Chapter 42a — Social Leverage & Opportunities

Chapter 42a — Social Leverage & Opportunities

The combat layer lets you act on entities. The economy lets you act on goods. This layer lets you act on factions and standing — leaning on reputation, coin, threat, and rumor to bend the strategic board without drawing a weapon. It arrived in v2.9 with four verbs and a currency economy that funds them, and grew in v3.0 into a full surface — twenty-five verbs across social / rumor / diplomacy / sabotage, passive leverage income that earns between opportunities, and dialogue that reads and writes this social state.

Shipped in v2.9. The player-leverage verbs and the opportunity spawn/resolution loop were authored across the v2.8–v2.9 arc; v2.9 connected the write side end to end — most importantly the earning path (opportunity completion grants leverage), without which the verbs were unaffordable in play.

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Leverage currencies

Leverage is spent, not rolled. getLeverageState(actor.custom) reads six currencies off the player entity:

Currency	Earned by	Spent on
favor	completing favor-shaped opportunities	bribe
influence	completing contracts / supply-runs	seed (rumor)
legitimacy	lawful opportunity resolutions	petition
heat	intimidation, defeat fallout	rises as a cost/consequence
debt	bribery side-effects	—
blackmail	investigation opportunities	v3.0 sub-verbs

A verb is only offered on the numbered menu when its cost is affordable and its cooldown is ready — the same “never advertise a guaranteed rejection” discipline the trade menu uses.

The four verbs

All four are numbered leverage entries on the action menu:

• bribe <faction> — spend favor to raise a faction’s reputation toward you; accrues debt and a little heat, more if the faction is already alert.
• intimidate <faction> — spend heat to cow a faction: raises their alert, lowers their reputation and cohesion. A threat, with a cost.
• petition <faction> — spend legitimacy to lean on the district’s controlling authority; taps the already-ticking pressure system.
• seed — spend influence to plant a rumor about yourself. This lights the entire player-rumor module (confidence decay, distortion, faction spread) and the Director’s Ledger RUMORS ABOUT YOU section.

Each verb writes real reputation_<faction> / faction_alert_<faction> / heat globals — the same globals trade pricing and the opportunity faction-gate already read, so a bribe you pay is felt at the merchant and in what contracts appear.

The opportunity lifecycle

Opportunities are the engine’s offered goals — and, since v2.9, the primary way to earn leverage.

1. Spawn. Every round, evaluateOpportunities scores candidate contracts / bounties / favors / supply-runs against live pressure, scarcity, faction, companion, and district state. It spawns scarcely: capped active count, a minimum interval, and pair-conflict dedup.
2. Accept. The opportunity verb (menu: Accept) moves an available opportunity to accepted.
3. Resolve. Complete or Abandon. Completion runs computeOpportunityFallout → applyOpportunityFallout, which writes the reward: reputation, economy shifts, leverage currency, and — for companion-tagged favors — a real morale change on that companion.
4. Expire. Ignore an accepted opportunity to its deadline and the authored expiry fallout now applies (reputation hits, obligations) — deadlines have teeth.

The endgame’s rising-power and merchant-prince arcs read the opportunities you actually resolved, so a session spent running contracts reads differently at the finale than one spent fighting.

v3.0 — the full social surface

Everything the v2.9 edition listed as a ceiling here shipped in v3.0:

• Passive leverage income is wired. tickLeverage decays heat and reconciles influence from reputation each round; computeLeverageGains grants favor / blackmail / legitimacy from XP, milestones, and player-resolved pressure — so the social layer earns between opportunities, gated so a world with no social activity stays byte-identical to legacy replay.
• The full verb roster. The diplomacy (7) and sabotage (4) groups — plus more social and rumor sub-verbs — register, taking the total to twenty-five; nineteen surface on the numbered menu, and the previously-dark leverage-diplomacy / leverage-sabotage companion reactions now fire. Dialogue conditions and effects read and write this social state (leverage / reputation / npc-relationship).
• escort opportunities spawn on a protective-travel-in-a-dangerous-district gate, and the named-NPC PEOPLE director section is live — the persisted npc-agency producer runs each round (see Chapter 37 — NPC Agency).

Remaining ceilings: two of the twenty-one new sub-verbs (deny, bury-scandal) need a rumor-target pairing dimension before they reach the numbered menu; and district starting supply still seeds from the universal baseline rather than each genre’s defaults (the v3.1 opener).