"0.34 parts" read as a fraction of something unnamed. It is a payment,
so it now looks like one: ¤34. The symbol is Unicode's generic currency
sign - it looks like money and is nobody's actual money, which is right
for a place whose banks are somebody else's problem.
The scale moves with it. FUNDS_PER_CONDITION fixes the exchange rate in
one place, so every balance number stays in the unit it is actually
about and how large the currency reads stays a presentational decision.
A supply run pays ¤34, an overhaul runs ¤200 to undo a crash's
permanent cost, and a full rebuild after a bad one is about a dozen
missions.
The debug panel gets ±¤ next to the existing condition levers, so the
workshop and the board can be exercised without first driving eight
missions to afford looking at them.
Save format bumped: quests.parts is now quests.funds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A car could be driven to zero in every subsystem and would keep going
forever at a wheezing thirty km/h. Nothing was at stake, so nothing was
worth protecting, so there was never a reason to take the quiet road.
"Decline, not reset" only reads as a stake if the decline can run out.
When the chassis is gone, so are you: somebody pulls you out, you come
round at the nearest base, the job in hand is written off with the car,
and the ground your work had won is handed back - 25m, through the same
path a finished mission uses, so the war moves for one reason only.
The replacement is a real car, patched to its ceilings so it can be
driven off the forecourt, and every ceiling is 8% down on the one you
wrote off. That is the ratchet applied at the one moment repairs cannot
reach. It stops at a floor: without one, enough deaths issue a car that
is written off the instant you are handed it, and the only way out of
the campaign is wiping it. A miserable car you can still drive is the
interesting version of that ending.
None of it is announced. The front moving against you is something you
find out by driving back out there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
