Keep money mattering at the top, and fix the instruments that hid it

Both settings now carry a charge levied by standing itself, which no purchase
ends. Corporate Ladder's steps on money (1200/-60, 2400/-120, 3600/-240): a flat
charge cannot flatten a slope, since late income scales with how well the player
plays, and the flat charge needed to stop an optimiser accumulating put ordinary
archetypes below zero for 44% of a run. Stepped, the balance settles around
$4,250 and ordinary play comes out better than before it existed. The Frontier's
is flat at -4 a run, because its late game never accumulated in the first place.

Found in the first two human sessions of this work:

- A career saved before a pack gained a stat had no path for it, and conditions
  compare numbers only, so every event, option and upkeep entry gated on a new
  stat silently did not exist for that run. Loading now fills those in.
- 'Wrap up my career' sat immediately after the last option in tab order, so one
  Tab too many and Enter read as the game ending at day 31. It goes last, and
  the retrospective says plainly that it is a summary.
- A 181-turn session ran against a stale bundle and the change under test never
  fired. Every logged turn now records app_version and build.
- src/version.js had reported 0.3.0 since 0.3.0, while playtesters were told to
  check the status bar. A test now holds it to package.json.
- 'Put money against the book' was shown locked to a player who owed nothing,
  six times. Options gated on a state the player cannot choose to enter are now
  hidden rather than greyed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxdJFbLq1rBKsUeticGV1g
This commit is contained in:
JesseMarkowitz
2026-09-12 23:07:35 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 5d645e6452
commit d84ae495f4
17 changed files with 318 additions and 23 deletions
+9 -6
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@@ -114,12 +114,15 @@ Open questions, in the order they are likely to matter:
evidence that was not enough the last two times. It needs a session before its
numbers are believed.
- **Standing now costs money to keep, and nobody has played it.** Each setting
has a `lifestyle` tier bought on the second rung and charged for every cycle
after — and a standing penalty, steepening as standing rises, for lagging
behind what the job expects. A Dispatch coordinator keeping up fully runs at
-$21 a week and has to earn the difference. It is measured (DECISIONS #36)
and, like everything else here, unplayed.
- **Standing costs money to keep, and the Frontier's version is unplayed.**
Each setting has a `lifestyle` tier bought on the second rung and charged for
every cycle after, a standing penalty for lagging behind what the job expects,
and a charge levied by standing itself that no purchase ever ends. Corporate
Ladder's has had one 96-turn session: both purchases were found and taken, and
the standing pressure worked, but the run arrived at the top with nothing left
to spend on — which is where the never-stopping charge came from. The Frontier
carries the same system at its own scale and has never been in front of anyone.
See DECISIONS #36.
- **Dispatch is eleven events against the mailroom's nineteen.** It passes the
variety guard, but it has had far less play than the mailroom. Waits on more
playtesting.