game.sim.tuning

Every number the Kessrel Line battle is balanced on, in one table.

game.shared holds the contract — the index ranges, the ten regiments, the seven waves, the capacities, the world frame. This holds the tuning that decides how the fight actually goes, and nothing outside /zero/source/game/sim/ reads it.

local T = require("game.sim.tuning")

The dials that change the feel most

• WEAPON[kind] — range, arc, dps, and a close/closeAt band. arc is how far across the canyon a regiment will traverse, so where it stands decides what it can answer; close is defensive fire at the barricade, which is what makes holding a line worth more than spreading thin. FIRE_SHARE concentrates a regiment on its three nearest packs instead of spreading its volume over everything in range.
• ALIEN_HP / ALIEN_SPEED / ALIEN_MELEE / ALIEN_VS_GATE — the exchange rate. ALIEN_MELEE against the close-band fire is what sets how many troopers a wave costs.
• RELEASE_FRACTION — a wave's whole count leaves the Maw over this fraction of its span. It is the single number that decides how dense the tide looks: at 1.0 a few hundred are ever on the field at once and the canyon reads as a scatter; at 0.32 the wave is a carpet.
• FUNNEL_NEAR / FUNNEL_FAR / FUNNEL_MAX — how far out a pack ignores its target and simply pours down the canyon. A pack that homes on its regiment from four hundred metres draws lanes of empty ground between the columns.
• PACK[kind] — the block size one pack owns, its footprint and how many scatter variants the caste has. With PACK_SEPARATION at or under the footprint, packs merge into one mass instead of reading as dots.
• MORALE — lossWeight against engagedDrain sets how fast a regiment under pressure breaks; brokenRecover against rallyAt sets whether Rally matters. Raise brokenRecover much above 0.05 and a broken regiment rallies itself before the player can spend the ability on it.
• TICK / KINEMATIC_SHARDS — the rules run at 15 Hz; the per-unit position pass is spread over three frames. Both trade cost against how steppy the crowd looks before the renderer interpolates it.

The frame the numbers live in

Distances are metres in the world frame game.shared fixes (+Z north, up the canyon, up the screen). Damage is hit points, and one skitter is one hit point, so a dps of 0.011 means a rifleman kills a skitter every ninety seconds and a three-hundred-strong regiment kills three a second — twice that at the barricade.