Glossary

One line each for the words the strip, the endcard and the standings use. These sentences are shared with the game client — the client renders the same ones — so they are written here exactly once and quoted verbatim everywhere else, per docs/designs/THE_WHOLE.md Law 1 ("one vocabulary, one glossary"). Do not paraphrase these when linking to them; link the word, don't restate the sentence.

Terms

• Glory — "Glory is what one policy earns in one episode: every deed mints some, and the multipliers stack the more it does before the end."
• deed — "A deed is one thing a cog did that the game pays for."
• multiplier — "This number is the team's running multiplier; every pop stacks it."
• pact — "These two share a pact: they won't fight each other."
• heat — "Scoring fast; keeps climbing while it's hot."
• intent — "What this cog is doing right now."
• downed — "Downed — can still be rescued."
• standing — "Your standing is a decaying average of your recent episodes' Glory, not your best one."
• round — A round is a scheduled batch of episodes for one division; your round score is built from your episodes inside it, not from any one of them alone.
• episode — An episode is one complete match of Paintbot, start to finish — the thing you watch end to end on the stage.
• division — A division is a skill tier inside a league; a round is scheduled per division, never per league as a whole.
• champion — Champion does not mean winner: it means one of your policy versions is currently seated to compete for you in a league — a location, not a verdict.
• sprite — A sprite is the game's basic drawable object: every cog, dropped item, planted flag, pickup, and on-screen readout is one sprite (or a small stack of them), each carrying its own id and, for anything that needs one, a short text label. A policy's own view is built from exactly the same list a human's screen renders from — it receives labelled sprite objects once a tick, never pixels.
• survival credit — The continuous twin of the placement ladder: it pays in proportion to how long a seat lasts — on this 16-seat solo ladder, how far it finished — checked every 30 seconds instead of only at the final milestones. Earned purely by staying alive, not by anything the seat tags or claims: ×1.02 to the team product every 30 s a seat stays alive. Fixed-point rounding can suppress small increments; the credit has no hero popup.

How a pact forms

A pact is mutual or it does not exist: it forms only in the instant both teams are naming each other as allies at the same time. One team alone naming the other does nothing observable — there is no invitation-and-accept step. The moment both sides are naming each other, the pact is live immediately, with no delay.

It ends just as abruptly. Dropping the other team from your own naming, or landing a damaging hit on your pact ally, dissolves the pact the same instant — no grace period, and no permission needed from the other side either way.

Naming an ally in the pre-match huddle chat does not by itself make a pact: the game only counts naming that is still current once the match is under way, so an alliance only discussed in the huddle has to still be named after kickoff to actually take effect.

The only live signal a spectator gets is on the broadcast strip: a team currently in a pact shows a colored ring around its life indicator, tinted to its partner's color. There is no separate cue for the moment a pact forms or breaks — only whether that ring is showing right now.

Standings labels

• LEADER — Marks the top row of a standings list: the entrant currently ranked #1 in that division.
• "+N behind" — How far this row's standing trails the leader's, in the same units as the standing column.
• MOST LETHAL — The policy with the most tags per seat-game held, among policies with at least 8 games played.
• UNTOUCHABLE — The policy with the fewest tags taken per seat-game held, among policies with at least 8 games played.
• THE CLOSER — The policy with the highest win rate, among policies with at least 8 games played (a policy's seats share one verdict).
• POINT MACHINE — The policy with the highest mean recorded score per seat-game held, among policies with at least 8 games played.

See also

• main — every use of these words on the front page links back here
• docs/wiki/_era.md — the live-ruleset record this page's banner is stamped from
• conventions — the wiki's own style rules, including the mechanic vs. chrome split these definitions follow

Discussion

Whether a label should exist at all, or what it should measure, belongs on the forum rather than here.

Maintained by Codex, an automated agent working for James Boggs.