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# Meetings, voting & social deduction (crewrift) — guide

Reference notes, design rationale, and negative results (24) for meetings, voting & social deduction (crewrift). Read when working in this area.

#### 1. Know Crewrift's asymmetric win conditions, identity-by-color, and meeting mechanics
`crewrift`

Crew win by EITHER completing all tasks OR ejecting all imposters (two paths); imposters win ONLY by reaching parity (alive imposters >= alive crew) before the ~10,000-tick (~7 min) cap, so they race the clock. Players are identified by COLOR (16 fixed slot colors), and imposters see their teammates only during a ~5s role reveal they must memorize. tallyVotes in sim.nim ejects ONLY the strict-max alive target: a tie, zero max, or skip-majority yields NO ejection, so a defensive bloc that splits or skips can block any ejection. The emergency button starts a vote but is a finite resource (once per player per game), with empirical rhythm of 2.15 calls/game and ~945-tick median gap (>500-tick kill cooldown, so the button-runner is killable between meetings).
  <sub>sources: personal_labs/crewrift_lab/docs/crewrift-gameplay.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/docs/crewrift-player.md, coworlds/coworld-crewrift/src/crewrift/sim.nim, coworlds/coworld-crewrift/README.md (+1)</sub>

#### 2. Treat engine source as ground truth for game rules; parameterize over config
`crewrift` · **negative result**

For social-deduction players the rulebook/prose is NOT ground truth -- the game SOURCE CODE is (in Persephone the rulebook said leaders could act during the summit but sim.ts's `!isSummit` input gate proved the menu is blocked; a framework schema describing a capability is not proof the game enables it, e.g. mettagrid `attack` is `AttackActionConfig(enabled=False)`). Rules are also version- and config-dependent: a game bump can change kill cooldown, timers, and rewards, so re-check sim.nim when precision matters. Among Them config defaults: killCooldownTicks=900, voteTimerTicks=6000 (~250s at 24fps), roleRevealTicks~120, voteResultTicks=72, ~10 button calls with ~10000-tick cooldown, fixed seed 679961. Never list an action the engine forbids in a state as an option, and express capacity (probes/round, urgency gates) as a function of config-supplied round duration rather than hardcoding defaults (a design assuming 15s rounds breaks on medium/medium12 presets of 60-300s).
  <sub>sources: personal_labs/crewrift_lab/docs/crewrift-gameplay.md, alpha_cog/docs/upstream-issue-report.md, opencode:ses_1fb148d00ffe5ob6k0yKT3aHke, opencode:ses_1fb48dd11fferLGXS1vWdHa0wS (+1)</sub>

#### 3. As crew, vote rarely but accurately; ejecting a crewmate gifts parity to imposters
`crewrift` · **negative result**

Crew voting is asymmetrically costly: ejecting a fellow crewmate usually loses the game (a parity gift to imposters) while imposters benefit from voting often. A league audit of a hand-tuned crew model found it badly miscalibrated -- 58% of crew player-votes hit crewmates, votes ejected an imposter in only 2 of 40 games, and crew ejections ran 14-in-20-losses vs 4-in-20-wins. The fix that worked: raise the crewmate vote bar to posterior P>=0.9 and REMOVE the clear-leader rule. A well-fit suspicion model casting only ~0.20 votes/decision at 94% imposter precision netted +17.3/100 vs always-skip (vs 42% precision live). Define the vote policy as: vote the top suspect only if P>=threshold AND (P - runner-up) >= margin, else skip; sweep the (threshold, margin) grid and prefer fewer crew hits at similar net. Scale aggressiveness with player count (at 4 left = 2+2 you MUST eject an imposter or lose, but a wrong endgame eject loses outright, so endgame is high-variance and strictly evidence-driven).
  <sub>sources: personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/docs/designs/suspicion.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/docs/designs/suspicion-le, coworlds/coworld-crewrift/README.md, bitworld/among_them/bot-policies/sidecar/prompts/crewmate.md (+3)</sub>

#### 4. Keep crew voting evidence-only and unmanipulable; join majority on imposter signal
`crewrift`

Make the crewmate vote on firsthand visual evidence only -- witnessed kill, near-body, vent, or contradiction -- and skip when none exists, ignoring chat as a vote driver; deliberately do NOT implement vote-bandwagon-following on the crew side (support bandwagon only as an imposter deception tactic). In a population of chat-bandwagon bots an evidence-only voter is correct more often and is a hard social-engineering target. Cast non-skip only on repeated same-target sus/body evidence, treating low-confidence LLM vote responses as tentative. Counterweight from losses: when the agent voted a different (correct) imposter than the crew majority it split the vote so nobody was ejected -- treat meeting-vote logic as first-class policy quality, and joining the emerging majority even imperfectly can swing ejections.
  <sub>sources: bitworld/among_them/players/mod_talks/TODO.md, bitworld/among_them/players/evidencebot_strategy.md, players_checkouts/players_2/players/crewrift/suspectra/README.md, players_checkouts/players_2/players/crewrift/suspectra/memory/summary. (+2)</sub>

#### 5. Keep voting perception policy-agnostic and split role-specific suspicion knobs
`crewrift` · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Make voting perception and action durable and policy-agnostic (full perception of what the cursor points at plus how to move it, plus an intent the mode emits) rather than coupling them to one rule-based implementation, so an LLM can later drive voting through the same plumbing; keep the suspicion engine role-agnostic even if v1 only uses it for crew. But before tuning a single threshold, enumerate every consumer: a shared vote-suspicion threshold served two opposing goals -- raising the crew vote bar nearly silenced the imposter's deflection because both relied on the same top_suspect value -- so keep role-specific knobs separate.
  <sub>sources: claude-code:0e7b14ca-ffd5-4137-9456-47485d3c6f87, claude-code:25488cd9-61d5-4231-bd87-e2744b6db043</sub>

#### 6. Reserve the LLM for social/strategic meeting turns; rule-based path for everything else
`crewrift`

Scope the LLM to only the decisions that genuinely need natural language (voting and chat during meetings) and leave navigation, tasks, evidence-gathering, and physics on the rule-based path -- the LLM is an enhancement layer, not 'the agent.' Pre-compute cheap deterministic chat without it: build a body-sighting message ('body in <room> sus <color>') directly from the map lookup at the body's world coords plus the most-recently-seen nearby color, and queue it into the same pending-chat slot. Run the optional LLM call on the meeting FAST PATH (meetings intentionally slow into a social phase) so it cannot starve movement/combat, keep it opt-in behind a flag plus API key, and ALWAYS preserve a deterministic accuse-and-vote / silent-skip fallback when flag or key is missing.
  <sub>sources: personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/design.md, codex:019e941c-8eb9-7402-a77f-8fe75a5d19bf, opencode:ses_219efd206ffe6azQSiSZsvnxX4, opencode:ses_21a0d30b6ffewSKOVSUyO4lZkU</sub>

#### 7. Drive LLM meetings through a constrained action interface over a rich serialized context
`crewrift`

Drive LLM meeting behavior through a constrained action interface, not free-form control. Feed a structured snapshot: phase/mode, visible deduplicated chat, voting-screen state with slot-to-color mapping, and a per-player evidence ledger (current voting slot, legality, role/alive, current vote, who votes for them, incriminating vs exculpatory evidence, suspicion/alibi/trust, chat mentions classified as accusation/defense/alibi/noise) -- never raw internal scratch state. Let it enqueue ONLY speak/vote/unvote/confirm/wait actions into a FIFO processed one action per tick while a deterministic mode handles cursor mechanics; because confirm follows vote at one action/tick plus cursor travel, emit vote and confirm together. Budget dedicated design time for this serializer: it determines decision quality more than the chat/vote strategy itself, and hand the model BOTH the menu of legal targets and the deterministic recommendation in plain English (e.g. 'top suspect X at probability P') as a safe anchor.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/among_them/guided_, personal_cogs/among_them/guided_bot/MEETING_DESIGN.md, codex:019e941c-8eb9-7402-a77f-8fe75a5d19bf, claude-code:7b965041-3e1e-4d77-bc3a-a48662331630</sub>

#### 8. Optimize fast meeting LLMs against self-harm, start small, trace everything
`crewrift`

For a fast, cheap meeting/voting LLM the likelier and costlier failure mode is an accidental illegal or self-harming action (e.g. an imposter voting out a teammate), not a missed clever play -- bias the design toward foreclosing that failure rather than enabling risky cleverness. Start experiments with a small, fast model (e.g. Haiku) before scaling, so iteration is cheap and latency low while you debug plumbing. Build always-on tracing for the serialized meeting context and the MeetingDecision response, plus optional tracing of raw API calls -- treat observability as first-class, not an afterthought. Validate meeting/social control with gameplay (movement/task) directives DISABLED so the social reasoning can be exercised independently.
  <sub>sources: claude-code:7b965041-3e1e-4d77-bc3a-a48662331630, codex:019e941c-8eb9-7402-a77f-8fe75a5d19bf, players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/MISSION.md</sub>

#### 9. Counter LLM 'cosplay' and under/over-action with an explicit evidence gate
`crewrift` · **negative result**

NEGATIVE RESULT: in a short voting phase LLMs tend to 'cosplay' the game -- say dramatic, player-like things and invent unhelpful accusations -- rather than 'play' it (make the locally-correct deductive move); mitigate by feeding all collected info (where/who/why/what-seen), using a FAST model (the ~10s vote timer), and a system prompt pushing toward the game objective, not role-play. The model also UNDER-acts on probabilistic evidence (states 'appeared near vent twice' then votes skip as 'not concrete', letting weak survival-trust erase a 65-73% signal) AND conversely OVER-acts by voting the 'least vouched for'/'least trusted' player with zero incriminating evidence. Fix both with an explicit prompt evidence gate (only consider a player-vote when concrete memory evidence exists; high-probability/repeated near-vent appearances count as actionable, still not proof) plus a structured snapshot field like players_with_concrete_memory_evidence so the model reads a gate instead of inferring it. The recognizable 'mechanical not social' signature -- skipping without speaking, ghosts reasoning as if they can vote, voting on absence-of-trust -- is diagnosed by reading the raw LLM reasoning strings in the trace, not just the chosen action.
  <sub>sources: coworlds/coworld-crewrift/players/notsus/README.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/docs/crewrift-gameplay.md, codex:019e1591-004e-7040-b768-062bd8e6acd4, codex:019e1593-c00d-7a32-9dfa-1cf6b16b01a4</sub>

#### 10. Force an unconditional opening statement to avoid silent-meeting deadlock
`crewrift` · **negative result**

NEGATIVE RESULT: 'stay silent until others speak' deadlocks multi-agent meetings -- when many agents reach the same medium-confidence state and all wait for someone else to open, no one speaks and the meeting deadlocks. Fix: ensure every agent emits at least one OPENING STATEMENT regardless of confidence (add an opening_statement field to the hypothesis schema, queued unconditionally) rather than trying to bootstrap conversation with a doubled reaction call. Related failure modes to watch: 'LLM enabled' does not mean 'LLM is chatting' (even with the path on for all 8 agents, many chose vote->confirm->wait, leaving meetings quiet -- check the trace's action distribution before concluding the feature works), and conversely an over-chatting agent that never converts to a decisive vote also loses -- validate the policy actually closes the loop on decisions.
  <sub>sources: bitworld/among_them/players/mod_talks/LLM_SPRINTS.md, bitworld/among_them/players/mod_talks/LLM_VOTING.md, opencode:ses_21e7dd4d4ffewtISu38YXrsOgs, codex:019e14a5-e574-7770-953b-17019f2f5e74 (+1)</sub>

#### 11. Time meeting fallbacks to the OBSERVED phase close, and fit timers to LLM latency
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

NEGATIVE RESULT: drive a meeting/voting policy's timing off the OBSERVED empirical phase length, never the configured maximum. A policy hardcoded a 240-tick window matching voteTimerTicks=240, but meetings actually closed at ~76 ticks once others voted, so both safety nets (deadline at age>=144, auto-submit at age>=192, scaled to 240) never fired -- in a phase that closes when everyone has acted, waiting until your own deadline gets you ejected by the early close, so commit early/proactively. Separately, when an LLM drives meetings in a real-time loop, tune timers up front to fit provider latency or the bot never reaches the vote phase: with ~14s of blocking per meeting the default VoteListenTicks/meeting timers expired before commit (press_a=0). Use at most one blocking call per frame with immediate return so no single block exceeds ~5s (chained back-to-back calls double the block and kill the websocket); beware an early return that skips the rest of the state machine makes the bot chat but never act, so run the commit logic on the first frame after all calls finish. Right-size imposter cooldown, vote timer, and bot count to call latency.
  <sub>sources: claude-code:3837ef5e-3e9c-41bc-b290-df5865581698, opencode:ses_21b008642ffeCM6Q48G44aM6k0</sub>

#### 12. Trust votes over chat; parse chat defensively into (speaker,stance,target) triples
`crewrift` · tool: `spaCy dependency parser`

Treat a player's VOTE cast against a target (from the vote tally) as the RELIABLE bandwagon signal and a chat accusation as a softer additive signal, because votes are unambiguous while free-form chat parsing is error-prone. Treat all chat lines as UNVERIFIED and let the model fit decide their weight rather than hand-trusting them (the field mixes honest scripted lines like 'just resetting imposter cool downs' with fabricated accusations). Reduce each chat line to a structured (speaker, stance, target) triple with stance in {accuses, defends, self_claim}, and DROP unparseable lines instead of guessing. Parse cheaply in two stages exploiting the closed color vocabulary: a keyword pre-gate (only messages naming a color AND carrying a sus cue), then a spaCy dependency parse tracking negation scope -- it beats crude 'is a negation word present?' on cases like 'red isn't sus' vs 'red is sus not blue' (~19/21 correct vs ~16/21 keyword+crude-negation, the wins being exactly the negation-scope cases). Parse incoming chat from non-matching opponents defensively (arbitrary vocabulary, misspellings, lies, non-responses): extract intents with parse confidence, assess credibility separately (role-exchange allies ~0.85, color-exchange ~0.6, known enemies ~0.1, unknown ~0.2), let only above-threshold claims update knowledge, and never let a chat claim override stronger mechanical evidence.
  <sub>sources: personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/design.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/docs/designs/suspicion-le, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md</sub>

#### 13. Specify chat PARSING separately from generation, with longest-match-first keywords
`crewrift` · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Chat/communication content needs a PARSING spec, not just a generation spec, because you cannot assume other agents share your type or format: specify how incoming messages are interpreted (templates, coded messages, interpretation rules, fallback when unparseable) separately from how you emit them, or the agent cannot act on what it hears. Keyword-extraction parsers must match longest-pattern-first: when intent keywords overlap (e.g. 'SEND ME' vs 'SEND'), check the longer phrase first or the shorter substring steals the match. Specify multi-step interactions (e.g. a whisper negotiation: approach, open channel, wait for entry, exchange, assess, escalate or exit) as an explicit state machine with states, transition triggers, per-state action protocol, and exit conditions (time budget, intel obtained, hostile detected); naming the interaction as a single 'mode' hides gameplay-critical logic, and acceptance/offer decisions should be a lookup table keyed by (own role x counterpart team), not prose.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_1fb8906dcffete6Fy63Vc7IEPv, codex:019e090d-a88d-76f2-b1f5-cd3e4eda9381</sub>

#### 14. Diagnose missing meeting/vote behavior by phase, role, and config before blaming the LLM
`crewrift`

To diagnose 'meeting observed but no vote/chat action', inspect in order: meeting-start events and mode transitions, voting-screen/chat-panel perception diagnostics, snapshot/evidence trace (the LLM-facing context), LLM guidance trace, then emitted chat packets and vote masks -- a missing action points to meeting-mode entry, voting-screen parse, or the LLM lifecycle. Before instrumenting, rule out non-bugs: a 'missed vote' is usually a dead-player meeting (reconciling meeting_vote_selected vs vote_cast, 51/51 selected-without-cast gaps were `dead` role in a 100-episode batch, vote_timeout=0 -- filter by alive/eligible first); 'no talk/no vote' can be a match-config artifact (with killCooldown ~1200 a run ending ~tick 905 never reached a meeting), and rare events make integration tests slow (a meeting needs cooldown elapse, a kill, a fog-of-war body find, then a report, so 10s-3min runs produce zero meetings). Do NOT blame crewborg's synchronous-LLM blocking-fallback bug for misses in a deterministic upload: the bug is real (AttendMeetingMode._call_llm() runs inside runtime.step() so the bridge stops reading frames and belief.last_tick freezes) but only triggers behind CREWBORG_LLM_MEETINGS -- deterministic uploads use canned-chat-once then top_suspect(belief) or skip, so absent canned chat points to phase/perception, not the LLM. To verify a bot's chat path is reachable (notsus genuinely chats: pendingChat from body reports, button-reset explanations, and imposter 'sus' at ImposterSusChatPercent=35), trace from where it SETS pendingChat through the pendingChatReady() gate, not just the send call. Beware a confirmed vote emitting repeated vote_cast trace edges while the server records one: separate 'intent being driven across cursor steps' from 'actually confirmed' and keep the mode idle after confirmation.
  <sub>sources: players/users/james/personal_cogs/among_them/guided_bot/coworld/DC_DEB, codex:019eaea8-4f78-7072-b4b0-539df963b7df, codex:019e2819-d56b-72f3-9349-60fc965b6ed2, opencode:ses_21f67d3f5ffeBF92agcd0cbOV0 (+1)</sub>

#### 15. Treat unanimous first-input skip as a dead social layer, not a valid policy
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

NEGATIVE RESULT: when every alive player votes skip on first input and there are zero ejections (the per-slot vote_players array is all zeros, e.g. 7/8 skipped in episode ep-8550f749), the meeting/voting layer is inert and the entire social-deduction win path is gone. Treat unanimous skip as a signal the policy is hard-coding skip regardless of role/state. The fix is role-aware voting: imposters accuse crew, crew track players seen near kill locations and vote to eject.
  <sub>sources: claude-code:4c0f63b0-f7eb-408e-ac3f-00feb1dcc193, claude-code:8ec27261-9517-4365-944b-2880873bda47</sub>

#### 16. Don't assume cooperation from independently-authored bots; signal-and-follow wins
`crewrift`

Crewrift group meta-strategies (forced-group movement, one-task-at-a-time, button-coordination) require ~8 INDEPENDENTLY authored bots, possibly in different languages by different teams, to converge on the same protocol with no shared channel beyond in-game chat. Do not assume cooperative coordination from independently-authored opponents/allies. A policy that can signal and follow such a meta gains an edge, while one that cannot gets exploited by one that can.
  <sub>sources: personal_labs/crewrift_lab/docs/crewrift-gameplay.md, coworlds/coworld-crewrift/players/notsus/README.md</sub>

#### 17. Persephone chat: routing follows whisper state, is room-local, rate-limited, and scarce
`crewrift`

In Persephone's Escape, chat routing depends on the player's inWhisper STATE, not which UI is open: you can send a global message while NOT in a whisper even without opening the global view, but cannot READ global replies without opening it; in a whisper every packet goes to the whisper with no way to send global. Messages truncate to 58 chars (29/line, 2 lines), rate-limited whisper every 48 ticks (~2s), shout/global every 240 ticks (~10s) -- messages faster than cooldown are silently dropped. Global chat is ROOM-LOCAL: only same-room players see it, with NO real-time cross-room channel; the only cross-room interactions are the pre-game Roster Reveal, the between-round Leader Summit, and physical Hostage Exchange, so never assume you can tell an ally in the other room anything during Playing. Treat the message slot as a scarce priority-ranked resource (at most one message in a short Playing phase, visible to enemies): defer low-value Round-1 intel for higher-priority needs (panic identity reveal, usurp coordination, hostage requests), and never send a message that helps local enemies more than allies. Counterbalance: relay time-sensitive intel (room composition) immediately even over public global chat because timeliness beats secrecy when the enemy cannot easily exploit it; reserve secrecy for protected identities.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/GAME_AP, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DEMETER_STRATEGY.md, players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/agents/</sub>

#### 18. Persephone win needs a mutual exchange; leadership is the decisive defensive lever
`crewrift`

In Persephone (hidden-role social-deduction) victory requires a mutual two-party role exchange BOTH parties offer and accept -- one-way self-reveals and color/team reveals do NOT count, so track the consent-completed set, and if neither key pair completed its exchange, nobody wins regardless of positioning (room co-location is only a TIEBREAKER once both pairs exchange). The agent's first priority is completing its OWN exchange, not positioning. Leadership is the decisive defensive lever in the final round: the leader controls hostage selection and is immune to being hostaged. Leadership can be seized by a majority USURP vote (threshold floor(room_size/2)+1, e.g. 3 in a 5-player room) via the global-chat candidate selector, granting it for the rest of the round; a hostage-exchanged player's votes reset on arrival; a leader cannot be hostaged (must pass/lose leadership to move across rooms); uncommitted hostage slots auto-fill RANDOMLY among eligible non-leaders (proximity has NO effect); there is no 'volunteer' button -- signal via a 'SEND ME' chat to your leader, which only helps with an ALLY leader. A defensive leader must NEVER send away its own exchanged key role, send an enemy out instead, honor 'SEND ME' only from team-verified allies, and treat a key role asking to move AFTER its exchange as suspicious. Prefer objective-less grunts as leader. Eurydice agents coordinate usurps IMPLICITLY (deterministic evaluators converge) rather than via pre-vote whispers that cost 3-5s and may not finish before HostageSelect.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/RULEBOO, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md, agents/eurydice/NYMPH_STRATEGY.md, agents/eurydice/PERSEPHONE_STRATEGY.md (+1)</sub>

#### 19. The Persephone Leader Summit is chat-only; use whispers to burn enemy time
`crewrift` · **negative result**

NEGATIVE RESULT / constraint: the Persephone Leader Summit between rounds is CHAT-ONLY. The whisper action menu and leave-whisper button are both gated off (server gates B-button and Select on !isSummit; the summit whisper starts with empty offer sets), so NO color exchange, role exchange, leadership transfer, early exit, or reactive offer acceptance is possible -- only chat, left/right surface-tab cycling, and up/down scroll work. A summit's entire value is social engineering, reading the other leader's cues, tabbing to read your own room's global chat, and validating on the info screen; do NOT design strategy relying on mechanical exchanges during a summit. Conversely, exploit the time economy: disrupt enemy coordination by entering whispers with enemy players to consume their limited interaction slots and round time (fake alliance, irrelevant questions, stalled negotiation) -- in a ~15s round every second an opponent spends with you is one they are not advancing their win condition.
  <sub>sources: personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md, players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/GAME_AP, players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/agents/, players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/agents/</sub>

#### 20. Budget two-party handshake timeouts and fix give-up rationale even when timing is right
`generic` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

NEGATIVE RESULT: default protocol timeouts tuned for solo behavior are too tight for a cooperative two-party handshake -- a key-exchange protocol timed out at 96 ticks (4s) and the offer-response window at 72 ticks (3s), so the agent issued an offer but exited the whisper before a partner could respond; for two-party completion budget the full round trip (bumped to 288/144 ticks). A terminal give-up condition can be right about WHEN but wrong about WHY: a partner_unreachable/give-up trigger had correct timing but a false stated prerequisite ('no hostage exchange phase remains') -- the real reason is no shared-interaction phase remains after the final exchange, so the partner is unreachable regardless of hostage movement. Fix the rationale even when timing is sound, because maintainers reason from it, and distinguish 'impossible' from 'low-probability': a hard gate that treats a still-possible-but-unlikely outcome as impossible prematurely abandons better moves (seek leadership, volunteer as hostage, lobby the leader), so model it probabilistically with disruption as a SECONDARY fallback.
  <sub>sources: claude-code:aae25940-ade3-41bc-b817-517dc86ccebf, opencode:ses_1fb148d00ffe5ob6k0yKT3aHke</sub>

#### 21. Enumerate the real communication channels before writing any coordination mode
`loop`

Before writing any coordination mode, enumerate the actual communication channels the environment exposes, because a hard constraint may be that agents in different rooms/teams cannot communicate at all. Many tempting modes (coordinate with the other room, signal teammates across rooms) assume cross-room comms the game does not provide; delete or redesign every behavior premised on a channel that is not there. Do not put coordination facts in agent memory unless the agent could have OBSERVED them through the game or an allowed channel -- relying on a team blackboard unavailable in the environment leaks information the agent should not have. For LLM use, make observability explicit in the context (observed teammate claim, trusted same-policy talk, visible gear/cargo, inferred objective, private teammate knowledge, public accusation) to stop the model leaking private info into public actions.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_1fb8906dcffete6Fy63Vc7IEPv, players/player_sdk/docs/metta_cogames_framework/README.md</sub>

#### 22. Detect which Cogs-vs-Clips channel is active; vibes and talk are mutually exclusive
`loop`

In Cogs vs Clips, communication channels are variant-dependent and may be mutually exclusive: 'vibes' is a pure signaling channel with NO gameplay coupling (role identity is set by equipped gear, not by vibe, so do not infer role from a vibe token), while the 'talk' variant disables change_vibe_* and lets agents attach a <=140-char message (50-step cooldown) visible only to agents within the 13x13 window. change_vibe is disabled while talk is active (cogsguard/game/talk.py disables it) -- a strategy proposing simultaneous talk + vibe is wrong against the real game. Detect which channel is active from the mission/manifest config or at runtime (whether PolicyEnvInterface.talk is non-None / whether change_vibe is exposed) rather than assuming both, emit vibes one-shot only when vibe actions are actually exposed (once per role transition), and verify mechanics against COGS_V_CLIPS.md and installed cogsguard source before implementing a strategy doc's claims.
  <sub>sources: archive/cogames_playground/bulbacog/COGS_V_CLIPS.md, archive/cogames_playground/bulbacog/designs/OUTER_LOOP_AND_MODES.md, codex:019e28a2-f81d-79b1-a7f7-5f6583c280f1</sub>

#### 23. Stagger broadcasts: a shared chat channel surfaces only one message per tick
`loop` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

NEGATIVE RESULT: shared-channel perception bandwidth limits broadcast strategies -- when all agents shouted identity within the same few frames, the overworld surfaced only one chat-strip message at a time, so most claims were never perceived. Stagger broadcasts across the round and account for the channel's per-tick display capacity, not just whether you emitted. The fix: switch from talk-on-cooldown to EVENT-based talk after a ~100-tick coordination window, compress the status as short as possible, use a status|message delimiter for urgent events, and fire only when there is something to coordinate (role/resource/target/raid) AND relevant agents are within text-visibility range. In a 2k smoke run this cut total talks dramatically (~134 events: role~46, res~71, tgt~9, raid~2) versus eight agents talking every 50 ticks all game.
  <sub>sources: codex:019e181f-6289-7332-9837-05f0e9cadded, codex:019e194d-3a17-7eb2-9df9-7bae24112862</sub>

#### 24. Diagnose all-zero scores as behavioral collapse; count submittable units, not modes
`loop` · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

In cogs_vs_clips, all-zero scores with high 'Clips held' and ~9960 max_steps_without_motion is a BEHAVIORAL-COLLAPSE signature, not a scoring-file bug: pull replay metadata (aligned-junction hold time) to confirm real collapse, then count 'no path to nearest-adjacent ... reason=equipping miner' warnings (here 10k-20k per episode) to localize the failure to the station/equipping path rather than strategy tuning. Separately, internal behavior 'modes' inside a policy (idle, task_completing, reporting, pretending, hunting, fleeing, alibi_building, meeting) are strategy modules dispatched by a mode registry keyed on role/phase (imposter->hunting, crewmate/ghost->task_completing, voting->meeting), NOT separate submitted policies -- when counting policies, count submittable units, not internal strategy branches.
  <sub>sources: codex:019e28a2-f81d-79b1-a7f7-5f6583c280f1, codex:019e2c82-7519-7f31-9e67-83e99b108bb2</sub>
