:161-163). Every other weapon, Zhestokost ballistics included, reloads for free.
  • LoadoutGenerator puts no rounds in any cargo, and station stock is drawn from EquippableItemData only (LoadoutGenerator.cs:98-99), so no station sells rounds either. An NPC carrying one of the three ammunition weapons fires its first magazine and then never reloads (InstantWeapon.cs:186-197).
  • So Zhestokost's "magazines run low, back to the tender" has no substrate until its weapons draw a commodity and generation stocks it.

What the extension points can carry

Extension point Carries Cannot carry
State graph with interrupt transitions (F1) Every per-ship motor behaviour: follow at a standoff, hold, flee, return, drift, sweep. Anything that needs more than one ship's knowledge: who may engage, shared tracks, duels.
Agent.Task (F2) The order a ship is executing. The patrol precedent already maps a task type to a state. Deciding the order. Nothing writes tasks except CreateAgent.
Zone.CreateAgent, then Zone.Admit (F3) Where a ship joins whatever owns its orders, and where doctrine is applied. Group state, which must outlive one admission.
Perception lists and EntityInfoGathered (F4) A ship's own view, which FireControl trusts. Shared knowledge. A second writer would let a ship aim at gear its own sensors never resolved (IsRevealed), breaking instruments-bound and fire control's single authority.
SetIff and grudges (F5) Hostility memory, and spreading it: one call per member. Faction-to-faction stance; that is the relations field.
Ship.Target (F6) The engagement itself: CombatState runs while it is set. Coordination, while four writers race for it.
Faction.Personality (F8) Nothing in this strand; it belongs to demand. Typed enums and per-role values.
SetMessage, Sensor.Ping (F12) Hails and ping cadence. Nothing needed here.

The graph, the task slot and the factory were built to be extended, and they carry the individual ship. What is missing is one layer: an owner of a group's intent. Every cross-ship dynamic in Faction Play needs it.

The primitives

Seven primitives carry the proof factions and leave room for the rest. Each says where it plugs in, what it reads and which quirks it enables.

1. Doctrine (data). A typed FactionDoctrine on Faction (key 17; key 16 is Relations by ruling), with flight-level fields and a RoleDoctrine per role (combatant, support). Flight-level fields: EngageOn (detection, identified, provoked, trespass, never), Grace, Hail, ComplySpeed, Pack, StepInDelay, PingInterval. Per role: BreakOffHull, BreakOffAmmo, RangeExponent, MinHitProbability, HoldStandoff, Anchor, Leash. A faction with no doctrine gets one built from today's globals, so it fights exactly as Minion does now. Inputs: catalog only. Enables the tuning half of every quirk (R&D range, Zhestokost spray, Cryonix discipline). Why not Personality: F8. The shape is question faction-doctrine-shape.

2. Flight (the group's intent owner). One runtime object per faction per zone, holding that faction's piloted ships. It is formed at admission and rebuilt on load, never persisted (F3). It is the only writer of each member's Target and Task; the agent graph only executes them. It reads members' perception, hull fraction, cargo and grudges, the doctrine, and the zone's stations. It ticks in Zone.Update before the agents. This is RimWorld's Lord (a group state machine that assigns duties to pawns) and Halo 3's objectives (squads fill prioritised tasks with capacities), at the size this game needs. Why a new owner: no extension point holds more than one ship's knowledge (table above).

3. Engagement rule with grace and hail (in the flight). Per hostile track, the flight decides when it becomes engageable (EngageOn over the union of members' views), hails once through the nearest member's SetMessage, holds for Grace, then engages, unless the track has slowed below ComplySpeed, which counts as compliance. A grudge on the track skips the grace. Enables Zhestokost's inspection hail, Sol Dominion's "never before identification" (identified: any member's info at the gear tier), Miss Terri's and Aya's "provoked", Megiddo's trespass, and Odla's "never". F.E.A.R.'s squad dialogue is the precedent: the bark speaks a decision already made.

4. Engagement slots and the duel (in the flight). Pack engagers per track; the rest hold at HoldStandoff (default: just outside their own longest weapon range). An engager that breaks off frees its slot after StepInDelay. With Pack 1 the slot is a duel. It is offered only to a challenger with no other hostile track near it, and it breaks when anyone lands a hit on a holding member, or anyone but the challenger lands one on the headliner. Broken, every slot opens and the pack engages whoever broke the form. This carries ruling lucent-duel-bait whole: honour the duel and pick the pack apart, or stage an interloper. The signal is a landed hit with its source (F10), so the cut adds Source to feedback-1's absorb. Prior art: attack tokens (the "kung fu circle" of brawlers) and Halo 3's task capacity.

5. Anchor and leash (in the flight). Each role's doctrine names an anchor: the flight's support ship, the nearest own station, the patrol site, or none. An engager past Leash from its anchor is ordered back, with hysteresis. Enables the Zhestokost column that will not pass its tender, AU escorts bound to the worksite, NiteLife guards that never leave the station, Dominion's jurisdiction, Megiddo's perimeter, and Aya refuge across a border.

6. Roles, break-off and rearm (in the flight). A member with no weapon is support; the rest are combatants. Doctrine says how many support ships generation adds (LoadoutGenerator gains an unarmed option, F9). Break-off orders a flee to the nearest own station, or away from the threat. It triggers on hull fraction (Lucent headliners, AU haulers, Alakrita, Cryonix), or on ammunition fraction against the count at admission. An ammunition break-off returns to the support ship, which transfers rounds through TryTransferItems (F11) until the baseline is restored; then the member rejoins. This carries the Zhestokost tender loop, once Zhestokost weapons draw a commodity and generation stocks it (F14, question zhestokost-ammunition). Support ships use their own role doctrine: the tender follows the column's rear and flees early, and the column, anchored to it, follows it home.

7. Motor states (in the agent graph). FollowState (an entity at a standoff, matching its velocity) and FleeState (toward a refuge, or away from a threat). They are new BaseStates on the existing graph, entered from tasks, and every task state returns to root when the task changes. Follow serves escort, hold, return, rearm and shadow; flee serves every break-off. They are two of the tutorial's four shared states; drift-cold and sweep stay with the tutorial.

Beyond the proof, three more primitives use the same owners and need no new layer:

  • Relations (ruling faction-relations-field). GetFactionRelationship reads Faction.Relations, and IsHostileTo treats Hated and Hostile as hostile at the TODO in F5. Every cross-faction pair starts here.
  • Picture sharing between flights. A flight pushes track entries and grudges to other flights in the zone by a ShareTrack policy: own faction, allies by relation, or every flight hostile to the track (Finch). A shared entry lets a recipient engage and steer; adopted grudges become SetIff on its own members. Sharing never writes EntityInfoGathered, so a recipient fires only once its own sensors hold the target. This is question shared-track-cueing.
  • Calls. A zone-level distress subject (caller, attacker, position), raised by a flight when a member is hit, or as a bark with a false caller (pirates). Flights with AnswerCall in range retask members. Navigator escorts pulled off a Lightsail convoy, Aya cover and the corridor edge come from this plus relations.

Target priority (drives, cargo, structures) extends CombatState's aim-item choice by doctrine and the flight's track choice. Jettison waits on question jettison-owner.

Model page rows

Kind Identity Lifecycle Authority
Doctrine Faction.Doctrine, catalog, key 17. Authored through an AetherDb catalog command, as the targeting migrations were. The catalog author. Read when a ship joins a flight.
Flight Runtime: zone plus faction. Formed at admission, rebuilt on load, gone with the zone. Never persisted. Itself alone, for members' Target, Task, hails and pings.
Track (flight picture) Runtime: flight plus hostile entity. Lives while any member sees it, or a sharer lends it. The flight, from members' perception. Never written into EntityInfoGathered.
Duel Runtime: flight plus challenger. Offered, then held or broken. Ends when the challenger leaves the picture or dies. The flight, from landed hits with their source.
Ammunition baseline Runtime: member. Counted at admission. The flight. Rearm moves real cargo through TryTransferItems.

Rationale

Why the flight owns intent and the agent only executes. Faction Play's dynamics are decisions about several ships at once: who engages, who holds, who knows what, who goes home. Spreading them across agents would keep four writers on Target (F6), add more on Task, and make agents read each other's private state. The RimWorld Lord and Halo 3's objectives both keep one group-level decider over simple individual executors, and Starsector varies one AI by parameters. The demotions: Minion no longer chooses a target. Zone.CreateAgent no longer assigns a patrol; the flight does. The global combat tunables become the defaults of a faction with no doctrine. TurretController keeps its own target writer, because turrets are not piloted and belong to no flight; giving stations a flight is a later step.

Why one flight per faction per zone. It needs no persistence and no grouping in generation, and a zone rarely holds two separate groups of one faction. The cost: two such groups would act as one. When generation learns groups, the key widens to a group id assigned in ZoneGenerator; nothing else changes.

Why shared tracks are cues, not fire-control data (the recommendation in shared-track-cueing). Fire control was rebuilt so that one owner decides a hit from the shooter's own sensor data (Designated, IsRevealed, PSensor). A remote track that fed EntityInfoGathered would undo that, and would show the player hits from ships that never saw them. As cues, sharing still delivers the dynamics Faction Play names: the Zhestokost column needs no identification and finds the hot target the Dominion pointed it at; the Finch shadow is a countdown because the hunters come, not because they fire from beyond their sensors. The US Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability fires on remote tracks, and it needs the fused track picture that the target rules out of scope.

Why the tutorial director goes through the flight. The tutorial sketch's director sets agents' tasks and targets directly. With the flight as their only writer, the director becomes an input to the flight (a scripted order for named members that outranks doctrine), not a second writer. The tutorial cut owns that hook; this map records the boundary.

Why the proof is four cuts. One cut would be about 2,500 lines with tests, well over a Hands budget, so it is split along the primitives:

  • faction-play-1 lands the owner: doctrine, the flight as the only writer of Target and Task, the engagement rule with grace, hail and compliance, the follow state, and per-doctrine range and fire threshold. Zhestokost already hails before it sprays, Lucent announces itself and fires only on good odds, and AU escorts shoot the first contact.
  • faction-play-2 adds slots and the duel, hull break-off with the flee state, and ping cadence: Lucent whole. It needs feedback-1's absorb.
  • faction-play-3 adds roles, support generation, anchor and leash: the tender the column will not leave, and the AU haulers that run while their escorts stay close.
  • faction-play-4 makes ammunition real for Zhestokost and closes the tender loop (question zhestokost-ammunition, F14). It ends with the operator's playtest of the three factions.

Each is sized at roughly 550 to 720 lines with tests, under 200k Hands tokens. All four wait for codex/mining (it changes Target's type and edits Minion.cs) and codex/scenarios (it rewrites admission in Zone.cs) to merge, because the first cut rewrites exactly those lines.

Prior art