Grand Century 1.2.0 — The Instrument

The instruments

Nothing here changes how the game plays. It changes what we can see — the
gates every later change will be measured against.

• Save fingerprint. Saves now record the world they were made against
  (province count, content schema version, and a hash of the seed's ownership
  topology). A save from a different world is refused with a message that says
  so, instead of loading and painting the map with someone else's provinces.
  Saves made before this still load — a missing fingerprint is accepted.
• Content lint + coverage. Every event has a choice, every decision chain
  resolves, and every formable's core states exist — checked automatically, so a
  future map rework cannot silently drop content that points at ids which no
  longer exist. It also counts what each nation has to do, and the answer is
  currently: 2 of 48 nations have a decision of their own, 3 have an event of
  their own, 20 can form something, and 28 have none of the three.
• Multiplayer conformance + bandwidth gates. The multiplayer server runs the
  only world, so any change to the simulation is a change to multiplayer. A test
  now proves the server and single-player produce identical worlds from the same
  seed and inputs, and pins the wire cost so it cannot grow unnoticed.
• Performance budgets, recorded. Snapshot building, the culture ledger, and
  the number of screens that redraw on every tick all have measured numbers now,
  so "we made it faster" becomes a claim with evidence.
• The steerability probe explains itself. When a lever looks like it does
  nothing, the report now says whether players were limited by money or by what
  the market had in stock — which turned "the tax slider is inert" into a
  specific, fixable finding about the economy.

What the new instruments immediately found

The gates earned their keep on their first run. None of these are regressions —
they are things that were always true and that nothing could see:

• Fiscal policy is decorative (#33). Cutting tax moves player pop cash by 2.5
  million and how well fed those pops are by 0.0002. Nobody is short of money —
  pops sit on roughly 833 rounds of everything they need to buy — so taxing them
  cannot reach them, and the treasury has been pinned at its ceiling since year
  three of the century.
• No unification happens (#34). Across a full century on both balance seeds,
  not one of the six formable nations ever forms.
• The great powers never change (#35). After the opening decade the top table
  moves six times in ninety years on one seed and not once on the other.
• Prices sit at roughly twice their base for the whole century (#36), within 4%
  of tripping the inflation gate.