ground-game/reports/260807-clay-borg-attack-and-modes.md

id	type	title	domain	repo	status	owner	topic_slug	created	extends
GROUND-RPT-0003	report	clay-borg: GR-E03 and GR-E04 played to the end, and what ATTACK is worth in each	consumer	ground-game	informational	bernd	whynot	2026-08-07	GROUND-WP-0003

GR-E03 and GR-E04 have been played to the end

GROUND-WP-0002 T04 recorded that both scoring modes were implemented and neither had ever been played through. That is now done, and it produced an answer to a second question we raised on 2026-08-06.

Reproduction: clay-borg$ cargo run --release -p games-ground --example attack-value (800 games per mode). Under CB-WP-0029.

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0. Why they were unplayed, which was our fault

cb-play built every game as SHARED GROUND and passed an empty setup patch. The mode was settable in scenario files and not from the driver, so two of your three shipped modes were unreachable from the only way anyone actually plays. Nothing about the modes was wrong; we simply had no way to select them.

Fixed. Reporting it because "we never played them" and "we could not play them" are different statements, and the second is the true one.

1. All three modes work, and they disagree

Same game, same 37 commands, seed 1, four players:

mode	winners
SHARED GROUND (GR-E02)	P1, P2, P3, P4 — mastery 4
COMMON PROBLEM (GR-E03)	P3 — the top personal scorer
BONDED COALITIONS (GR-E04)	P1, P2 — the best Bond network, 4 > 3 > 2

The modes produce three different answers from identical play, which is what they should do.

2. What ATTACK is worth — asked in all three

On 2026-08-06 we raised, from play, "there is no incentive to play attacks as long as I have positive cards." We could not send it then: it had no artifact, and our own bot ranks ATTACK below everything, so its zero attacks measured our heuristic, not your game.

The artifact varies exactly one number — ATTACK's rank in an otherwise identical policy — and asks in every mode. 200 games per cell. "Won" is group success in co-op, and "is seat 0 among the winners" in the other two, since ATTACK is an individual's choice.

mode	never attack	attack when convenient	attack always
SHARED GROUND	132 / 165 / 190 / 200	identical	0 / 0 / 0 / 0
COMMON PROBLEM	59 / 52 / 48 / 44	59 / 52 / 48 / 34	0 / 0 / 0 / 0
BONDED COALITIONS	131 / 134 / 132 / 116	59 / 52 / 48 / 34	0 / 0 / 0 / 0

(2, 3, 4 and 6 seats)

ATTACK earns its place in none of them.

• Co-op: attacking is free — identical win counts — and also pointless. Group success depends on SOLVE alone; ATTACK's effects (Stress, Rivalry, DARVO) feed nothing that decides it.
• Semi-co-op: a modest cost at six seats.
• Coalitions: roughly halves your chance of being among the winners.

3. The coalitions result has a mechanism, and the data confirms it

GR-A07 flips a Bond to a Rivalry on Attack. GR-E04 scores Bond networks. So attacking destroys the thing that scores.

The confirmation was not designed and fell out: the attacking numbers in GR-E04 are identical to GR-E03's — 59 / 52 / 48 / 34 in both. That is exactly what the mechanism predicts. Break every Bond and each seat becomes a coalition of one, so GR-E04 degenerates into GR-E03.

4. The consequence we think is worth your attention

Because nobody who plays well attacks, Stress never rises, and DARVO never arms. In 500 competent games it fired zero times. The full sequence — DENY, ATTACK, REVERSE, the Focus/Blame flip, the Protection interaction — is reachable only by playing badly.

We are not saying this is a defect. DARVO is the pattern the game is about not falling into, and a self-destructive ATTACK may be exactly the design — the mechanic as a cautionary structure rather than a strategy.

The question is narrower than that, and it is yours: is it intended that the namesake mechanic is unreachable in competent play, in all three modes? If yes, nothing here needs changing and we will record it. If no, the lever is that ATTACK has no path to any scoring outcome.

5. Standing offer

We can now run any mode at any seat count over any seed range, and vary a single policy parameter to isolate a mechanic's value. If there is a question of the form "does X ever pay?", it is cheap for us to answer.