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# Crewmate tactics — guide (crewrift tier)

Reference notes, design rationale, and negative results (11).

#### 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. 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>

#### 7. 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>

#### 8. 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>

#### 9. 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>

#### 10. 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>

#### 11. 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>
