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
