R-258 put a tactic in the bestiary on the strength of a table-side harness — cheapest
weapon first, best weapon last, 10.7 points of win rate across 24 orderings. Measured in
simulate.mjs, the pipeline every published number comes from, it is worth +0.27 points,
with per-seed differences of -1.5 to +1.8 against 2.6 points of noise on a single arm.
Zero.
The toy lied for two reasons, both mine. Its party had one uniquely valuable weapon (an
anti-materiel rifle the borough does not own, so unhalved, worth double anything else) so
there was something to sequence around; the frozen party is 4.09, 3.98, 1.43, 1.43 —
two near-identical pairs. And the toy fixed the order every round, while the game
re-rolls Reaction every round and has no rule for holding an action, which I checked
before measuring. The order is not a decision the rules offer, and I had written table
advice for it.
The page is corrected: the ladder stays, because it is derived and true, and it now says
you cannot choose who goes first.
What is worth doing, measured the same way: committing a round's attacks to one target,
in fights that can actually move (a fight at 0.2% or 100% cannot show an effect and three
of my first four samples were pinned there). Against dodge <= 30% focus fire gains 7.6
points, which is just killing attackers sooner; against dodge >= 55% it gains 12.2, so
about 4-5 points is the defence ladder and the rest is arithmetic unrelated to dodging.
Separating them needed contested fights at both ends of the dodge range — without that
control I would have credited all 13.8 points against three redcaps to the ladder, which
is R-255's mistake again.
runFight gained two hooks, off by default and unused by the baseline: partySequence
rearranges the party within the slots initiative already gave them, leaving enemies where
they fell so the experiment isolates agent order from who acts before the creature; and
partyTargets "focus" concentrates fire. Both roll the same dice, and check-lethality
confirms all 47 creatures still fight exactly as recorded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
