# Balancing Targets (base numbers) The root numbers of the balancing. Everything in `derived.md` is tuned to hit these; when rebalancing, **change these first and re-derive — never patch derived values directly**. The rules these numbers follow live in `rules.md`. All time targets are in **game time**. The player can pause and accelerate, so real session length differs; playtests measure both. The time unit is the boss cycle (`world.toml boss_countdown_seconds`, 300 s). Destroying a station set advances the boss countdown by `boss_advance_seconds` (60 s), so cycles run shorter than nominal when pushing actively — targets deliberately ignore that. ## Run shape 1. **Run length** — a winning run takes up to 2 hours of game time: win around boss cycle 20–24. Losing runs end earlier. 2. **Phase boundaries** — early = cycles 1–5 (iron/copper, small hulls), mid = cycles 6–14 (quartz, medium hulls), late = cycles 15+ (voidsteel, capitals). Push cadence: first station set around cycle 2–3, roughly one per cycle from mid onward — so the destroyed set's level ℓ is reached around cycle ℓ+2. 3. **Factory size curve** — producing buildings over time; when saturated, output threat/s equals this count, so this curve IS the player power curve: ~25 when the starting asteroid is full (end of cycle 2), ~60 at the start of mid (cycle 6), ~120 at the start of late (cycle 15), ~150 near the win. `threat_rate_formula` must remain a fraction of this curve; buildings plus belts must physically fit the asteroid plus affordable expansions. 4. **Threat-cost ladder** — total production-seconds per *fitted* hull (including the typical/default module loadout): drone 10.5, frigate 47, destroyer 99, cruiser 233.5, battlecruiser 354.5, battleship 722.5, dreadnought 1491.5, carrier 1436.5. Every production chain must sum to its ladder value. (The original strawman was 10/40/80/200/350/700/1500; the small end runs ~10–20% hot because fixed chain overhead dominates small hulls — accepted, and the achieved values adopted as the ladder. The ~×2-per-class curve shape is the invariant.) 5. **Fleet size** — swarm-leaning: ~25 player combat ships as the standing mid-game fleet. Standing fleet = build cadence (4) × average ship lifetime, so this target drives time-to-kill and therefore all combat stat magnitudes. 6. **Block economy roots** — bootstrap complete (starting asteroid full) by the end of cycle 2; a factory spending ~30% of its capacity on blocks doubles in ~4 minutes early game; one expansion affordable per cycle at ~1/3 of block income mid-game, decelerating to one per 2–3 cycles late as escalating costs outrun income. ## Combat anchors All combat stats derive from these; per-hull HP additionally carries empirical trims from arena rounds (values in `derived.md`). - **Weapon DPS per threat pays a concentration tax that grows with gun size**: small ≈ 0.62, medium ≈ 0.48, large ≈ 0.41 DPS per threat of weapon contribution, compensated by the range ladder 50/70/100 m. Rationale: concentration itself (focus fire, no DPS loss to attrition, range) is worth paying for — with a flat curve, concentrated fleets win equal-threat fights outright (arena round 1). - **Hull HP = 15 per threat of hull contribution** as the prior; per-hull HP is the empirical trim knob (guns are shared across hulls, hull HP moves exactly one matchup). The arena consistently prices capitals as *tanks with taxed guns* — capital hulls sit well above the prior. - **Armor HP ≈ 37 per threat** — a strong premium over hull HP because armor is pure HP with no capability, and fights snowball: killing removes enemy DPS, surviving merely delays — HP must be cheaper than DPS. - **Repair ≈ 0.7 HP/s per threat** — in-combat sustain effectively removes enemy DPS and must be priced like DPS, not like HP. - **TTK / fight duration**: parity fights in the 30–60 s band at mid-game scale; capital mirrors ~90 s deliberately; the extreme tank-vs-chip-damage matchup (dreadnought vs destroyer swarm, ~3.5 min) is an accepted outlier. - **Mobility is monotone in size** — the smallest hulls are the fastest and nimblest. Sensor ranges (150→350 m) always exceed weapon ranges. - **Weapon modifiers are capital economy**: a ×1.2 damage modifier at ~22.5 threat beats adding a gun once a ship carries more than ~68 threat of weapons — modifiers pay off on gun-heavy big hulls, waste on small ones. Range modifiers are the strongest and are priced/kept small (×1.3): range is the dominant stat under the orbit AI (free approach fire). - **Stations**: a fresh player station holds one early parity wave unaided; the enemy station at level 0 matches the player station exactly and scales per push level. Station range is the dominance lever, not HP (at 4× a small gun's range, two stations annihilated a 3× threat swarm through approach fire alone). - **Accepted imbalances**: the carrier loses its equal-threat fights until the drone-launching capability exists (the hangar is dead threat) — fix by implementing drones, not stats. A pure smallest-ship fleet modestly loses (~15–25%) to a range-fitted capital — desirable doctrine texture; the fair anti-capital answer is the mixed fleet. ## Pacing anchors - **Starting set** is the rule-minimum: drone, frigate, small gun, salvager (plus the explicitly unlocked building-block recipe). - **Threat rate shape**: below the player's achievable military output (≈ half the factory curve) early, crossing at the late boundary (~cycle 15), overwhelming by ~cycle 24. - **Winning = five real decisions**: `artifact_win_count` is set so that across a winning run's ~15–18 pushes (~7 cumulative artifact offers at the current chance formula), the player must choose the artifact over a schematic about five times.