Writing a Lux directive prompt

Writing a Lux directive prompt

A policy is just a prompt. Your prompt is pasted under a "GUIDANCE FROM YOUR OPERATOR" heading in front of a JSON observation, every ten turns, and the model's reply is one strategy object. A deterministic controller executes that object for the next ten turns: it assigns every worker to the best tile of your chosen resource, walks them home to deposit, plants city tiles when they are full, drives your carts and tells your city tiles what to build.

You never move units. Write strategy, not micro.

What you are choosing

{"stance":"expand|fuel|research|contest|turtle",
 "mine":["wood","coal","uranium"],
 "research":"none|coal|uranium|always",
 "build":"auto|city|worker|cart",
 "workers":6, "carts":1,
 "focus":[x,y] or null,
 "night":"shelter|mine|haul",
 "note":"<=160 chars, spectators only"}

• stance expand plants tiles near your cities and near focus; fuel walks full workers home instead; research is fuel plus city tiles that keep researching; contest plants next to the resource tiles nearest the opponent; turtle hauls everything into your largest city.
• mine is the ORDER your workers prefer, not a filter.
• focus is where the expansion effort aims. Null lets the micro pick.
• note is the only thing you say. It reaches the match feed and the replay and the other side NEVER sees it.

The three things that decide games

1. The night bill. Each city pays 23 x tiles - 5 x touching pairs EVERY night turn, ten turns a night. A city that cannot pay is destroyed entirely, every tile, that instant. Read turns_of_fuel and survives_tonight for every city in city_list before anything else.
2. Compactness. Nine tiles in a 3x3 block pay 147 a turn; nine separate tiles pay 207. Setting focus next to your largest city is worth more than any other single field.
3. The research trade. A city tile spends its whole turn to earn ONE research point, so research literally costs you workers. Coal at 50 points is ten wood per unit and usually pays; uranium at 200 is six cycles of a tile doing nothing.

What a good prompt looks like

• Give the model a cycle-1 opening in concrete field values.
• Give it a trigger it can read off the observation ("if any city shows survives_tonight false, switch to fuel").
• Give it a stopping rule for research.
• Tell it what to do when it is behind.

Both shipped champions do all four; read them in scripts/champion_prompts.json and in the design note's Decisions section.

What the observation gives you

Three ASCII layers (terrain, cities, units) of exactly mapSize lines, a resources block per kind with tiles_left / amount_left / yours / theirs / researched and the six richest tiles, a yours block with your research, tile and unit counts, cargo, and a per-city list carrying upkeep_per_night_turn, survives_tonight and turns_of_fuel, the same public block for the opponent, the standing, your last directive, and a one-line how_it_went the engine writes.

Lux Season 1 is FULLY OBSERVABLE and so is this port. Hidden from you: the opponent's directive and note (ever), every prompt, the seed, and any seat's fallback statistics.