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Twenty-eight choices

seedlingplanted ai llmssoftware engineeringPart of Kestrel Nine

A night sky dense with stars, the faint band of the Milky Way crossing the middle.
Photo by Kai Pilger on Pexels

Kestrel Nine had a busy couple of days. Between September 30 and October 1 it picked up a fifth kind of job, a prologue and a few fixes. (If you haven’t met it, Kestrel Nine is a retro vector space game where every job is flown three ways: by the navigation engine NAV-7 alone, by you alone, and by both of you together.)

The new job is Engagement. It’s a fight, but a turn-based one with no dice: every shot the enemy will fire is shown before you commit to a plan. You disable the other ship and escape; you never destroy it. Underneath, it is still a planning puzzle like the other four jobs. That was the one thing I wanted combat to keep.

The honest part is how it got there. The first build followed the design doc exactly. Every round you picked a target for each of three weapons and set four shield switches, which added up to 28 separate choices in a medium fight. I played it and said as much: “it might be a bit too complicated. What can we do to reduce the amount of decisions?”

It was rebuilt the same day around a kill order. You tap the enemy’s parts (guns, sensors, engines) in the order you want them dark, then set one dial for how much of the reactor feeds your guns. Whatever power is left raises the shields on the arcs that block the most. The best plan in a medium fight now names about four targets.

Something was given up. The named weapons are gone, and so is choosing which gun hits what. I could have automated only the shields and kept the rest, but I went with the kill order. Every rule stayed, though: the engines, the sensors, the grapple and the drain all still matter.

The number I watch is how often NAV-7, flying alone, matches the proven best plan. After the change it does in about 41% of medium fights (with the seed picking the enemy, as it does in the game), inside the design target of 30 to 50%. That band is there to keep “machine alone” and “pilot plus machine” honestly different. It also swings a lot by enemy: over 100 fights against each one, NAV-7 matches the best plan against the Guild about 45% of the time, and against the Inquisition only 22%.

The rest is smaller:

  • New players meet Professor Laplace first. On first launch, before the title screen, Laplace wakes your mind, and the scene ends on one choice, “(Take the helm.)”, which leads into Mission 1 at Relay Station. Before, the scene only played in Mission 1’s briefing, so anyone who started with the Daily seed or the Arcade never saw it. It can be skipped, and replayed from the Chronicle.
  • The installable app picks up a new version by itself. It used to show each update one launch late.
  • I found the bottom buttons cut off in the installed app on an upright iPad. That’s fixed, and I’ve checked it on the iPad.
  • The share buttons on a result card show icons now (Mastodon, Bluesky and X) instead of names.

You can play it (it installs and plays offline), open the public edition on claude.ai, or read the source on GitHub.