The banner that came back as a tent
written 2026-10-04Who owns what is the first thing a player reads on the board, and for months it was a faint wash of color on the models themselves. The fix was a flag on a pole. The generator could make the pole. It could not make a flag that hung flat.
Every army and every city on this board used to say whose it was by being tinted: a faint wash of its owner's color laid over the model. On a generated model the wash was close to invisible, and on a phone it was invisible.
So the owner asked for something a person could read from across the board: a banner on a pole, standing next to every city and staked in the ground beside every army. Only the cloth would change color. That meant the cloth had to be a model of its own, apart from the pole.
Anything set like 0.0665 was measured by a machine and generated into this page from the committed results. Everything else was written by a person.
A pole and a cloth, ordered separately
The generator hands back one welded model with one painted skin. Ask it for a flag on a pole and the cloth and the wood are the same piece of geometry sharing the same paint, so recoloring the cloth would recolor the pole with it.
So the banner was ordered as two models, a pole with a short arm and a plain cloth, and joined afterward. The cloth was asked for pale and undyed, because the game multiplies each owner's color into it, and any color the generator painted into the cloth would tint every owner's banner the same way.
The pole came back right the first time: straight, a round knob on top, a short arm.
The cloth came back as a tent
The first cloth looked perfect from the front. From the side it was two sheets, a front panel and a back panel, hanging from the top rod and splayed apart like the walls of a tent. It was 1.8 times as deep as it was tall.
The request had asked for a gentle fold, and the generator took that as an invitation. It was sent back with a request for one flat sheet, in one plane, explicitly not folded, not two-sided, not a tent.
The second cloth was also a tent. Narrower, a lot less dramatic, still two panels, still 1.0 times as deep as it was tall. Across the pole and the cloth that is 3 models generated and 1 sent back, and the instruction had named the defect outright. The generator builds a hanging banner from one picture, and the picture of a banner has a back.
Flattened, not recast
A third try would have been a guess with a bill attached, on a prompt that had already said the one thing it could say. So the shape the generator paid for was kept, and its depth was compressed when the banner was assembled, to 20 percent of what it delivered.
That is written down in the assembly plan as its own declared step, next to the size and the position, and recorded in the report, so anyone can see that this cloth is not what the generator drew. What is left is a gentle flare at the bottom and two layers of cloth, which is what a real banner sewn double has.
The color rule that made the castles metal
The cloth went through the same color rule the castle roofs had. The roof caps came back from the generator the wrong color twice, so the pipeline has a step that pulls a texture's color toward grey and leaves its brightness alone. It runs on a named part and records what it did.
On the cloth, its log said it had corrected two pictures. A cloth has one picture of color. The second was not color at all.
A generated model carries a second small picture beside its paint, and its channels are not colors: one says how rough each spot is, one says how metallic. The rule had been clamping every picture the model used, and pulling that data picture toward grey pushed the metallic channel to the top. On the cast the channel reads 18 percent metallic. On all 9 capitals' roof caps it reads at least 92 percent.
No test had caught it. The rule now touches only the color picture. The capitals' roofs have not been regenerated since, so they are still metallic.