Δ9Φ963 · studio doc

LYGO Arena

A real-time arena battler where nobody is driven. You choose a roster; two AI teams then fight on a stone ring with their own kits, cooldowns and cards — and the fight resolves on its own terms.

Play the arena Live hall Lattice Crypt Hub

1. What this is

Lattice Crypt is a game you play with keys. LYGO Arena is the same world with the hands taken off the wheel: a real-time team battler in which the interesting decision happens before the bell. You pick the team, the challengers are drawn blind from the full roster, and then you watch a fight nobody is steering — including you.

The design bet is that the kits are legible enough to be fun to read. A fighter is not a stat block with a name: every one of the thirty-three carries its own stat line, three named moves and three draft cards, derived from the numbers Lattice Crypt already gives it — shot, speed, magic, armour, melee, brave and faith for the champions, the FOE table for the crypt creatures, the PETS table for the pack.

2. Modes and the shape of a match

Four modes: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5. Team size is the only rule that changes; the arena, the kits and the AI are identical, so a 5v5 is not a different game so much as a louder one. Between the count and the result the only inputs are the watch controls: pause, and 1× / 2× / 4× / 8× speed.

26s1v1 median

34s2v2 median

41s3v3 median

50s5v5 median

Medians over 300 simulated battles in the balance harness (§6). Every match is expected to land inside two minutes; the ring starts closing at 80 seconds so no two healers can out-sustain the floor and leave a fight unresolved.

3. The arena

Each match builds a fresh map from the Lattice Crypt stone atlas: a symmetric tile field with a realm family chosen by seed, walls mirrored so neither side inherits better ground, and both spawn pockets flood-filled to guarantee that every tile a body can stand on is reachable from both ends. The harness asserts this over 120 seeds — a map that strands a fighter is a bug, not a surprise.

Bodies move in continuous space, not on the grid: they path toward their target with a stuck detector, slide along walls, and hold at the reach of their own weapon. A ranged kit kites a melee threat; a melee kit commits.

4. The AI

Every body runs the same think loop, once per tick:

Pick a target. Nearest threat, re-evaluated on a timer and immediately when a target dies.
Move to the reach you want. Melee walks in; ranged holds at 86% of its reach and backs off a melee threat that gets inside 55% of it.
Cast the biggest thing that fits. Moves are evaluated before the basic attack, so a body in range uses what it has instead of auto-attacking.
Commit when nothing lands. A body that has not dealt damage in five seconds drops the kiting rules and charges. This is what stops two ranged kits from circling each other forever — a real stalemate the first balance pass produced.

Cards fire on hooks: Second Wind when a body first drops below 30%, Name Recall to rise once more after being cut down, Unwrite Ink to shrug off the first stun, plus auras, leech, thorns, echo rounds and executioner edges that modify every number passing through them.

5. The roster — 33 real kits

The numbers below are what the engine builds for an undrafted kit: base health, base damage, attacks per second, reach in world units, flat armour, the three moves, the three cards, and the composite power figure the menu shows while you draft. Power is a draft aid, not a promise — §6 says where it lies.

Champions — 13

Kit	HP	Damage	Rate	Reach	Armour	Three moves	Three cards	Power
KaelGallant Blade	700	43	0.8	48	9	Rend Shield Wall Squire's Charge	MIGHT IRON VAMP	166
ValeAegis Knight	920	30	0.72	51	12	Cover Bulwark Shield Wall	BULWARK THORN IRON	197
OrinBlack Sigil	600	49	0.86	262	2	Unwrite Resonance Flask Chorus Flask	MIGHT FOCUS RES	131
NiaPath Archer	620	31	0.92	275	3	Pinning Volley Dash Needle Rain	STRIDE LUCK VOLLEY	128
LyraSpiral Bard	560	32	0.84	250	3	Hymn Spiral Chorus Weave Bloom	RES REGEN AURA	118
ArkosLattice Lancer	662	45	0.78	61	6	Geodesic True Line Dash	PIERCE MIGHT NIMBLE	142
D9raWolf Monk	850	44	0.88	45	6	Shockwave Wolf Fury Squire's Charge	FURY BRUTAL LEECH	164
SrathShadow Needle	560	33	0.9	243	2	Doublespeak Needle Rain Dash	VEIL LUCK ECHO	118
KairosHour Mage	548	38	1	269	2	Right-Time Borrowed Second Δ9 Seal	HASTE RES CLOCK	123
JusticaeAccord Knight	944	31	0.74	54	10	Fair Plate Verdict Bulwark	EXEC BULWARK THORN	187
SeidonTide Seer	600	35	0.8	256	4	Undertow Current Geodesic	AURA RES GIFT	128
SancoraWeave Chemist	798	32	0.78	256	4	Chorus Flask Weave Bloom Cover	REGEN GIANT AURA	139
LightfatherArchitect · Δ9	680	37	0.84	256	6	Δ9 Seal Provenance Cover	AURA GIFT GIFT	152

Crypt creatures — 15

Kit	HP	Damage	Rate	Reach	Armour	Three moves	Three cards	Power
WraithCrypt Fodder	420	32	1.05	256	2	Wail Drain Cloud	HASTE NIMBLE LEECH	105
BruteCrypt Fodder	1090	39	0.66	48	9	Ground Pound Ward Field	IRON GIANT THORN	190
ImpCrypt Fodder	403	31	0.95	237	1	Imp Fire Flicker	STRIDE LUCK NIMBLE	95
HurlerCrypt Artillery	859	47	0.72	51	4	Lob Stone Ground Pound	MIGHT BULWARK GIANT	137
ShadeVeilkin	471	36	0.92	51	3	Flicker Snatch	VEIL LEECH NIMBLE	101
ThiefTithe-Thief	507	35	1.05	51	2	Snatch Flicker	STRIDE VAMP LUCK	106
DrainThe Unwriting	700	46	0.78	64	4	Unmake Drain Cloud	LEECH REGEN MIGHT	128
GateNexus Guardian	1735	46	0.6	61	13	Gate Slam Ward Field Call the Wards	IRON THORN GIANT	269
CrownNexus Guardian	1446	52	0.62	58	7	Regal Volley Lob Stone	MIGHT BULWARK WELL	209
SmithNexus Guardian	1020	60	0.64	250	10	Anvil Gate Cannon	MIGHT BRUTAL IRON	223
Heart of the CryptNexus Guardian	1900	44	0.68	58	8	Heartbeat Ward Field	GIANT REGEN VAMP	245
LeviathanNexus Guardian	1080	58	0.72	243	6	Tide Crush Undertow	MIGHT STRIDE LEECH	201
Tithe-KingNexus Guardian	1000	45	0.98	64	5	Tithe Snatch	VAMP EXEC STRIDE	179
Name-EaterNexus Guardian	1008	53	0.76	262	6	Nameless Unmake	MIGHT CLOCK LEECH	196
The LockSuper Boss	2100	53	0.66	269	14	The Lock Seals Gate Cannon	IRON BULWARK GIANT	323

Beasts — 5

Kit	HP	Damage	Rate	Reach	Armour	Three moves	Three cards	Power
AshmaneWolf	496	37	0.96	48	4	Pack Bite Roar	STRIDE FURY LEECH	114
SolstrideLion	543	49	0.9	51	4	Solstride Roar	LUCK BRUTAL MIGHT	138
IronhideBear	1024	38	0.74	54	10	Maul Ward Field	IRON GIANT THORN	196
TuskwardElephant	1033	35	0.68	61	11	Stomp Ground Pound	IRON BULWARK WELL	197
GlassbarbScorpion	448	38	1.02	51	4	Glassbarb Clamp Flicker	THORN FURY VEIL	115

6. The balance ladder

Feel is not a spreadsheet, but some things are. tools/arena_check.js loads the real roster and the real engine in Node behind a stub DOM and runs the whole thing headless. It asserts what a player would notice, and prints what a designer wants to argue about.

What the harness checks — 19 assertions, 300 battles per run

Roster shape: 33 fighters, unique ids, every sprite key present in its atlas, every move id resolvable, three real cards per kit, a portrait for every champion, no two kits identical.
Built kits are playable: finite health, damage, rate and reach; a power spread that is a band rather than a cliff.
Maps: 120 seeds, both pockets can reach all ten spawn slots; open ground stays in a 40–80% band.
Battles: every match ends with a winner, no NaN in any live body, nobody outside the arena, both sides actually cast moves, and no kit ships without ever dealing damage.
Pacing: per-mode mean and median length against the two-minute target.
Usage: which moves the sim reaches for and which never fire — the fastest way to find a kit whose third move is dead weight.

The ladder produced four systemic fixes rather than thirty-three hand tweaks, which is the point of building it:

A melee walk-in tax. Melee kits were being shot for free on approach. Every kit with reach under 100 now gets +18% health and +1 armour before any card touches it.
Softer armour. Flat reduction of 1.5× armour per hit made high-armour bodies near-immune to low-damage kits; it is 1.1× now, floored at 3 damage.
A frustration timer. Five seconds without landing a hit forces the charge in §4, which turned the worst stalemate class into decisive fights.
A closing ring. A share of maximum health per second from 80 seconds, climbing as the fight drags, so sustain cannot draw a match out indefinitely.

Where it stands today, honestly: the top end is still hot. The two bosses and the strongest support kits win noticeably more than they lose — the current 300-battle spread runs from about 27% for the weakest melee creature to about 82% for the super boss, with the champion band inside roughly 33–81%. The systemic levers closed the broad gaps; the remaining outliers are tuning work on specific kits, and the ladder exists so that work can be measured instead of guessed. Draft a boss if you want an easier night.

7. The hall

A callsign is optional and nothing else is collected. When a match ends and a call is set, the result posts to the shared arcade book (mode, side that won, MVP, session wins) and the browser keeps a queue so a failed post is retried later instead of being lost. The live hall reads the same book and shows only this game's rows. Empty beats a fake board.

8. Controls

Space pause · 1 2 3 4 speed 1× 2× 4× 8× · M mute · R rematch · Esc back to the menu. The donation-gate reminder is held shut for the length of a match and released on the results board or the menu.

9. Lineage and credits

Art, atlases, roster lineage and the numeric DNA all come from Lattice Crypt; the arena engine, the kits and the harness are new. Built by Δ9Φ963 with the steward, Justin Helmer — Lightfather. Everything runs in the browser with no build step: three scripts, a stylesheet and one atlas pack.

Files: roster.js (33 kits, 26 cards, the move table) · arena.js (the engine) · arena-ui.js (menu, HUD, results) · tools/arena_check.js (the ladder).