the client crashed in LogicBattle::resetSimulatedManaTimers again, and
this time it was ours: remove_dead was dropping a king tower once it
fell, while battle.leaders still pointed at it. that function reads both
leaders straight out of the battle and calls a virtual on each without a
null check, so the next state to arrive killed the client.
the client's own rule is one line:
LogicCharacter::shouldDestruct() { if (this[209]) return 0; ... }
isLeader, never destructs. remove_dead now keeps them the same way, and
the harness watches every tick of a full match for a leader that has
gone missing - it caught this one at tick 693.
built a harness first, so the simulation could be run without the client
and the fault seen rather than argued about. it reproduces in twenty
milliseconds what took a battle to observe.
what it showed: a troop on its own walks at the enemy towers and stops
at its range, both sides, correctly. put a lane full of them together
and the ones behind get squeezed backwards past their own towers and
into the edge of the map, where they stand hitting nothing. that is the
y=250 and y=31750 frida read out of the client.
the collision pass was clamped only by the arena, so a troop in a crowd
took a shove every tick with nothing to bound it. it is now limited to
half a step, which is the property that matters: a crowd can slow a
troop but can never carry it backwards faster than it walks.
two smaller ones alongside. bot_play treated every object it owned as a
landmark, so once one of its own troops drifted it played the next card
on top of it and the one after further out again; only buildings count
now. and it deployed exactly on a tower's coordinates, leaving the
collision pass to dig the troop out of a building it was born inside -
it now stands in front. default_target falls back to any enemy when the
buildings on that side are gone.
the harness keeps all of it honest: drop the push bound and a troop is
out of the arena by tick 140.
