diff --git a/plan/daily-challenge.md b/plan/daily-challenge.md index d411f23..8697ccf 100644 --- a/plan/daily-challenge.md +++ b/plan/daily-challenge.md @@ -145,6 +145,52 @@ played by a person before they shipped. A hundred generated ones will not be. being few and fixed. The consuming half belongs with [scenarios](scenarios.md). +## Fights worth building + +Two specific challenges, written down because each one needs something the ten +shipped fights did not. Neither is a scenario file yet, and both should wait +for [scenarios](scenarios.md)' generator rather than be hand-authored into the +catalog it is replacing. + +- [ ] **The Black Marauder, for one day in October.** A MAD-3R in flat black + with no markings, fought at night. The lore is a BattleCorps ghost story + by Lance Scarinci — an ordinary 3R that turns up where it should not, + deadliest in the dark — which is why the fight is cheap to build: the + design is stock, and everything that makes it that machine is presentation + and conditions rather than a unit file of ours. +- [ ] **Decide what makes it feel wrong rather than just hard.** Pitch black is + a planetary condition and a black paint job is a `camo_` key the + scenario format already takes. One Marauder against a company that cannot + see it is a real fight; the same Marauder with inflated skills is a + difficulty setting. The first is worth building and the second is not. +- [ ] **Decide whether a dated challenge is a thing at all.** Every challenge + carries the UTC day it runs on, so pinning one to 31 October needs no + mechanism — but a fight that is only interesting on one day of the year + is the first challenge that cannot be replayed on its own terms, and it + is the argument for [seasons](seasons.md) rather than against it. + +- [ ] **A daily that actually fields drones.** MegaMek implements the control + systems — SRCS, the shielded aerospace variants, the SDS Caspar systems, + and a drone control console that must sit in the head — so a drone fight + is a question of what may be fielded rather than of what the engine can + do. +- [ ] **Find out what a drone force can even be.** The pinned release has + twenty-one units with drone in the name and none of them is a + BattleMech: eleven vehicles, a conventional fighter, three aerospace + fighters, four DropShips and the two Caspar WarShips. The nearest thing + to a drone Mek is the Shugosha, an industrial Q-Mech. So this challenge + is either a combined-arms fight or it is not a drone fight, and that is + the thing to establish before anything else here. +- [ ] **Check the rules level against the house rules.** The Zephyr OmniDrones + are Level 3, the Shugosha is rules level 4, and what lance.blue plays + under is [house-rules](house-rules.md)' single answer rather than a + per-scenario opinion. A daily that quietly switches experimental rules on + makes two days' scores incomparable and says nothing about it. +- [ ] **Decide what a player does with them.** Drones are interesting because + they behave differently from a pilot, and a daily where the drones are + all on the other side is a daily about fighting them. Both are worth + building; they are not the same fight and should not be the same day. + ## Deliberately not here **No lexicon, yet.** A daily result is a match record plus our own read model, @@ -156,7 +202,8 @@ candidate, and it would make the pick checkable by somebody who is not us. **Not seasons.** Grouping days into seasons with a standing that resets overlaps `leaderboard` heavily and should be built on it rather than beside it. -If it happens it is its own epic. +It is its own epic: [seasons](seasons.md), which also holds replaying a day +after its season has closed. ## Related