v0.8.0.15
2
Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
|
f308a2d94d |
v0.8.0.15 — the reference documents, and a card that advertised what it cannot do
The four hand-written references brought up to the game as it actually runs, ahead of the next testing round, plus a Quickstart to hand a tester who has never played. They had not been touched since v0.6.2 — a month and two minor versions — and each now says at the top which build it describes. ONE LIVE BUG CAME OUT OF THE PASS. mainlineDescription told players "Cars may be sorted into any new order here" on the Interchange. It is the printed capability and has never been implemented: nothing reads sortsCars to permit a sort, and its one live use is marking the card an Extra may be made up on, because it is the Mainline card with a yard. That sentence is not only documentation — view.ts renders it as a Mainline card's `what`, so it is what a player reads on the board, and the generated reference printed a "Sorts cars: yes" column beside it. A card advertising a button that does not exist sends a player hunting for it and then concluding the game is broken. What the documents had wrong, all of it verified against the code rather than read for tone: the victory model in the Rules book (firstToTarget / highestAfterDays and the target-bearing length presets stopped existing in 2026-08 — it is a free days count and a combined floor of 3 x players x days); "there is no lobby, no server, no multiplayer"; crossing time in mph rather than regions; Extras launched automatically eastbound; the Uncontrolled Siding listed as a passing card; industry track length taken from the box count; and a "Sister Trains" optional rule that never existed. The Home deck's counts table came out under TODO #15a — Jesse's own ruling that counts move with balance — and it had been wrong for a month, which is the argument made twice. The Home and Mainline deck references are restructured to explain how a deck is USED and to defer every per-card table to rules/as-built.md. Duplicating it by hand is precisely the drift #15a was raised about: as-built needed no correction beyond the Interchange, because build:cards regenerates it and a test fails when the checked-in file disagrees. Everything hand-maintained around it had drifted; it had not. docs/design.md, the index everything starts from, said v0.4.3, "what is not: the server", and 493 tests. It now also lists the player-facing references, which it never has, so the Quickstart is findable at all. 999 fast tests and 35 sim tests pass. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DmdqqCNoiqE7GBo6wthBnR |
||
|
Jesse
|
9f3b92d08e |
v0.4.7 — the switching game: track order, the cut on your own card, and four rules
Eight play reports and one design that had been written up and not built. The
through-line is switching: what a card can hold, which end of a train a cut comes
off, which way a train meets cars standing on the line, and what the board and the
log say about all of it.
TRACK ORDER FOR STANDING CARS, AND THE CUT ON YOUR OWN CARD
Two reports turned out to be one root cause. `TrackCard.standing` claimed "in track
order (§A.3)" and had no defined orientation at all, while `CrewTray.consist` does
(nose first, relative to facing) — so every transfer between them was a conversion
nothing performed. §A.3 says what it should be: cars occupy the track "in the same
order they originally held, left-to-right". Left-to-right is west-to-east, and that
is now the defined orientation of `standing` and of an industry track through
`carsOn`. It is the board's orientation, not the train's, so it does not change when
a different train touches the card.
- Setting out is batch-invariant. Four cars at once, four singles and two pairs
parked three different orders, one of them physically impossible. Successive
cuts off the same end stack up towards the engine, so the insertion point is the
train's own place in the row.
- Approaching a cut from either end now mirrors. `couples` is built nearest-first
along the direction of travel and reverses onto the nose, so the farthest car met
ends up nose-most — which is what makes a run-around worth its Move.
- A train no longer drives through its own cut. The walk began at the neighbour of
the start square and never read the start card, so a crew could set cars out and
pull straight away from them. Coupling is mandatory (§A.4) and your own square is
no exception; the cut counts against the four-car limit. Setting out off the end
you are not leaving by still works.
`CrewTray.standingWest` records where a train stands among the cars on its card — a
train may set out off both ends on one square, so which side a cut is on is not
recoverable from the array alone.
On the board, the cut is drawn split at the train — west cars left, east cars right,
engine in the gap — and each car's tooltip says whether it stands ahead of or behind
the engine. The history says which end a cut came off, and a move's button separates
"takes your own boxcar back off this card" from cars found standing on the line.
Decided: taking your own cut back on the square you are standing on is UNDOING the
drop. It is exempt from trains 3/4's per-location freight budget, X13's "drop but not
pick up" and X22's "empties only", and it refunds the budget the drop spent.
Otherwise a legal-looking drop becomes silently one-way.
Measured, 200 paired seeds, developer bot: -0.55 revenue (t = -3.63), freight revenue
1.11 -> 0.56. That cost is the bot's, not the rule's — its trains run engine-first,
so at a stub industry it sets a car out between itself and the only way out, and the
correct play is §A.5's facing-point move, which is the cross-turn planning TODO.md
already records as out of reach of any bot. Filtering self-recoupling moves out of its
options took recoupling from 625 of 1,029 set-outs to 101 of 677, and all 101 that
remain are that case. Read the number as a bot measurement, not a balance one.
THE SUPERINTENDENT'S RULING NAMES THE TRAINS IT IS ABOUT
Reported: the Superintendent could not tell which train he was clearing. The heading
asks the question now — "may Train 6 follow Train 4 onto the same Mainline card?" —
and the trains moved to the FRONT of each button, because the button splits its label
at the first em-dash and showed only the head.
AN INDUSTRY TRACK HOLDS FOUR CARS, LIKE EVERY OTHER CARD
Reported at undo 188: "we wanted to drop two cars, but were only allowed to drop one."
An industry track was built as long as its box count, so a one-box industry had room
for one car. Box count is how much WORK an industry can hold, not how much RAIL it
has. Ordinary track was the other exception, unbounded; both are gone and every card
holds four.
THE FREIGHT AGENT MAY STAGE A LOAD BEFORE THE CAR IS THERE
§6.3 asks nothing of the industry track — the empty car belongs to §9.3's Load the
car, which is the Laborer's action. The gate now lives only there, so cargo can wait
on the dock while the car to ship it in is still being switched in. Nothing can jam:
a load in a green box is waiting, not stuck.
THE TRUCK DOCK UNLOADS, AND BRINGS NOBODY
+1 inbound, no Laborer. It printed +1 outbound and +1 Laborer, which made it a
longer-host-list copy of Forklifts. Beside Packing Sheds it now does nothing at all,
and the hand tooltip says so before it is played.
Also in this release, from the days before: Mainline card tooltips computed from the
crossing rule; an Extra starts from the Division Point its number sends it to; a
modifier's suppressed grant comes back when a Whistle Post is upgraded; the Oil
Refinery and the Grocer's Warehouse ship as well as receive, per the card reference;
and the dormant defences name the attack they answer. `.claude/` is now gitignored —
it holds Claude Code's worktrees, i.e. a second checkout of this repository.
570 tests, typecheck clean. The three published replays were re-recorded twice —
legality changed, so bot play changed. Full detail in CHANGELOG.md.
|