# CB-EV-0031 — a seat that does not regulate

CB-WP-0039. Tier M (adds a policy to the panel every future measurement is
reported against; chaos d8 = 2 → no override). **Declaration 11 of chaos
window 3.** Closed 2026-08-08.

> Like [CB-EV-0030](CB-EV-0030-h1-measured.md), **this has not had the
> tier-L adversarial review that pass owes, and none of it may reach
> `ground-game` until that review has run.**

**Delivered:** the `reactive` policy, and the measurement CB-EV-0030 §4
named as the one it had not run.

---

## 1. It changes CB-EV-0030's verdict

CB-EV-0030 concluded H1's DARVO arm rate was still 0. **That was true of
the panel, and the panel was greedy-family throughout.**

`GreedyPolicy` ranks `Action::Ground if gated => 100`: the instant the
stress gate bites it grounds. Stress plateaus at 3, and the arm at 5 is
unreachable **by construction**. So "H1 does nothing" was really "H1 does
nothing *to a seat that already manages its Stress*" — and H1 was written
for the seat that does not.

`reactive` is greedy with **one preference changed**: GROUND demoted below
ATTACK. SHARED GROUND, 200 games per cell, all 200 ran in every cell:

| | | greedy | | | | reactive | | |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| **seats** | won | atk | darvo | peak | won | atk | darvo | peak |
| 2p | 68 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **0** | 1200 | **400** | **5** |
| 3p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **0** | 1800 | **400** | **5** |
| 4p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **0** | 2400 | **400** | **5** |
| 6p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **0** | 3600 | **400** | **5** |

**H1's mechanism works.** Criterion 1 (DARVO arm rate non-trivial) and
criterion 2 (ATTACK selection rises for some subpopulation) are **met** —
for the subpopulation H1 was aimed at. CB-EV-0030 reported both as
failures, and that report was about greedy.

**Criterion 3 still fails, and now worse.** Reactive wins **nothing**, at
any seat count, under H1.

## 2. The baseline finding, which is larger than H1

Look at the baseline half of the same run. Greedy and reactive are
**identical** — 132/165/190/200, zero attacks, zero DARVO, in all four
bands.

**Peak Stress across 3,200 baseline games was 1.** Starting Stress is 2,
so no seat's Stress was ever *set* above 1: it only ever went down.

> **The baseline's entire Stress economy is unreachable under this panel.**
> The gate at 4, the DARVO arm at 5, the Freedom token that buys past the
> gate — none of it can engage, and a policy built to be reckless with
> Stress plays identically to one built to husband it.

That is a deeper account of F17 than F17 has. ATTACK is not merely
unrewarding; **the pressure it is supposed to answer never exists.** H1 is
an attempt to fix exactly this, and it is aimed at the right thing.

## 3. What H1-B actually does, which is not what it was for

`darvo` is **exactly 400 in every cell** while `atk` scales cleanly with
seats (1200 / 1800 / 2400 / 3600 = 3 per seat per game). A constant across
seat counts is an artifact smell, so it was measured rather than reported.

Six-player final Stress, every seed: **`[5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4]`**. Exactly two
seats arm, whatever the table size.

**The self-soothe is doing it.** An attacker at Stress ≥ 4 takes −1 for a
landed Attack, which holds it at 4 — *below the arm* — while its targets
take +1 or +2 and climb to 5. **H1-B suppresses DARVO in the seat that
attacks and concentrates it in the seat attacked.**

The hypothesis wanted ATTACK to be rational at high Stress. It is. The
side effect is that the aggressor is the one seat protected from arming.

**Stated as a limitation, not a finding about H1:** `reactive` picks its
Attack target by first-legal, not by any judgement, so the *concentration*
on two seats is partly an artifact of crude targeting. The direction —
attackers held at 4, targets pushed to 5 — follows from H1-B's arithmetic
and does not depend on the targeting. **The number 2 does.**

## 4. What this does not say

- **`reactive` is not a good player and is not meant to be.** It wins
  nothing under H1 and exactly what greedy wins under baseline. It is an
  instrument for reaching the Stress economy, not a claim about how people
  play.
- **Two policies is still not a panel.** RetrospectiveAnalysis §4.1 asks
  for greedy, random and first-legal at minimum; this pass added a fourth
  axis to two of them, in one mode.
- **SHARED GROUND only.** CB-EV-0030 covered three modes; this covers one.
- **No felt-play**, and this is the kind of claim — about pressure, and
  when a player feels cornered — that a human table answers and 3,200
  simulated games do not.

## 5. Open

- **The baseline's Stress economy being unreachable (§2) deserves its own
  finding**, and is not raised here because it wants the plural panel of
  §4 first. It is the more consequential of the two results in this file.
- **Whether H1-B's suppression is intended** is ground-game's question,
  and it is the sharpest thing this pass can hand them.