Design questions
These are the things about p(Doom)1 that are not settled. Not a roadmap and not a promise — a list of questions the game is genuinely holding open, with where each currently stands.
Each line below is a one-sentence summary derived from the design
backlog. The full text of each is being prepared. Nothing here is a
commitment that a question will be answered a particular way, or at all — an open
question is exactly that.
| Ref | Question | Status |
|---|---|---|
| DQ-1 | Victory condition removal the doom≤0 victory branch is removed. | RESOLVED |
| DQ-2 | Baseline yardstick is the no-action baseline still the right reference under turns-survived scoring? | open |
| DQ-3 | Cross-version leaderboard UX (seed, game_version) boards show as separate seed (version) entries. | open |
| DQ-4 | Character-creation re-roll within a seed ruling applied: same seed → same starting staff. | open |
| DQ-5 | Empty-seed determinism contract only explicitly-seeded games are deterministic (empty falls back to Time). | open |
| DQ-6 | Schedule provenance in the replay artifact replay accepts a schedule, but the exported artifact doesn't yet carry it. | open |
| DQ-7 | Governance player-facing design governance added as an engine float (a ledger currency per ADR-0003), but its scale, starting value, how the player raises/spends it, and its UI are undesigned. | open |
| DQ-8 | Balance constants ledger escalation rates (DOOM_PER_UNPAID_1000, interest, loan multiple) and rival doom pressure are placeholders. | open |
| DQ-9 | Receivables / counterparty content the Entry model supports the receivable (favor/pledge) side, but content is unbuilt and overlaps ADR-0007 alliances (WS-3). | open |
| DQ-10 | Inward-SA / ledger visibility how much of the player's own ledger is visible is undecided; overlaps WS-2 SA and the inward-SA deferral (ADR-0008). | open |
| DQ-11 | Save/fork/divergence mechanics Pip open to them; legal under ADR-0006's verification law. | open |
| DQ-12 | Rival narrative presence playtest note: rival still "narratively invisible" despite mechanical doom pressure. | open |
| DQ-13 | Doom nudge strength playtest note: "doom nudges overall probably a little strong." Folds into the DQ-8 balance pass, re-denominated at month grain. | open |
| DQ-14 | World-state progression display playtest note: "sense of progression over time doesn't feel very strong." Candidate home: month review screen (ADR-0009 consequence) + era-keyed visual/UI shifts. | open |
| DQ-15 | Researcher archetype roster Pip authored three (people-pleaser interp, authoritarian governance pessimist, moral-crusader agent foundations), Fable drafted two for veto (capabilities-curious optimist, burned-out ex-frontier senior). | SEEDED |
| DQ-15 ext | Portrait variant pools + seeded assignment each archetype carries a POOL of appearance variants (gender, ethnicity -- the representation rule made mechanical) with per-run random assignment and hot-swap capability; Pip kept both style-pole bests deliberately as pool stock (the CRT-dossier v2 set promoted as the current consistent face of the roster). | open |
| DQ-16 | Conference-attendance subgame Pip's flagged ambition ("that's how critical I think these are"). | open |
| DQ-17 | Achievement candidates register observer-only, never writes back to sim/score. | open |
| DQ-17 ext | Achievements in-run visibility Pip wants them referenceable during a run, near a "character sheet" UI surface that doesn't exist yet (himself unsure); also "felt a little generic" → content pass owed. | open |
| DQ-18 | Early game = scouting / the populating board DQ-18 — EXECUTED — the scouting beat ran as workshop #3's lead. | EXECUTED |
| DQ-19 | Character creation surface attached question (Pip: "the right question"): does founder background type the starting channels/connections — ex-academic → research-sight affinity, ex-finance → doors/VC access, ex-journalist → media-sight? | PRIORITISED |
| DQ-20 | Risk pools Pip's gloss, logged not designed: "insurance/mutualisation - industry actors pooling exposure to AI incidents, and the pool itself becoming an actor with opinions about safety standards. | open |
| DQ-21 | Intermediary vocabulary v1 Nine streams: general_capability (chronic floor), frontier_capability (per-actor map; player slice separately named for DQ-22 aggro), overhang (frontier − safety_absorption), global_compute (uncontrollable ocean, no direct doom term), dedicated_ai_compute (governable fleet), ambient_risk, global_panic (additive), global_alarm (small stream AND damper-gate), plus scheduled pulses (ramp/spike/tail envelope on ADR-0005 entries); political_pressure gates dampers, owns no stream. | RESOLVED |
| DQ-22 | Aggro-threshold midgame rivals develop their own positions until the player's visible impact threatens their interests, then active attacks begin (litigation, funding cuts, rep attacks, scathing reviews, psyops, aggressive hiring, leak seeking) — "the sign we're entering the midgame." XCOM:EU anti-grind / Factorio pollution-biters pattern. | open |
| DQ-23 | Damper economy minting systems, durations, stacking rules, per-stream caps. | open |
| DQ-24 | Attention-demand taxonomy + typed delegation enumerate the ~4–6 demand skill-categories (candidates: ops/bookkeeping, people/HR, technical-infra/security, research direction, external/comms) and the hire-archetype matching ("can't delegate bookkeeping to a security engineer"); enumerate the process-step demand list (hiring pipeline steps, onboarding, research-strategy setting, progress check-ins); define aggregation rule (typed micro-demands roll up into manager-absorbed classes at scale — same object as the Celine's-law report). | open |
| DQ-25 | Desperation-lever revisit Pip wants the mechanic + flavor re-understood (ADR-0003's catch-up machinery); solver-bot data now in (EE-9, PR #642, docs/balance/DESPERATION_SOLVER.md, calibrated pre-stream-migration constants). Numbers to be re-confirmed against the current model. | open |
| DQ-26 | VC/equity depth revisit the L5 instruments ship with equity dilution + board seats as inert standing terms (DQ-7 stubs). | open |
| DQ-27 | Mortality guarantee -- where is it ratified? the guarantee (no immortal runs, ADR-0002) is currently emergent from ledger compounding interest, asserted across ADR-0002/0003/0013, pinned in no single ADR. | open |
| DQ-28 | Game "phases" as vocabulary + scenario-jump testing DQ-28 RESOLVED — the 5-phase spine (Startup → Incubator → Entity → Institution → Titan) is now in WORLD_AND_LORE ("The five phases of a run"); felt-not-announced (Factorio, not AoE). | RESOLVED |
| DQ-29 | Cover-up debt a failure-response trichotomy: Transparency / Investigate / Cover-up, where covering up a technical failure mints a delayed-exposure hidden liability — a secret ledger entry that bites later via an exposure event. | open |
| DQ-30 | Economic cycles typed funding-source cycle-sensitivity (government counter-cyclical, seed/VC most cyclical) + named macro phases (bull/bear/winter). | open |
| DQ-31 | Org/actor taxonomy -- tags, not enums the sim currently knows exactly two actor kinds: "the player" and RivalLab. | open |
| DQ-32 | News feedline + SA-priced information flow rival/world information should arrive on a News feedline: v0 is just a distinct colour on the Events tab (the #726 rivals channel, made filter-outable, is the seed), later possibly its own submenu on the action feed that lights up with unread items. | open |
| DQ-33 | Content-pool ladder (artefact promotion/relegation) as pdoom-data's artefact pools grow ("10,000 papers, 5,000 events"), move to a fixed-size active pool with ranked entry: artefacts rated on impact measures, top N% make the game's event pool; each month reports new entrants, rankings, pool shifts, and the new cut. | open |
| DQ-34 | Leaderboard disclosure tiers: score vs reconstructable play submitting a score must not automatically make a player's ACTIONS reconstructable by others. | open |
| DQ-35 | Cosmetic progression + community insignia background theory of rewarding progress: one of the few things Pip likes in CoD is its appeasement of hardcore grinders via lots of little cosmetic tags and banners with distinct subthemes — pure cosmetics, no power. | open |
| DQ-35 ext | Scene/art unlocks + conditional event art concrete mechanisms for DQ-35: (a) event hero-art VARIANTS as unlockables (crisis V3 as achievement unlock; records_vault as unlocked leaderboard ground; records_trophy_terminal as a post-game achievements surface); (b) CONDITIONAL art selection -- e.g. | open |