Make standing cost money to keep, in both settings
Each pack declares a lifestyle tier, bought on the second rung and charged for every cycle after: Corporate Ladder's car and address, the Frontier's bay and the room over the Ellis place. Falling behind what the job expects costs standing, in steps that steepen as standing rises. A Dispatch coordinator keeping up fully nets -21 a week and earns the difference out of the days. No engine change; the only interface change is a tier display format. Sized by measurement, not feel (DECISIONS #36): a -2/week penalty is invisible against Dispatch's standing gains, and a player who chases standing every turn beats any flat penalty — 99 standing while buying nothing, and $2,245 richer than one who kept up. Hence the top step. Two defects fixed on the way. The conformance suite excluded debt from the economic baseline by matching /debt|owed|loan/i on path names, which would have counted every lifestyle tier into it; packs now declare tuning.baselineExcludes. And 'the promotion leaves a player better off' pooled end balances across archetypes that do not spend alike, so it measured the mix — it is now derived from the upkeep arithmetic. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxdJFbLq1rBKsUeticGV1g
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@@ -547,3 +547,50 @@ ends around $8,300 over 200 turns, and money stops being a constraint. The
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direction is that rising standing brings rising expenses — the car, the place to
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live, the clothes a position expects. Upkeep entries are already gated
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conditions over state, so this is content work, not an engine change.
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## 36. Standing costs money to keep
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Built in both packs, with no engine change, exactly as #35 predicted.
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Each pack declares a `lifestyle` tier — Corporate Ladder's car and address, the
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Frontier's own horse and the room over the Ellis place — bought at a second-rung
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event and charged for every cycle thereafter. Dispatch nets +49 a week; with the
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car +19; with both, **-21**, so a coordinator keeping up has to earn the
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difference out of the days themselves. The Frontier runs the same shape at its
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own scale: +18, +11, +4 a run.
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**The charge that makes it a choice is levied in standing, not money.** A player
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whose lifestyle lags behind the job loses standing every cycle, in steps that
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steepen as standing rises. Both are gated on the second stage: the first rung
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pays too little for any of this, and charging a mailroom associate for a car
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would be a trap rather than a decision.
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Three things were measured rather than guessed, and all three changed the design:
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- **At -2 a week the charge was invisible.** Dispatch hands out standing several
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points at a time, so a coordinator who bought nothing still finished pinned at
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100. The step had to reach -4/-6 before ordinary play settled in the seventies.
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- **A player who chased standing every turn beat it anyway** — 99 standing while
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buying nothing, and $2,245 richer than one who kept up. The lifestyle was a
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pure loss to anybody paying attention, which is the opposite of the intent.
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The top step (-14 above 80 standing) puts that player's ceiling at 82, so the
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last fifteen points are bought rather than worked for.
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- **The Frontier's first numbers left a keeper on $8 after 200 turns.** That is
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not pressure, it is the debt trap this pack was tuned twice to avoid; the room
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went from 9 a run to 7.
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**Which upkeep counts as the baseline is now the pack's to declare.** The
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conformance suite used to exclude debt-gated entries by matching
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`/debt|owed|loan/i` against path names — the generic suite guessing at content's
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vocabulary, which #31 exists to prevent, and which would have silently counted
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every lifestyle tier at once into a baseline that is supposed to mean "the floor
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a player faces having opted into nothing." Packs now name those paths in
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`tuning.baselineExcludes`, and the suite fails if one is not declared state.
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**And a test that had passed for two releases was measuring the wrong thing.**
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"The promotion leaves a player better off" compared the end balances of promoted
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and unpromoted players pooled across archetypes — but which archetypes get
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promoted is not independent of how they spend, so the comparison mostly measured
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the mix. It inverted the moment there was something to spend money on. It is now
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derived from upkeep arithmetic, and the lifestyle's effect is tested with two
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players who differ in exactly one habit.
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