Chapters, a boss, and a test harness that was lying

The run had no shape. Every measurement said the same thing: a flat line and then a cliff. Nothing happened for fifteen days, and then the granary fell in a single wave. That is not a difficulty curve, it is a trapdoor.

So waves now come in chapters of ten, and wave ten belongs to the Tax Collector — twice the height of an ordinary collector, slow, heavy, walking straight up the middle lane swinging a money bag. He brings a thinner escort than a normal wave, because a full crowd would only hide him. He is announced a full day in advance, so the last ordinary prep phase of a chapter gets spent preparing for him specifically rather than for more of the same. Wave size is a sawtooth rather than a ramp: it climbs through a chapter, peaks on the boss, and the next chapter opens below that peak and above where the last one started. Beat him and you reclaim land — a fresh grove appears where the Authority used to hold, and the families who lived on it come home as two more villagers, arriving unassigned so the job board is the first place you look.

The job board also finally tells you what a job yields. It used to show headcount and nothing else, which is not a decision — “two woodcutters” means nothing until you can see it is twelve logs a day and the mill wants sixteen. Those numbers are measured rather than calculated, because millers stand idle waiting on logs and everyone takes cover when a wave lands, so any formula would flatter the village.

And then the embarrassing part. The granary had been sitting on exactly 170 of 260 hit points for seventeen consecutive days with a builder assigned and planks in the yard. The repair code was fine. Two things were wrong, and neither was where anyone was looking. Builders were using the same panic radius as every other villager — but the granary is what the collectors are attacking, so a builder with ordinary nerves spends the entire wave yo-yoing between the house and the granary and never once arrives. The repair crew now works under fire and only bolts when someone is actually swinging at them.

The second cause was the test harness itself, which skipped most of the prep phase to keep runs short. Twelve seconds is not enough time to walk to the granary and repair it — and it is not enough time to mill a real day’s planks either. Every economic measurement taken so far was quietly false. The harness now sits through the whole prep phase exactly as a player does, which promptly revealed that with a real economy the game is far too easy: the granary never drops below full, and turrets pile up two a day. That is a much better problem than the one before it, because it is the true one. Running the sim on a fixed timestep got the cost back — a twenty-day run now takes two minutes instead of half an hour.

The hero was also soaking entire waves single-handed. Collectors can now only claim a limited number of slots on him at once; the rest walk past and go for the granary. One farmer should not be able to body-block sixty tax collectors, and it makes co-op read properly — four heroes holding four knots.