419 lines
32 KiB
Markdown
419 lines
32 KiB
Markdown
# To do
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Things worth coming back to. Anything noted here should either get done or get an explicit decision
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not to — the point is that nothing quietly evaporates.
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Ordered within each section by how much it is currently costing us.
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---
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## Next
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- [ ] **REBALANCE, once the rules are right — deliberately deferred.** Card counts, industry counts
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and the track mix all need a pass together, and none of them should move until the rules stop
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moving. Standing distortions to account for when it happens: offices are doubled (Q12) and
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industries tripled (Gap 12), both tuned when the deck held 139 cards and **no track**; it now
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holds 243 of which 104 are track, so every draw is diluted by 43% — precisely the pressure
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those multipliers exist to relieve. Until then, read no balance conclusion from the revenue
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numbers; they are a functionality signal only.
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- [ ] **Review the standalone replay against the site's replay viewer.** `node src/sim/replay.ts
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--seed 1234 --out replay.html` writes a self-contained HTML file; the site instead reads JSON
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saves from `public/replays/`. Nothing links to the standalone one and its output is gitignored,
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so it is a developer tool that happens to look like a product feature. It carries two panels
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the site viewer does not — the bot's decision trace ("what it chose, why, and what it passed
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over") and the timetable — which is debugging material rather than something a player wants.
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Decide: fold the decision trace into the JSON viewer and delete the standalone, or keep it and
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accept that it is a tool. No action for now.
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- [ ] **The bot was partly living off an illegal placement.** Barring curves from the Running Track
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(they have no east-west road and dead-end the main) cost it districts 28.0 → 19.7 cards and
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revenue ~2.0 → 0.8. It has no plan for where a curve should go once the easy square is gone.
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Same root cause as the two items below; fix them together, after the rebalance.
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- [ ] **THE BOT'S PRIORITIES ARE NOT THE PROBLEM — measured.** Ten heuristic variations, each paired
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over 400+ seeds. Every reordering of what the bot prefers came out inside the noise; the only
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thing that moved revenue was refusing to schedule a train the Office cannot hold
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(**+1.09 ± 0.16, t = 6.79** at 1600 seeds, revenue 1.19 → 2.28). Notable failures, all
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instructive:
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- **Refusing to bury the engine costs more than it saves** (−0.35, t = −2.98). It works —
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burial falls from 8.4 decisions a game to 0.03 — and freight halves with it, because
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coupling is mandatory (§A.4): the moves that bury the engine ARE the moves that pick cars
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up. Burial is the price of collecting, not a mistake.
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- **Reserving Moves to get home costs 0.55** (t = −2.32), though 62 of 120 trains left on the
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board at game end were stranded in the district. The switching work is worth more than the
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departures.
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- **Granting clearance when the train ahead has one Stage left is −0.98** (t = −5.24). Trains
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move in numeric order, so a follower can enter the region the leader still occupies before
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the leader moves. "About to leave" is not "gone".
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- Preferring coaches at make-up, stocking the platform first, playing Interlocking earlier,
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hunting the Depot in the Departments: all within noise, and three of them were exact
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no-ops — Interlocking sits in hand alongside a train card **0.04 decisions a game**.
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The funnel says why: only **8% of Cargo phases** have a stocked green box, and the bot already
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takes 42% of the turns where stocking is productive. The opportunities are not there to be
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prioritised better. What is left is the economy itself, which is a deck question.
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- [ ] **The bot cannot get a crew next to an industry, so Flying Switch never fires.** Industries are
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now stub-only and the bot places 2.23 a game (was 3.84), in districts averaging under two rows
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deep. `flyingSwitch` is exempted by name in the reachability sweep in `sim.test.ts`; deleting
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that line is the test that this is fixed. Same root cause as the item below.
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- [ ] **THE RUN-AROUND IS OUT OF REACH OF ANY BOT, AND THE DECK IS WHY — measured, five ways.**
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"Teach the bot to plan across turns" was tried properly and does not work. Every attempt is
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neutral or negative, and they fail for one reason that the numbers make plain.
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| attempt | result |
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| hold ALL track for the siding | **−0.70** (t = −3.27) |
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| hold only CURVES, the closing piece | **−0.26** (t = −3.22), district 17.9 → 16.7 cards |
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| finish a run before cutting another way down | 0.00 — 398/400 games identical |
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| treat a second turnout as the closing piece | 0.00 — **400/400 identical** |
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| spend a curve only on a square that CLOSES | −0.11, and only 15 games in 400 differ at all |
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**The pieces never meet.** Over 12,000 Local Operations turns: a turnout and a curve are in
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hand together on **0.3%** of them, and a turnout with a MATCHING-hand curve on **0.2%** — about
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once every eight games. A run-around needs five specific pieces of the right hands in a usable
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order; the bot does not get to the two-piece prerequisite.
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And it is not hand pressure. The hand is FULL — mean 2.66 cards, at the three-card limit on
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78% of turns. The bot plays 11.4 track cards a game and discards 1.5, so it spends the pieces
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as they arrive because a piece that builds anything outscores holding one that might build
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more later. Holding is the only counter, and holding measures worse every way it is tried.
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This is a consequence of moving track into the deck, not a bot weakness: 91 run-arounds per 100
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games when track was a private 26-piece supply the player chose from, 29/100 once it was drawn,
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4/60 now. **If the run-around is meant to be the central switching puzzle — and the rules
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present it that way — the supply has to change, not the player.** Options: give track its own
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hand or yard the way the prototype did, raise the hand limit for track specifically, or print a
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siding as a single card. Nothing else reaches it.
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- [ ] **CLEARING AN INBOUND BOX MINTS A CAR — measured at 1.29 a game against a supply of 80.**
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Answered, and it is duplication after all. The two directions are not symmetrical:
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- **Outbound is paid for.** `stockToOutbound` SPLICES a loaded car out of the Division Yard to
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become the load, and `loadCompleted` swaps the emptied car into the Classification Yard as
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the loaded one takes its place on the industry track. Objects in, objects out.
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- **Inbound is not.** `unloadBegan` (apply.ts) turns one loaded car into an empty car on the
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track **plus** a load on MEN|AT|WORK, and `passengersDetrained` does the same to a coach —
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one loaded coach becomes an empty coach in the train plus an object in the red box. Then
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`inboundCleared` pushes that object into the **Classification Yard as a car**. The cargo
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becomes rolling stock, while the car it came out of is already back in service.
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Measured over 200 games: cars at the end minus 80, plus collision losses, equals the
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`inboundCleared` count in 71/200 games exactly and 258 against 279 in total — the rest is
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loads still in flight at the final whistle. So the supply inflates by about 1.3 cars a game.
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That is the number `ROLLING_STOCK_SUPPLY` is supposed to control, so **no supply figure below
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can be tuned until this is settled**. The fix is a decision, not a patch: either a load stops
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being a `RollingStock` and becomes its own type, or `inboundCleared` discards rather than
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banking. Found by a conservation audit, not by a failing test.
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- [ ] **`state = fold(events)` is not literally true, and the README says it is.** Replaying the
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event log onto a fresh state throws: the phase driver mutates state directly and emits a
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descriptive event afterwards — `newTrainPhase` does `s.trays.set(...)` and then pushes
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`trainMadeUp`. Replay works because it re-applies INTENTS (`fromSave`), not because folding
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events reconstructs the position. Nothing is broken today, but the claim underwrites
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reconnection and restart recovery, which are unbuilt — so it should be either made true or
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restated before anything is built on it.
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- [ ] **Engines are not a SUPPLY yet, only a position.** `engineAt` now records where the engine
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sits in the tray and the consist shows it, but an engine is still conjured with the tray
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rather than drawn from the Division Yard and returned to it. The rules put engines in the
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Division Yard alongside the cars, with a predefined number of them, so running out of engines
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should be a second way trains get held — today only the Crew Tray count does that. Needs a
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number to start from, then playtesting.
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- [ ] **The yards are shown on the play page but not in either replay viewer.** The Frame carries
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them, so it is a rendering job, not a modelling one.
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- [ ] **The rolling stock supply is a guess.** `ROLLING_STOCK_SUPPLY` (coach 8+8, boxcar 10+10,
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hopper 8+8, reefer 5+5, tank 6+6, caboose 6) is marked provisional in `content.ts` and was
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scaled alongside the Gap 12 industry increase. Now that the Classification Yard returns stock
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only when the Division Yard empties, these numbers set the real supply pressure. Adjust from
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playtesting rather than theory, and watch whether industry density feels light or heavy at the
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same time.
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- [ ] **Heavy Grade orientation is rolled, not chosen.** The card prints "Player sets orientation",
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but it is dealt during setup and setup has no decision point at all — `createGame` is a pure
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function of the seed, which is also what makes a save portable. Rolled from the seed for now.
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Revisit when setup gains an interactive phase; the orientation matters, because it decides
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which direction climbs and therefore what Brakeman and Helpers are worth.
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- [x] ~~**Measure with error bars from now on.**~~ Built: `node src/sim/compare.ts 1600 <tweak>=<n>`
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runs the current bot and one variant over the same deals and reports the paired difference.
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Pairing drops σ from ~9 on the level to **5.3 on the difference**, so 1600 seeds gives ±0.13 in
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about 1m45s — the noise floor is now ~±0.15 rather than ±1.0. Threshold to keep a heuristic is
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**t ≥ 3**, and the report prints the better/worse/identical split beside the mean, because a
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mean carried by a skewed tail is a different claim from broad improvement.
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- [ ] **Re-run the three "worth ~0" action-mix experiments against the new floor.** Capping the draw,
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pairing the two halves of a load, and restricting Enhancements were each measured "within noise
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of zero" over 400 games — but at 400 games the standard error is ±0.33, so a real +0.5 would
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have looked like nothing. They are nearly free to re-run now and at least one may have been
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discarded wrongly.
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- [x] ~~**Confirm the Classification Yard rule against the source.**~~ Confirmed, and the guess was
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wrong. The rule is: used Rolling Stock to the Classification Yard, used engines and cabooses
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straight back to the Division Yard, and the Classification Yard empties ONLY when the Division
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Yard is bare — then all at once. The Day-boundary version I had invented was far more generous
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and worth **+2.42 revenue a game the game does not actually grant**. Corrected; revenue 9.67
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→ 7.25.
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- [x] ~~**Enhancements are placed but mostly do nothing.**~~ Measured: forbidding every Enhancement
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except Interlocking is worth **-0.01 ± 0.41 (t = -0.04)** over 400 paired seeds. They neither
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pay nor cost. Left alone. Unlocking the Running Track straight put
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nine kinds on the board (telegraph 0.73, waterColumn 0.57 …), but only Interlocking has a
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measured effect. The Telegraph/Telephone/Radio chain adds to the other train's number when
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dispatching facing trains, which may be worth nothing in solitaire; Water Column removes a
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Watertower; Facing Point Locks prevents Derail, which is multiplayer-only. Worth measuring
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what each is actually worth before the bot spends actions on them.
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- [ ] **The marginal Local Operations action is worth ~0, and that is the real ceiling.** Three
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separate attempts to spend the 60 actions better — capping the draw, pairing the two halves of
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a load, restricting Enhancements — each measured within noise of zero over 400 paired seeds.
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76% of the time an outbound industry has neither a stocked green box nor a spotted car, and
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only 5% of Stages have a single workable facility anywhere, yet redirecting actions at that
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does nothing. Something upstream limits how much work exists to do at all; find out what
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before spending more effort on the option mix.
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- [ ] **Freight was stuck at ~2.7 loads a game and three fixes have not moved it.** Sidings,
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facility placement, car selection and the discarded-load leak all raised revenue (3.2 → 6.5)
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without raising `loadStarted` past 2.7. The chain is not leaking and the cars are arriving
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correctly (57% of drops land on a facility that wants them, 0% on one that does not). The
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binding constraint is now upstream of routing: 60 Local Operations actions a game, and a load
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needs a stocked green box AND a spotted car AND a free Laborer to line up in the same Stage.
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Measure how many Stages have all three before changing any heuristic — the answer may be that
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the economy, not the bot, is what caps freight.
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- [x] ~~**`stats.ts` undercounts freight.**~~ Fixed: both halves counted, freight share 39% → 49%.
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Worth revisiting the **industry density** decision below, which was taken on the old number.
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---
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## Open questions for Jesse
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Blocked on a decision, not on work.
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- [ ] **PROPOSED RULE — deal each player six track cards at the start.** Jesse's proposal, and it
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aims squarely at the measured problem above: a run-around needs five specific pieces and the
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bot holds a turnout and a matching curve together on 0.2% of turns. Six pieces in the opening
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hand is roughly the private supply the prototype had, in a form that does not reintroduce an
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unbounded one — and it would make the opening district a decision rather than a wait. Questions
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before it goes in: are the six drawn from the track cards in the deck (thinning it for
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everyone) or from outside it; do they sit in the hand, against the three-card limit, or in a
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separate track hand that does not compete; and does the bot's opening change enough to need
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re-measuring (it will — this is the one change that could move the run-around numbers).
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- [ ] **PROPOSED RULE — one Revenue point for every train that exits your section.** Jesse's
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proposal. Worth noting what it would do to the economy as measured: arrivals run at 5.4 a game
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and completed runs at about the same, so this is roughly **+5 Revenue a game** against a
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current mean of 2.6 — it would more than triple the score and, unlike freight or passengers, it
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pays for traffic the player does not have to work. That may be exactly the intent (it rewards
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keeping the line clear, which is the Superintendent's job) but it changes what the game is
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about, and it interacts with the victory-target question below: 20 over 5 Days becomes
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reachable almost on traffic alone. Cheap to measure once decided.
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- [x] ~~**Q13 — rear-end collisions on a Mainline card.**~~ Answered: collide on catching up.
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Implemented, and not on cards that print "trains may pass". Invisible to a bot that always
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denies clearance; a bot that always allows drops from 7.34 revenue to **-5.13**.
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- [ ] **NINE OF THE TWELVE SPECIAL-TRAIN RULES ARE DECLARED AND READ BY NOTHING.** Found by grepping
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each flag on `TrainRules` for a reader outside `content.ts`. Only `expedite`, `emptiesOnly` and
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`freightTypes` are enforced; `stopEarnsPoint` now is too, after a playtest reported the Circus
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Train standing still for a Stage and earning nothing. Still unbuilt:
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`noSwitching` · `terminalsOnly` · `coachStaysOnStationTrack` · `oneFreightPerLocation` ·
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`noPassengerWork` · `dropOnly` · `pickUpEmptiesOnly` · `stopThenExpedite` · `copiesNextScheduled`
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These are what make a special train special — a Circus Train that may not switch, a per-diem
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train that may only pick up empties, a Second Section that copies the train ahead. Until they
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are enforced, `trainRules()` marks them **NOT YET ENFORCED BY THE ENGINE** in the train's
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tooltip rather than listing them as if they applied, because telling a player a rule is in
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force when it is not is worse than saying nothing. Each is small on its own; the question is
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whether they are worth building before the rebalance, since several of them restrict switching
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and would move the freight numbers.
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- [ ] **Poling.** The only card in the deck with no defined behaviour — the sheet records its effect
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as "TBD in the source". A test asserts it stays TBD so nobody invents one.
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- [ ] **Heavy Grade orientation at setup.** The card says "Player sets orientation", but `createGame`
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is synchronous and has no decision point, so it is currently rolled from the seed. Should become
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a real choice when setup gains an interactive phase.
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---
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## Balance, provisional
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Numbers chosen to fix a measured problem rather than taken from the design. Revisit once the victory
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target is settled and freight carries its intended share.
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- [ ] **Office card density** (Depot 4→8, Station 2→4, Terminal 1→2). Chosen to remove a 25% chance
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of an unwinnable opening deal. Blunt: it lifts the whole ladder and dilutes every other
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category. The better answer may be fewer Terminals, a cheaper first upgrade, or more A/D
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capacity at the Whistle Post itself.
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- [ ] **Industry density** (9 → 27, Gap 12). Restored roughly the prototype ratio. The "freight is
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only 13–18% of gross" figure that motivated this was partly a measurement bug (see the
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`stats.ts` item) and partly the car-selection bug; freight now runs at 37%. Worth re-deciding
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whether 27 is still the right number now that the industries are actually served.
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- [ ] **Train density.** Left alone by decision, but noted: 22 train cards in 140 are drawn less often
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than 22 in 115 were, and trains scheduled fell 2.9 → 2.1 as a side effect of the other density
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changes.
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- [ ] **The victory target (20 over 5 Days) is out of reach by a factor of about four, and the
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Office ladder is why.** Measured over 800 games with the tuned bot, which no longer throws
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revenue away on collisions (0.0 a game, down from 0.4):
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| trains scheduled | games | revenue | | Office reached | games | trains | revenue |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 0 | 110 | 0.67 | | Whistle Post | 297 | 0.81 | 0.62 |
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| 1 | 379 | 1.69 | | Depot | 272 | 1.49 | 2.92 |
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| 2 | 234 | 3.72 | | Station | 176 | 1.89 | 4.36 |
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| 3 | 68 | 5.68 | | Terminal | 55 | 1.93 | 5.04 |
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| 4 | 9 | 5.78 | | | | | |
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Revenue is almost exactly linear in trains scheduled — about **1.9 a train** — and trains are
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capped by A/D capacity, which is the Office tier, which is a card you have to draw. So the
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whole economy hangs off one valve: **37% of games never leave the Whistle Post and earn 0.62;
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53% of all games earn nothing at all.**
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Extrapolating the line, 20 Revenue needs roughly **11 trains and therefore 11 A/D tracks**. A
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Terminal has four. The target is not merely missed, it is structurally unreachable under this
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deck at this Office ladder — no amount of bot skill closes it, and the best game seen in 800
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was 26 against a median of 0.
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The three ways out are all yours to choose between, and they are different games:
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1. **Lower the target** to what a 5-Day game can produce (6–8 looks like the honest number).
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2. **Open the valve** — more Office cards, or a cheaper first upgrade, or more A/D capacity at
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the Whistle Post, so the ladder is climbed rather than drawn.
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3. **Raise revenue per arrival.** It is 0.46 today; each arrival can in principle pay 2 for
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passengers alone. That is the freight/passenger conversion problem, not the traffic problem.
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Nothing here is a bot weakness any more, which is what this measurement was waiting on.
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---
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## Not yet built
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- [ ] **Real audio, as committed assets.** Everything the game plays is synthesised from oscillators
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(`src/web/sound.ts`), which was the honest choice for a site that fetches nothing — but it is a
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placeholder, not the finished sound. Sound therefore defaults to OFF.
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- **"All aboard" most of all.** It currently goes through the browser's `speechSynthesis`, so
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it is whatever system voice the player happens to have — a robot, not a conductor. A real
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clip is the single biggest improvement available here.
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- **Find and add the rest as assets**: steam whistle, grade-crossing bell, couplers clashing,
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a train pulling away. Needs licences that permit redistribution (CC0 or similar), files small
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enough to commit, and a check that the "fetches nothing external" test still passes — assets
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must be served from the site's own folder, never hot-linked.
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- Keep the synthesised versions as the fallback for anything not sourced, so a missing file is
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a quieter game rather than a broken one.
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- [ ] **Regions as the primary model (the other half of §8.2).** The Division map now DRAWS regions,
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deriving position from what the crossing already cost. The engine still models a crossing as a
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countdown of Stages, so two things printed on the cards remain unimplemented:
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- `entryPoints` is declared on every Mainline profile and read nowhere. The Heavy Grade card
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has five named Start positions, and playing Brakeman is supposed to move your entry point
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along the card. The engine gets the same ANSWER by taking a Stage off the crossing, which is
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why the derived drawing looks right — but the mechanism is not the printed one, so a card
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whose starts do not correspond to its speed would be drawn wrong.
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- `implications.md` §6 calls this "the single largest mechanical gap" and asks for typed cards
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with speeds and named entries, with crossing time DERIVED from the region walk.
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Doing it properly changes movement, so it invalidates every balance figure — revenue 8.7, the
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freight numbers, all of it — and needs a full paired re-measure over 400 seeds. Needs the
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source Start-position art for the ten card types before it can begin.
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- [ ] **Player settings, saved.** The district's auto-focus is the first of these: it is DISPLAY
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state, so in a multiplayer game two players may reasonably want it set differently and it must
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never become part of game state. It currently resets on reload. Worth a settings object in
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localStorage — auto-focus mode to start with, and whatever else earns a preference — kept
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strictly separate from the save, which is the seed plus the intents and has to stay portable.
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- [ ] **Let the game join a call and talk to the table.** Long-term. If the game could join a Zoom,
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Teams or Jitsi call and post into its chat, it could carry the whole table's shared state
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without anyone alt-tabbing: the history of actions as they happen, and a prompt when someone
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is holding the game up — "Now waiting on player Alice to complete the Cargo phase."
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- Further out, audio into the same call: a crash when a collision happens, a bell as the Stage
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clock turns over.
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- Further out still, a nudge on a timer — if a player has not moved within some interval, the
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game says so, by beep or by spoken line: "Still waiting on Alice to complete the Cargo
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phase." That turns the turn chart's "waiting on" chip into something a distracted table
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actually notices.
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- [ ] **Multiplayer train make-up is a round, not one player's job.** When a new train is built,
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players take turns adding cars to the consist; in solitaire one player does all of it. The
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engine currently has no per-player turn within the New Train phase, so this is unbuilt rather
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than wrong.
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||
- [ ] **Action cards (10) and Space-use cards (12).** Genuinely multiplayer-only — they are played AT
|
||
an opponent. Rejected with `NOT_IMPLEMENTED`.
|
||
- [ ] **Multiplayer proper.** The engine runs 2–5 player games and the bot plays them, but there is no
|
||
server, no turn submission, and no per-player view.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## Smaller things
|
||
|
||
- [x] **Carry `links` forward in replay frames.** Done, and the premise was wrong in an instructive
|
||
way: measured, `links` was 5% of the `cells` payload. What actually cost was the `what` prose
|
||
(32%), the facility object stored a second time inside its own cell (24%) and the rest of the
|
||
static identity (26%). All three are interned now — 3415 KB → 1877 KB, and a round-trip test
|
||
runs the page's own unpacking function.
|
||
- [ ] **Undo is unlimited step-back, and that is a decision to revisit.** The save is the seed plus
|
||
the intents, so `undo()` replays without the last one and can walk all the way to the deal. The
|
||
RNG advances with the replay, so the same play re-rolls the same 1D12 — you cannot undo your
|
||
way to a better die. But you CAN see a train's departure Stage and then spend the turn
|
||
differently, which is an ordinary solitaire take-back and also a real information leak. Options
|
||
if it starts to feel like cheating: make the Stage boundary a commit point, or cap the depth at
|
||
the current Stage. Deliberately left open until it has been played with. Multiplayer gets
|
||
nothing until there is a proposal/agreement flow — undo there is a table decision, not a
|
||
button.
|
||
- [ ] **The 5 MB replay size limit is arbitrary.** Invented, not a browser constraint. It has earned
|
||
its place — it caught a 5.2 MB payload that turned out to be the whole grid re-serialised every
|
||
frame — but the number itself deserves a reason.
|
||
- [ ] **Curves are drawn as two straight segments meeting**, not true arcs. Fine at this size, angular
|
||
close up.
|
||
- [ ] **Wide boards scroll.** A 40-card district and a 13-section Division both need horizontal
|
||
scrolling. Legible, not compact.
|
||
- [x] ~~**Every published replay was dead.**~~ All three replayed **2 intents of roughly 400** and
|
||
presented as short games, exactly as the item below predicted. Re-recorded from bot games with
|
||
`node src/sim/save-replay.ts`, which verifies each save round-trips before writing it, and
|
||
`harness.test.ts` now fails if a published replay stops short. The version-stamp item below is
|
||
still worth doing — this catches the breakage, it does not explain it to a player.
|
||
- [ ] **Save/restore is not version-aware.** A save from an older ruleset stops replaying rather than
|
||
failing loudly, which is the safe direction but says little about what changed. **This has now
|
||
bitten once**: both published replays were dead — one got 42 intents into 360, the other 4 of
|
||
338 — and nothing said so; they simply ended early and looked like short games. A save should
|
||
carry a ruleset stamp and the page should say "this replay was recorded under an older
|
||
ruleset and stops at Stage N" rather than presenting a truncated game as a whole one.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## Done, kept for the reasoning
|
||
|
||
- [x] **Put rolling stock back into circulation.** The Classification Yard was write-only — seven
|
||
writers, no readers — so 37% of all rolling stock left the game by Day 5. Returning it at the
|
||
Day boundary is **+2.32 ± 0.52 (t = 8.79)**, the largest single change measured on this bot,
|
||
and it was ranked THIRD and predicted not to matter because the Division Yard never runs dry.
|
||
The aggregate was the wrong measure; having the right commodity at the right moment is what
|
||
counts.
|
||
- [x] **Make Enhancements reachable at all.** The bot never laid a straight on the Running Track
|
||
(0.00 in 100 games) because two-arc run-arounds do not need one — so 13 of the 18 Enhancement
|
||
cards had nowhere to go, including Interlocking, the only cure for the only penalty in the
|
||
game (`no free A/D track`, 27% of gross). One scored straight fixed it: enhancements placed
|
||
0.64 → 3.01, collision cost 2.70 → 1.91, worst game −47 → −24. Revenue +0.70 ± 0.74 paired
|
||
over 400 seeds — real but not significant alone; the variance reduction is the clearer win.
|
||
- [x] **Stop the bot discarding its own freight.** `canStockProductively` did not check the Division
|
||
Yard while the engine's `stockOutbound` does, so Freight Agent was chosen when nothing could be
|
||
stocked and the follow-through fell through to an unjam that threw a waiting load out of the
|
||
green box — 3.10 a game against 2.71 started. Now 0.00. Revenue 6.0 → 6.5, wins 5 → 8 in 100.
|
||
Also confirmed **routing was never the problem**: 0% of drops land on a facility that does not
|
||
want the car.
|
||
- [x] **Why switching work did not become Revenue.** Answered: it was the freight the crew shuffled,
|
||
not the shuffling. The chain never leaked — 95% of started loads finished — it was barely
|
||
entered, because a load needs a matching empty car spotted and half the industries never asked
|
||
for one. Three fixes later (sidings, facility placement, car selection) revenue is 3.2 → 6.0
|
||
and freight 26% → 37% of gross.
|
||
- [x] **Fix car selection.** Three of six industries were invisible to `wantedCars` — a hand-written
|
||
industry→car map naming two industries that do not exist and omitting three that do — so tank
|
||
cars were dropped **0 times in 100 games**. Derived from `INDUSTRY_PROFILES` now, and the
|
||
second commodity of the two-commodity industries is reachable. Revenue 5.0 → 6.0, freight
|
||
share 25% → 37%, wins 1 → 5 in 100.
|
||
- [x] **Put the industries on the run-around.** Facility placement was unscored — the first legal
|
||
square — so 0.00 facilities a game sat on a loop; now 1.08. The instructive part was the
|
||
second bug: scoring facilities onto the siding row dropped run-arounds 91→36, because the
|
||
anchor test asked a card's KIND rather than its PORTS and an industry in the line read as a
|
||
dead end. Revenue 4.1 → 5.0. Freight did **not** follow, which is the item above.
|
||
- [x] **Make the bot build sidings that are sidings.** 0 run-arounds in 100 games → 91. Three bugs,
|
||
all scoring on local shape without checking it reached anything; the decisive one was that
|
||
`bestTrackLay` never declined a piece, so it spent the track supply on whatever was legal.
|
||
- [x] **Teach the bot what a siding is for.** Nose coupling (§A.3) implemented, so approach direction
|
||
decides which car is droppable; the bot runs around rather than setting out, when the drop can
|
||
follow. Switching activity transformed, revenue unchanged.
|
||
- [x] **Curve geometry.** Curves were topologically identical duplicates of turnouts, and nothing
|
||
reached north, so a district could only be a vertical column. Now two-port rotatable arcs.
|
||
- [x] **Q10 — when track may be laid.** During the "draw a card" option, one piece a turn. Track was a
|
||
card when §6.2 was written; a 26-piece supply has no hand to bound it.
|
||
- [x] **Q11 — which way a Heavy Grade climbs.** Answered from the card: it prints "(Up)" and "Player
|
||
sets orientation", so it is a property of the placed card, not a compass constant.
|
||
- [x] **§6.2's reshuffle.** Implemented, and the `deckReshuffled` event it had already declared and
|
||
narrated — but never emitted or reduced — is now real. Not yet reached in play: solitaire
|
||
Campaign ends with 168.8 of 243 in the deck and four-player Campaign with 86.6, and no run of
|
||
any length has emptied it. It is a safety net rather than a live mechanic today, which is worth
|
||
knowing before tuning draw rates.
|
||
- [x] **Q12 — Whistle Post lock-in.** Players always start at a Whistle Post; office density doubled
|
||
instead.
|