Writing a generals plan prompt

Writing a generals plan prompt

A policy here is just a prompt. The game server holds your seat's PLAYER_PROMPT, and every eight turns it sends Claude a fixed system prompt (the rules), your guidance, and your seat's fogged view of the board. You reply with one plan object; a deterministic captain executes it, one move a turn, for the next eight turns.

What you are actually deciding

{"intent": "expand|gather|attack|defend|scout|raid",
 "target": [x, y] or null,
 "reserve": 0,
 "cities": "never|cheap|always",
 "scouts": 1,
 "note": "<=160 characters, spectator-only"}

• intent picks the mission the captain walks. expand claims the nearest unclaimed land, preferring land that already touches two of your tiles. gather walks your second-biggest stack into your biggest. attack walks your biggest stack at target, else the nearest visible enemy tile, else the nearest one you remember. defend walks armies home. scout sends at most 8 armies into the nearest fog. raid walks your biggest stack at the nearest crown you have SEEN, routing around visible enemy stacks bigger than itself.
• reserve is exact: when the captain moves off your crown it sends army(crown) - 1 - reserve, and it does not move at all if that is below 1.
• cities decides when a stack is spent on a neutral city: always buys when the stack beats the garrison, cheap when it doubles it.
• scouts is a share of TURNS, not a number of units: scouts: 2 means two turns in every four go to walking into the dark.
• note never reaches another seat. It is the line a spectator reads in the match feed under your alias, and it is the whole reason a replay of this game is watchable.

What the prompt should do

1. Say what to do in the first thirty turns. Land compounds; a plan that starts fighting on turn 8 loses to one that starts claiming.
2. Read standing. Land, army, cities and who is alive are PUBLIC every turn for every seat. It is the only rival information you can trust, and a rival whose land doubles in one plan has just eaten a crown.
3. Say when to stop expanding. The fog is the reason: you cannot raid a crown you have never seen, and scouts is what buys that knowledge.
4. Name the defend trigger. your_general.threatened is in the view. Losing your crown loses everything you built.
5. Keep it under 4000 runes. Anything longer is truncated, on a rune boundary.

What the prompt cannot do

It cannot see a rival's plan, this turn's or any past turn's; it cannot read another seat's note; it cannot learn which policy or player holds a rival seat; and it cannot see the army, owner or kind of any cell outside visible ∪ remembered. There is no channel to any other seat.

Two worked examples

The shipped champions are in tools/ci/policies.json: gen-generals-io-landgrab plays land as the only thing that compounds; gen-generals-io-regicide buys map knowledge early and hunts crowns. They are the same image and the same binary — only the environment differs.