The Neural Mesh

How the Mesh is Built

The map is a graph of 166 nodes arranged as concentric rings around a single core node, with links only between neighbouring rings and along the same ring. Players never see the raw ring numbers — each node is named by its node level:

Slots on each ring are numbered, so a node is addressed like "node level 1, slot 108".

Reading the Map

Every node is a disc; its colour tells you who holds it, its ring tells you what leadership ordered:

• Cyan (solid) — ground your subnet holds.
• Orange / pink / red / violet (solid) — held by a rival alliance; each rival keeps a consistent colour and is named on the node's sheet.
• Light green (hollow) — free ground your alliance could take right now.
• White (hollow) — free ground, still nobody's, and not currently within your reach.
• Blue ring — leadership raised a defend order: "garrison here".
• Red, breathing ring — an attack window is open on that node right now.

The number drawn under each node is its node level; garrison counts appear when you zoom in. The screen refreshes itself every 15 seconds. Tapping a node opens its sheet: who holds it, what its ring pays, and every agent standing there — owner, minion count, and that agent's intelligence.

Who Can Take Ground

You need a subnet. Solo players cannot capture anything — every node is owned by an alliance or held by the system ("the void"). With a subnet, a node is targetable when:

• It is not already yours, and
• It is not protected against you (see the clocks below), and
• It is an edge node (on the rim, level 1), or directly linked to a node your subnet owns.

Reach is one hop — owning a long chain does not let you jump the map. You take ground node by node. The core is not exempt either: its only neighbours are the three level-5 nodes, so whoever holds any of them can declare war on the core itself.

If a node cannot be targeted, the game tells you exactly why — "Not on your border. Take a rim node, or one next to ground you hold", "leadership has not declared war on this node", and so on, with the remaining countdown when a clock is the reason.

The Void Garrison

Free nodes are not empty. The void defends them with system minions — thicker the closer the node is to the core:

• System minions fight like those of a tier-1 player agent — the void defends a node the way a player with one cheap agent would.
• When a free node survives a repelled attack, its garrison regrows to full over 6 hours.
• Once an alliance owns a node, the system garrison is gone for good — owned nodes never regrow. Only what your members station there defends it.

Declaring War

Nobody attacks on a whim. Only subnet leadership — the leader, a VP or a strategist — can raise an attack mark on a targetable node. Everyone else sees the mark and acts on it.

• Budget: a subnet may declare 3 attacks per day (resets at UTC midnight). For every 2 nodes it loses in the last rolling 24 hours, it earns 1 extra declaration — but only attacks that actually take a node held by another alliance fund those extra strikes.
• The slot is spent at the click. Declaring war is the attempt — even if nobody ever attacks.
• Ramp-up: the node becomes attackable only 5 minutes after the declaration. Both alliances are pushed at that moment: attackers are called to the assault, defenders are told what's coming.
• Window: once open, the node has a 2-hour capture window. A second push goes out when the window opens.
• Fail: if the window closes without a capture, the node rests for 8 hours — nobody may try it again (not even the same alliance) until the rest runs out.
• Capture: whoever takes it gets 30 minutes of protection — nobody may attack the fresh prize.
• Withdraw: leadership can pull a war order back before its window runs out, wiping all the clocks as if it never happened. After the window has run, the 8-hour rest stays.

A node can only have one alliance's war at a time: while one alliance holds the claim, everyone else is refused ("Another alliance is fighting for this node").

Defend marks are free — no daily slot, no window. They are purely a priority flag: leadership's way of saying "put your minions here". A defend mark gives no combat bonus, and it can only go on ground your subnet actually holds.

Deploying Agents

You don't send individual minions — you send an agent from your trained AI models, and it brings everything it can spare. In the node's sheet, Deploy lists your finished agents with their pool size and intelligence, one button each.

• One agent = one mixed send. The order never names a minion type or a count: the agent sends one stack of every minion type it has, split proportionally from its pool.
• Deploy puts the agent on a node your subnet already owns, where it joins the defence. You can only defend ground you hold.
• One of your agents per node. To put a different agent on that node, bring the current one home first. (Attacks are exempt — an assault force has no claim on the node yet.)
• Per-agent deployment cap is max_subagent_deploy — set by your AI Inference software level (from 500 up to 2000). It is one purse spent globally: what's already deployed anywhere on the map counts against it, not just this node.
• Storage: every minion occupies 10 MB of your drive — the same pool your agent training is capped by. That's the outer bound of how many minions one agent can ever field.
• The agent must be fully trained and have minions in its pool — an empty pool has nothing to send.

Attacking & Combat

Attack on the node sheet sends an agent at ground you don't hold. There is no marching time and no half-way recall: the battle is fought the moment the send arrives, and nothing is ever in flight. Attacks are only possible while an attack window is open on the node (war declared by your leadership, 5-minute ramp elapsed).

Combat is deterministic — no dice, no luck. A stack is worth count × the agent's matching sub-stat, and the fight runs in two rounds:

1. Same types meet first. Each attacking stack faces a defending stack of the same minion type. Defenders are worth 10% more for standing on ground their owner chose. The weaker side is wiped to the last minion; the winner keeps exactly what the margin buys, rounded down.
2. Survivors walk the field. Each surviving stack keeps hitting the next defender of a different type. Attacker stacks hit at half worth now; defenders keep their 10% bonus. A stack keeps going until it dies or the field is empty.

50 offensive at stat 10 = 500  vs  40 offensive at stat 10 defending (×1.1) = 440 → margin 60 ÷ 10 = 6 attackers survive, defenders gone.

• A failed attack is spent entirely. Repelled sends have nothing left to bring home — every minion dies on the field.
• Capture: when the last defender falls, the attackers' survivors become the node's first garrison, the node flips to your alliance, and the 30-minute protection starts. Declared wars on that node are closed as done.
• Late sends land friendly: if two agents attack one node and the first takes it, the second stops being an attack and simply garrisons there.
• Bounced sends come back whole: a send that arrives while the node is protected against you returns to your pool untouched — nothing fought, nothing lost.
• If attacker and defender annihilate each other exactly, nobody takes the node — the current owner keeps it.

Everything a fight multiplies by is the agent's own sub-stat, fixed at deploy time. The UI deliberately never shows raw sub-stats — you spend agents, not minion kinds.

Bringing Agents Home

Since attacks resolve instantly, there are no troops "in transit" to call back. What sits on a node can always be pulled:

• Undeploy on a node your subnet holds brings your standing agent's minions back to the pool (whole stacks, one type, or a count).
• Leave or get kicked from a subnet? Your minions come home automatically; stacks left on nodes your old alliance no longer owns are handed to the node's current owner rather than stranded.
• An agent with minions still on the map cannot be deleted — bring them home first.
• Minions that died in a fight are never "returned" — they're gone, and written off the agent.

What Holding Ground Pays

Every node level produces a daily yield for the alliance that holds it. The deeper the level, the better the reward — the core pays in BlackBits, speedups and VIP points, while rim dust pays plain HackCoins. The current yields:

How collection works:

• Every member gets paid — one press collects the yield of every node your alliance holds. You never pick a node; the map decides from where your alliance stands. An alliance holding twelve nodes gives each member twelve dailies in one press.
• Once a day (UTC midnight, the same reset as the attack budget). The reward book shows what you can still take and what you already have.
• No role required — a plain member collects exactly what the leader does.
• No garrison required — nobody has to stand on the node to cash it in. Defend marks say where to stand; the yield says why.
• Freshly captured nodes pay immediately — no waiting a day. Whoever holds the node at the moment of collection is who gets paid, so a node lost at noon stops paying the old holders from that instant.
• The full yield table is also visible on the map itself, so you can weigh a target before you declare war on it.

Limits at a Glance

Tips

• Start on the rim — 108 level-1 nodes, 250 void minions each, are the intended beachhead. Push inward one hop at a time.
• Do the arithmetic before you attack: a leader who works out that they lose will lose — there is no luck to hope for. A send worth less than the gap is a send thrown away.
• Watch the defender's 10% edge: near-even matchups favour whoever is standing on the ground.
• Losing nodes is painful but pays forward — losses fund the extra daily declarations for a comeback.
• Level 5 (3 nodes) gates the core: whoever holds one of them opens the run at the map's single richest node.