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# Crewmate tactics (crewrift) — guide

Reference notes, design rationale, and negative results (23) for crewmate tactics (crewrift). Read when working in this area.

#### 1. machina_1 scoring: connected junction-ticks held, not captures
`crewrift`

In CoGames cogsguard 'machina_1' (Cogs-vs-Clips) the team-shared reward is dense per-tick = (count of connected held junctions - 1) / max_steps, so the binding metric is junction-ticks HELD over time, NOT junctions GAINED. A junction scores only when it carries your team tag AND sits in the connected net:cogs closure rooted at the hub (BFS, max edge distance 25 cells); aligning adds a team+net tag, scrambling removes a net tag and disconnects everything downstream, instantly cutting score. Territory bands map to score (low ~12% held, mid ~34%, high ~46%); a policy can reclaim 103 junctions yet lose because the opponent holds far more junction-ticks (e.g. ~228k vs ~465k), and the ~7-8 point gap to league leaders is an ~8% hold deficit. Optimize RETENTION of connected friendly territory, not capture count or raw resource gain.
  <sub>sources: alpha_cog/AGENTS.md, alpha_cog/docs/README.md, archive/cogames_playground/alpha_cog/docs/cogs-v-clips-rules.md, archive/cogames_playground/bulbacog/COGS_V_CLIPS.md (+2)</sub>

#### 2. machina_1 roles, gear, and economy constants
`crewrift`

Role identity is the gear inventory item held (miner/aligner/scrambler/scout, one at a time from gear stations), NOT the 'vibe' attribute (a 1-of-7 purely-communicative enum with no mechanical effect; overlapping names are coincidence) -- key all role logic on gear. Map is 88x88 (compact 'arena' is 50x50, the fast smoke-test), 8 Cogs, 10,000-step episodes, 4 Clips ships. Cogs deposit four elements (oxygen/carbon/germanium/silicon) into the hub and withdraw hearts; hub starts with 5 hearts and 3*num_agents (=24) of each element, and one new heart costs 7 of EVERY element, so hearts are the scarce bottleneck after the initial 5. Extractors hold 200 and vanish when empty; a non-miner withdraws 1/bump while miner gear withdraws 10/bump and grants +40 cargo (10x extraction). Switching gear clears the slot and charges the team hub per-role element costs (aligner 3carbon/1oxy/1germ/1sil, miner 1/1/3/1, scrambler 1/3/1/1, scout 1/1/1/3).
  <sub>sources: alpha_cog/AGENTS.md, alpha_cog/docs/README.md, archive/cogames_playground/alpha_cog/docs/cogs-v-clips-rules.md, alpha_cog/docs/upstream-issue-report.md (+1)</sub>

#### 3. machina_1 capture/scramble, frontier, and damage/death model
`crewrift`

An aligner (needs aligner gear, consumes 1 heart) captures a junction only if it lacks the actor's team tag AND is within the frontier (within 15 cells of the team's junction network OR within 25 of the hub -- the cap of 25 matches the hub align radius, so a frontier cap below ~15-25 yields zero alignments because nearest neutral junctions sit 15-25 cells out). Aligning an enemy junction ADDS your tags but does not remove theirs (a contested dual junction); a scrambler (scrambler gear, 1 heart, +200 HP) strips the enemy net tag (cascading to its team tag), so a clean reclaim is scramble-then-align as two distinct role steps. Damage is an ambient spatial query (not per-cell): -1 HP/tick within radius 10 of enemy junctions/ships, radius 20 of enemy hubs, plus -1/tick everywhere; friendly territory heals +100 HP and +100 energy per tick (so sub-max HP is a reliable proxy for 'recently in enemy territory'). Friendly territory is NOT permanent terrain -- it is projected only by connected net:cogs junctions, so when Clips cut a junction the territory behind it collapses and aligners standing there suddenly take damage. On HP<=0 the agent does NOT respawn or teleport: it persists at death location and the damage variant clears inventory, destroying all held gear and hearts. Budget HP for the round trip and protect heart/gear carriers from death.
  <sub>sources: archive/cogames_playground/alpha_cog/docs/cogs-v-clips-rules.md, archive/cogames_playground/bulbacog/COGS_V_CLIPS.md, players_checkouts/players/players/cogsguard/role/README.md, players/cogsguard/role/AGENTS.md (+3)</sub>

#### 4. Batch deposits to ~91% of effective cargo, but validate at the 10k horizon
`crewrift` · **negative result**

Mining/deposit throughput is a hard score cap: depositing ~10 cargo per trip (23% of a 44 effective capacity) while leaders carry ~37-40 (84-91%) leaves ~3 points on the table; batching to a per-trip threshold >=40 raised deposits per match ~40% and can multiply throughput. Size the threshold against EFFECTIVE capacity including the miner +40 gear modifier, not base cargo. CRITICAL: this flag is horizon-dependent and flips sign -- a high threshold was inert/negative at 2000 steps (+0.006) but clearly positive at 10000 (+0.775), because frequent small deposits refresh the team-visible hub inventory that deficit-targeting reads, so batching desynchronizes teammates at short horizons. Always confirm batching-style flags at the full 10k competition horizon, never the cheap 2k filter.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_1fb299595ffeQdQJTUCJtJD6Yu</sub>

#### 5. Deficit-targeting tuning loses discriminative power at the 10k horizon
`crewrift` · **negative result**

Deficit-targeted mining's edge narrows over horizon (+0.37 at 2k -> +0.28 at 5k vs substrate) because the saturation-fallback path (spread miners to nearest extractors when hub inventory is high) fires more once the hub matures and is actively useful at 10k -- raising/removing its threshold helped 2k but reversed and regressed at 10k. No per-tick signal can distinguish a persistent map-geometry property (some extractors far from the miner pack) from a transient steady-state pattern, and at 10k every seed develops persistent deficits, so deficit-streak/ratio/temporal-persistence heuristics that discriminate at 2k lose all power at competition horizon. Four such tuning experiments all helped scarce-element seeds but destroyed strong seeds at 10k; accept regression on geometry-disadvantaged seeds as the cost of dominating elsewhere. Also: initial hub stock (5 hearts, 24 of each element) masks economy dynamics for roughly the first 1000 ticks -- deficit-mining and affordability flags show no effect until it is exhausted.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_1fb299595ffeQdQJTUCJtJD6Yu</sub>

#### 6. CvC survivability: danger-cost A* + reactive HP leash, never a predictive target veto
`crewrift` · **negative result**

Make safety a tunable risk-budget, not a hard rule: use survivable = current_hp - round_trip_danger_cost > safety_margin (round_trip_danger_cost = danger_cells_on_A*_path x 2; margin 0 brave, ~80 never enters danger), falling through to the next-best target on failure, kept SEPARATE from scarcity selection. The proven win is a danger-cost A* that DETOURS around enemy cells -- it produced slightly MORE deaths but +27% junctions gained, because death-rate correlates POSITIVELY with score (r=0.86: agents die capturing contested nodes, while low death rate signals a passive low-scoring policy). Build the self-preservation leash into the per-tick decide() (not a slow strategy engine): if HP <= manhattan distance to nearest safe friendly ground + ~20 margin, return home (it stays true thereafter since each step costs 1 HP and closes 1 cell). NEGATIVE results, all reverted: a PREDICTIVE 'reject targets whose A* path might kill me' gate regressed (-0.18 to -1.28) by firing on survivable marginal cases in low-death self-play -- prefer a REACTIVE blacklist that excludes a target only AFTER an agent died pursuing it (zero false-positive cost). A target-layer HP veto duplicating the danger-A* could never fire usefully (-0.644 when re-gated onto neutral cells). And abandoning profitable scoring work to preserve gear/HP almost never pays, since -1 HP/tick lets agents survive typical round trips -- every retreat-threshold experiment regressed.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_1ff2ef8c8ffej7zC4A18jgSDFv, opencode:ses_200badeadffeB2E7J3adm6BmGw, opencode:ses_200c9dd21ffe1aW5O7lRu8HbG6, opencode:ses_1f6f88f62ffe6S4x2gevW9UGvE</sub>

#### 7. Test a correlation against its competing explanation before designing for it
`crewrift` · **negative result**

The hypothesis that aligners waste trips arriving at a heart-empty hub during production droughts was REJECTED: replay showed the heart-to-alignment ratio correlates with DEATH RATE, not heart-supply timing -- high-death matches inflate the ratio because hearts are lost to death-with-hearts while alignment counts stay healthy. The real bottleneck under the bursty economy is aligner survivability, not heart availability. Likewise diagnose an apparent resource 'surplus' as production-driven (genuine over-mining) vs waste-driven (loss from deaths) BEFORE reacting: in low-death self-play there is no real surplus, so reducing producers and adding consumers compounds demand and regresses; a surplus that only appears at tournament death rates is a waste symptom fixable only by reducing waste, not reallocation.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_1fb299595ffeQdQJTUCJtJD6Yu, opencode:ses_1ff2ef8c8ffej7zC4A18jgSDFv</sub>

#### 8. CvC aligners: sweep neutral junctions, then patrol; gate mode-switches narrowly
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Split aligner phases honestly: EXPANSION is the outward per-quadrant sweep capturing junctions (sweep all reachable in-region NEUTRAL junctions first -- a failure mode is fixating on the Clips boundary while leaving neutral junctions behind uncaptured); PATROLLING (frontier_patrolling) is short-range monitoring of the cogs/Clips boundary, repairing broken cogs-chain junctions and avoiding deep pushes. Assign each aligner a fixed quadrant for both phases so coverage stays distributed. Two failure modes need different remedies: early beelining into the small initial enemy territory (unsafe), and completing the capture pass (~32-38 connected junctions) but never transitioning to defense -- an HP leash alone fixes neither. NEGATIVE: over-broad mode-switch triggers are a recurring failure that steals expansion time (the scarce resource) -- 'switch to repair/patrol whenever any local opportunity exists' regressed seed-42 to 6.9802 (below 7.6517 baseline); aggressive frontier-patrol activation also regressed and was reverted. The wins came from better target RANKING (boundary-weighted expansion/repair) and keeping the patrol switch gated on a mature foothold (36 cogs-connected junctions) PLUS known projected boundary contact in the aligner's quadrant; any needed early trigger must be NARROW and multi-guarded (>=1 heart, not in enemy territory, local memory >=10 cogs and >=3 Clips junctions, directional neutral target within ~24-28 steps), which recovered to 7.78-7.85.
  <sub>sources: codex:019e1355-fd7e-77b2-8af2-3f93c0ae623a, codex:019e1357-835f-7442-bd46-7e911617621f, codex:019e147d-3e35-7f00-a855-0d39cb511d70, codex:019e147f-2fcd-7e83-93ab-fab57ce504b4 (+1)</sub>

#### 9. CvC aligner-economy regressions: never force synchronous re-eval or roam zero-heart aligners
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Negative results, all backed out, all collapsing the economy via congestion or correlated choices: (1) 'wake all aligners on every role change' forced synchronous strategy re-eval so all miners picked the same initial resource and the economy collapsed. (2) Letting zero-heart aligners roam immediately congested the compound and crashed seed-42 to 0.9247. (3) Forcing synchronous re-eval on a stalled noop (to unstick agents in EquippingMode emitting noop for hundreds of ticks after already holding gear) again collapsed seed-42 via congestion -- the EquippingMode stall was flagged as a known open issue, not papered over. Validated behavior instead: heart-carrying aligners near a productive hub top off only while the hub can immediately craft another heart, then leave; zero-heart aligners wait for the next craft.
  <sub>sources: codex:019e1355-fd7e-77b2-8af2-3f93c0ae623a</sub>

#### 10. Keep all four aligners: additive extensions beat role-slot substitutions
`crewrift` · **negative result**

In the fixed 8-agent CvC mix (default 4 miners / 4 aligners), role composition is load-bearing and effectively closed without a structural game change: dropping ONE aligner is the dominant cost of any swap, losing ~0.55-0.57 mean at 2k regardless of replacement (3M/3A/scout/scrambler and 4M/3A/scout both ~-0.57; 4M/3A/1S rejected at -0.565; a 3M/3A/2S split went 3W/9L, ~-3 mean, winning only where the baseline catastrophically collapses). The bar for a new role is not 'does it help?' but 'does it help MORE than the scoring role it displaced?' -- a scoring role contributes to the reward integral every tick. So prefer ADDITIVE/opportunistic extensions: letting an aligner opportunistically scramble/attack an enemy junction ONLY when it has no friendly-frontier target shipped +0.41 mean (behavior unchanged on ticks where the primary task exists). Roles in alpha_cog are assigned once at agent creation (_assign_role in policy.py, positional via STARTER_ROLE_CYCLE[agent_id % len], even ids miners / odd aligners), fixed for the episode and gated behind config flags in priority order -- flip the flag to experiment, don't expect mid-episode role changes. Beware inert flags: a dedicated-attacker preload/targeting flag was a byte-identical no-op because the 4M/4A mix instantiates no dedicated attackers; confirm the role exists in the active composition before testing a role-specific flag.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_219f1d27dffeB6anKWkF3ghwm6, archive/cogames_playground/alpha_cog/experiments/notebook/hypotheses/H, archive/cogames_playground/alpha_cog/experiments/notebook/hypotheses/H, archive/cogames_playground/alpha_cog/experiments/notebook/hypotheses/H (+3)</sub>

#### 11. Adapt to the team's actual role mix; self-play cannot validate tournament mechanics
`crewrift`

A robust runtime response to whatever role mix the team ends up with beats statically optimizing your own mix. A rule where each agent observes nearby teammates' gear before equipping and steers the team toward a target mix (4M/4A) was the ONLY ship whose self-play A/B predicted tournament impact: inert in balanced self-play (+0.0) but strongly positive on forced-imbalance tests, shipped for +0.85 mean mixed-team gain -- because self-play against a static built-in enemy CANNOT validate tournament-specific mechanisms, so ship those to the league rather than rejecting on self-play noise. WATCH the race condition: if all agents read each other's gear BEFORE anyone equips, every agent sees 'team has 0 aligners' and a deterministic tie-break (default miner) makes them all pick miner, leaving 0-1 aligners -- invisible in self-play (controlled spawn order), only surfacing in mixed matches with async spawn. Mitigate with a deterministic OPENING assignment from slot id (e.g. highest observed agent id opens as aligner/support, others as miners), then drive later changes from local events; agent_id is only a tiebreaker, never a role authority.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_223934d40ffeDEyNrTrCRbhzkC, opencode:ses_223c540d9ffe8nF6kcU1RXf0wp</sub>

#### 12. Design CvC policies self-sufficient for the league; shared state is local-only
`crewrift`

Two architectural stances: a single multi-agent policy CLASS owning all per-agent sub-policies CAN maintain shared map state (hub/gear/extractor/junction/Clips locations, target claims, timestamped sightings) -- the largest scripted-policy edge available without training, since the starter keeps only per-agent memory. BUT in a Coworld LEAGUE each of the 8 slots runs an independently submitted policy (e.g. beta-cvc, >=2 of 8 teammates are other participants), so there is NO shared state: design every policy self-sufficient and robust to teammates that random-walk, AFK, or act adversarially. Teammate awareness is limited to the 13x13 observation window plus global hub counts; vibes are weak/unreliable evidence; coordination must go through in-game comms, not external memory. The baseline to beat is comms-blind -- neither upstream StarterPolicy nor the repo's scripted_alpha.py emits or reads vibes/comms -- so any working comms coordination is greenfield upside, not a modification of existing behavior. Even when multiple local slots run the identical policy, treat teammates as unknown unless visible state or talk proves otherwise.
  <sub>sources: archive/cogames_playground/alpha_cog/docs/cogs-v-clips-strategy.md, opencode:ses_223c540d9ffe8nF6kcU1RXf0wp, archive/cogames_playground/bulbacog/COGS_V_CLIPS.md, archive/cogames_playground/bulbacog/designs/LOOP.md (+2)</sub>

#### 13. Layer new coordination on existing behavior; claim/follow handoff lost to naive parallel
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

NEGATIVE: a 'scrambler claims a target, nearby aligner follows to capture' reservation/handoff scheme made Bulbacog results WORSE than naive parallel play; before re-attempting it, analyze exactly why it underperformed rather than assuming the idea was sound. A key cause: removing/hiding the old scrambler target reservation while adding the new handoff caused regressions even when no handoff ever fired (seed 7 collapsed with zero support-accepts and zero raid_done) -- changing normal scrambler target semantics made aligners lose useful targets. So layer new coordination ON TOP of existing reservation behavior, not as a silent replacement. Separately, when the economy is severely imbalanced mid-game, miners narrowing to the deficit pool only RECOVERS balance, it does not PREVENT the early-mid dip -- distinguish recovery from prevention.
  <sub>sources: codex:019e19a7-8605-7992-9b28-cb4d2ca9132e, codex:019e194d-3a17-7eb2-9df9-7bae24112862</sub>

#### 14. Resource concentration is load-bearing; check the systemic pipeline before agent-level fixes
`crewrift` · **negative result**

Resource concentration can be load-bearing for a policy's strongest seeds: forcing per-agent diversification across multiple targets regressed because late-game scaling on top seeds depended on concentration -- expect concentration-reducing changes to hurt those seeds and test at the full 10k horizon before shipping. Relatedly, an additive per-agent throughput fix can be INVISIBLE at the episode level if a downstream systemic mechanism absorbs the extra capacity into a bottleneck: rescuing one agent's output had no score effect because a concentration mechanism funneled it all onto one already-overshot resource. When testing an agent-level fix, verify the team's systemic pipeline can actually USE the extra throughput.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_1fb299595ffeQdQJTUCJtJD6Yu, opencode:ses_1ff2ef8c8ffej7zC4A18jgSDFv</sub>

#### 15. Confirm the engine rule (config->simulator) before designing a Crewrift behavior
`crewrift` · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Trace config -> simulator to confirm a game rule BEFORE building behavior around it: a behavior built to repeatedly slam the emergency button was physically impossible because the button has a per-player max-press count (default 1) and no separate cooldown. A constant that looks like an arbitrary tunable may be fixed by a rule -- reducing the aligner frontier cap from 25 gave zero alignments at cap 15 because nearest neutral junctions sit 15-25 cells out and 25 matches the hub align radius; check before sweeping. Measure OPPORTUNITY COST, not just whether a detour 'works': the emergency-button-rush functioned mechanically but stole task tempo, leaving the agent at 6/8 tasks in crewmate losses ending on kill-parity. To root-cause movement/completion/kill-rate bugs, write throwaway instrumentation reading runtime.belief and runtime.action_state after each runtime.step, because standard traces carry mode/intent/reason but NOT self-position, task progress, walkability, or kill-ready state (belief_updated logs only the event type). Note the completion condition: 'done with all tasks' means every index in belief.assigned_task_indices is in belief.completed_task_indices. When reviewing replays, fix the blocking crash first, then mine for behavior bugs in a prioritized P0/P1/P2 table.
  <sub>sources: codex:019e9656-7cfc-7032-ae70-82b6dbc0a053, opencode:ses_201637e3bffeRa6Y0x3DOs8hh1, codex:claude-code:ff9f693c-b88a-419d-be7a-efc46750dc23</sub>

#### 16. A Crewrift reporter must emit only facts recoverable from its artifacts
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

First disambiguate: in the coworld schema 'reporter' is a DIAGNOSTIC role/runnable that consumes a coworld bundle zip and emits a report, NOT the in-game body-report mechanic (tryReport* in sim.nim, defined by the coworld schema in metta's packages/coworld) -- decide which is meant before reading code. The diagnostic reporter must only emit facts recoverable from the artifacts it receives: in Among-Them-style social-deduction games, whether a slot was killed/alive at episode end and meeting/ballot/transcript activity live ONLY in the game's stdout text, not in the binary replay or results JSON. Remove phases that guess 'likely_dead' or estimate meetings; emit only genuine facts present in the results JSON (e.g. vote_players / vote_skip / vote_timeout counts).
  <sub>sources: claude-code:96721109-1130-405a-a411-a3aed2c1a84b, claude-code:3dd8c20f-7122-4a7c-9400-e9b7f6799a28</sub>

#### 17. Crewrift crew: skip votes and finish tasks, because voting is negative-EV
`crewrift`

As Crewrift crew, accuse/bandwagon voting is likely negative EV: ejecting a crewmate approximately gifts imposters a free kill toward parity while un-ejected crew ghosts keep tasking. League evidence across 40 games: crew ejections were 14 in 20 losses vs 4 in 20 wins, imposters ejected only 2x in 40; skip-heavy crew win 39-43% vs player-voting crew 23-28%; the top crew player almost never votes players, finishes 8/8 tasks, and spends its one emergency button every game. Vote only on near-certain reads; otherwise skip -- always-skip is a strong league-validated baseline. Crew play is also the volume lever: ~77% of league seats are crew, so a ~10-13pp crew win-rate gap dominates aggregate performance more than the imposter gap. Before shipping any new voting model, gate it on a net-parity-cost metric (mis-ejection of crew = -1, imposter ejection = +1) and only ship if it beats always-skip.
  <sub>sources: personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/docs/designs/suspicion-le, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/version_log.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/WORKING_CONTEXT.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/lessons_archive/TENTATIVE_LESSONS-20260612-</sub>

#### 18. Screen-reading crewmate loop, post-task vigilance switch, and league meta
`crewrift`

A screen-reading Among-Them crewmate loop: localize the camera, match task-icon templates against the radar overlay, A* path to the chosen task respecting walls and visible imposters, hold the action button until the task completes, and report bodies / vote from accumulated evidence (last-seen positions and witness counts per player). After enough confirmed completed tasks, switch from task-seeking to vigilance: stop wandering task targets, shadow visible crewmates, and press the emergency button only under strong accumulated body/evidence signals -- a guided_bot doing this scored ~76.32 in qualifiers. League meta: Among-Them Daily episodes have exactly num_agents=8 scored slots; when a pool exceeds 8 the commissioner rotates entrants via entries[(job_index + seat) % len(entries)], so an entrant plays ~8/N of episodes and appears 'missing' elsewhere (normal rotation, not a bug). When hunting the most informative crew failure, chase the crew_lost_nearly_won episode (tasks nearly complete but crew still lost) -- it carries the most signal. Map config: images must be 952x534; the map JSON (default map.json, --map:/mapPath) controls the Skeld image, Aseprite layer indices, task stations, vents, the emergency-button rect, the meeting home point, and room names.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/archive/players/among_them/starter/README.md, players/users/james/personal_cogs/among_them/guided_bot/coworld/README, players/users/james/personal_cogs/among_them/guided_bot/coworld/CLI_PA, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/.claude/skills/crewrift-report/SKILL.md (+1)</sub>

#### 19. CoGsGuard structural traps: gear-timing contention and the AOE energy deadlock
`crewrift` · **negative result**

Two CoGsGuard failures are structural, not policy-tuning bugs. (1) Aligners take too long to find their randomly-placed gear stations, so by arrival the cogs commons is already depleted of aligner-gear resources -- a timing/resource-contention bug aggravated because agents don't share discovered locations and must each independently explore hub-perimeter structures, making role-readiness timing variable run to run. (2) Junction alignment has a chicken-and-egg trap: agents need energy to navigate to junctions, aligned junctions are a primary energy source, but junctions start enemy-aligned and the hub AOE that should bootstrap energy is broken -- no policy tuning fixes it until the AOE application bug is resolved.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/players/cogsguard/role/README.md, players_checkouts/players/players/cogsguard/role/aligned_junction_held</sub>

#### 20. Persephone's Escape: the key exchange is the strict win prerequisite
`crewrift`

In Persephone's Escape no team can win unless a specific key pair completes a mutual role exchange inside a whisper (R.OFFER + R.ACCPT): Hades<->Cerberus for Shades, Persephone<->Demeter for Nymphs. If neither key pair exchanges, nobody wins, so a key role must treat its own exchange as a strict prerequisite prioritized above ALL positioning and intelligence work. Room co-location is only a tiebreaker, checked only when BOTH teams have exchanged (Shades checked first); if only Nymphs exchanged, Nymphs win regardless of room. The exchange is definitively unreachable once the partner is confirmed in the OTHER room at the START of the final round, because the remaining phase sequence (Playing -> HostageSelect -> LeaderSummit -> HostageExchange -> Reveal) leaves no Playing time after a possible hostage arrival for R.OFFER/R.ACCPT; do NOT mark it unreachable merely because the partner is unfound after one or two rounds or is across rooms in an earlier round, since hostage exchange can still relocate them before the next Playing phase.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_1fbfc5c8fffesCp5Ilc2Hs3Q6X, players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/README., players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/agents/, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md (+2)</sub>

#### 21. Persephone defense: protect identity, hold position, win the info war by not playing it
`crewrift`

In Persephone's Escape defense scales better than offense: the defending team (Nymphs) only needs to keep their key role (Persephone) in a different room from the enemy key role (Hades), a status quo already ~50% favorable by random assignment, while the attacker must take affirmative action to co-locate -- so one well-placed defensive leader can negate the entire opposing positional strategy. The defending key role should only flee a room shared with Hades when there is evidence the Shades also exchanged; absent that, holding position and seeking leadership for hostage immunity is safer. Win by NOT revealing: never do a mutual role exchange or one-way reveal with a confirmed enemy and never say 'I am [key role]' in mixed company (color exchange only narrows you to the team, not the role). Use behavioral camouflage -- act like a grunt, show team color freely -- and if you suspect you've been identified, feed false room info or claim to be a grunt or the less-valuable partner, because being identified lets enemies engineer co-location via hostage exchange.
  <sub>sources: agents/eurydice/NYMPH_STRATEGY.md, agents/eurydice/PERSEPHONE_STRATEGY.md, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md</sub>

#### 22. CvC junction-capture TIMING dominates raw count; the gap to leaders is mining/scramblers/coordination
`crewrift` · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Junction-capture TIMING dominates raw count in the score integral: a match with ~93 junctions scored ~35.8 while leaders with similar counts scored 41+ because they captured EARLIER -- roughly 8 junctions captured ~2000 ticks sooner is worth ~+4-5 points, so prioritize faster early-game gearing/navigation, not just total captures. Top policies hit 50% territory by tick 600-700 vs alpha-cog's tick 2000 and ran far higher per-trip mining cargo (~37-40 vs ~10) -- concrete targets a stronger player must close. Replay analysis decomposed the ~8-point gap to league leaders into ~3 points mining efficiency, ~3 points dedicated scrambler agents (never implemented), and ~2 points coordinated multi-agent strategies (staggered hub visits). Diagnostic for WHEN score diverges: an early divergence (by tick ~100) points to gear acquisition and early miner deaths, not late-game Clips pressure -- a deficit-mining + dynamic-K combination can route a miner to a distant extractor early where it dies before completing a cargo cycle, and a lost miner costs gear + cargo + a replacement, cascading into fewer hearts and alignments. A seed-1024 regression localized to 2 of 4 miners never acquiring miner gear (one missing from the gear-holding map, one dying early), producing -7 junction aligns and -600 carbon mined vs substrate.
  <sub>sources: claude-code:425dc11e-1c8d-4d12-bf44-adf01b6fa796, opencode:ses_1fa6f7b71ffeMqiFWPAD235jUs, opencode:ses_2042c1ff1ffefETImBU5n4D43k</sub>

#### 23. Don't let a severity gate starve the mechanism it feeds
`loop` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Tighter severity gates can break the mechanism they feed: for a vibe-driven role-rebalancing decision a flat severity_threshold=2 or a unanimity guard suppressed too many fire events and killed the benefit; the working config was min_observations=2, severity_threshold=1, decision_tick=60, deficit imbalance >1. When a gate suppresses the events a mechanism depends on, the mechanism dies silently -- tune gates against downstream event volume, not in isolation.
  <sub>sources: opencode:ses_2042c1ff1ffefETImBU5n4D43k</sub>
