THEGRANDESTINE INTERNAL DESIGN DOCUMENTS - Obscure Behaviors

This list shows why Grand's extremely good game designer prowess and talent, as all professional games require such background information as an easy way to incorporate memorization as a unique and interesting skill in your game that does not annoy anyone whatsoever. Depth is discovering new things, so obviously random unexplainable nonsense in your game creates unparalleled depth.

(Ranged) and (Magic)

(Ranged) just means it is a special action that can be blocked. (Magic) is the same but can't be blocked.
There is some nuance involving immunities, however.

Paying

You can pay even if it would set you to 0 morale or below, which is a slight downside because Alchemist has a mandatory pay cost cure effect.
You don't lose until the morale settles on 0 morale or below (so if you have a piece that's dying next turn, Vampire can still save you by gaining morale).
Wrath does not pay if its passive is used.

Morale Decay and King Decay

Morale decay happens at 50 full-turns, I think White loses 1 morale first.
Enemy morale loss effects happen at the "end of your turn", at least I prefer to interpret it this way. In other words if your opponent has no King and morale decay is active, I think of it as "every time I move, they lose 4 morale".
It is possible to draw in this game but there is no draw condition other than both players having 0 morale when the turn settles. I think with draws the higher-rated player loses 1 rating and the lower-rated gains 1. You can offer a draw with /draw, or (bug) you can make your opponent surrender with /surrender.

(Path)

Path abilities are a different kind of blockaction that involves checking the blockaction of connected actions. ArchBishop's path first checks the move tile, and then iterates onto each connected path.

(Unstoppable)

This keyword is only made to save lines on text, and only applies for Vampire's fly action. It just means that it ignores Freeze and Petrify.

Armor

(Unblockable) attacks completely ignore armor, which is a horrible nuance.
After armor is broken, it changes the armor action to only remove its armor, not the entire action.
So "Move or Attack" with armor will just turn into a normal "Move or Attack".
Also, Samurai breaks off armor, it doesn't pierce through it.

Transformation

Transformations always refresh any 'statuses', negative or positive, and value changes. This includes the term 'promote', 'become', and 'upgrade'.
When something is transformed, On Death effects do not happen except for morale penalty.
Also, transformations are inconsistent with death squares. This info is on the wiki, but there is a non-obvious pattern: action-based transforms cause death squares. Envy is action-based, Prince is passive-based.

Statuses

Enchant, void, and null are not statuses as they are not affected by Status-Immune and can't be cured.
All sources of enchant end after your own turn, not your opponent's. This is specifically for the "can't target enemy King" clause, and it is a pure downside.

Prevented Actions

Some actions are invalid outright if they don't do anything, even if you wanted to do them to prevent zugzwang. You cannot even target enemies that are immune with the standard freeze/petrify/poison effects, the action is just invalid. The same applies for pushing if the push is completely blocked and wouldn't push at all.

The Splash ability with Hydromancer/WaterElemental is a multifauceted sink for this. You cannot target a MageTower in a corner because it is both status-immune and makes no push, but you could target that same MageTower if it made a push.

A non-exhaustive list of more cases:

• Trying to apply poison to an already-poisoned unit
• Trying to apply the same type of location effect to a square that already has it
• GravityMage: You can't move a unit if it would do nothing.
• Castling with transparent units in the way - one exception is long castle

Castling

The 'long castle' moves the King 3 squares instead of 2 unlike classic chess, but also you can castle if the transparent unit is right next to the King as that doesn't interfere with the final landing spots of the castle.

Behemoth

Behemoth is still affected by minion passives and can be moved in the case of an enemy Nexus or Portal's ability target, as those abilities do not actively target Behemoth. (The same is true for Magic-Immune for Nexus and Portal in general, it can be moved.)

Samurai

Samurai's autoattack breaks armor, it doesn't pierce through it.
Samurai cannot autoattack if Freeze/Petrify.
Samurai can autoattack the king if enchanted.
This is related to game-end detection: samurai's autoattack triggers before the game is detected to end. Say you have only 21 morale and a Queen, and your opponent has 12 morale and a Rook, but also a Samurai defending the Rook with the autoattack. If you capture the Rook the game will be a tie even though you got your opponent's morale to 0 at the end of the turn, as the autoattack triggers anyway.

Wisp

This is on the wiki.

LifeStone

Uses the unaltered costs of pieces to determine what to revive, and revives the unaltered versions of pieces. It also uses a queue, meaning you can revive previously killed pieces.
Example: [6] Guardian, [12] Rook, and [6] Guardian, die in that order. You can use LifeStone+0's to revive 2 Guardians and then a LifeStone+2 to revive the Rook.
Example: A FireElemental loses value until it's 10 value and dies. It cannot be revived because it had base 15 value.

Envy

The description is poorly written, it just means it makes an unaltered original version of the copy. So a FireElemental at 1 value copied will make a new 15 value one.
Also, Envy can create situations where you have multiple Kings on board. This creates ambiguity with Valkyrie, enemy Minotaurs, Vampire, and Pride. I think the original King gets these benefits and this is not based on trigger order but if new Kings start dying I have no idea what happens.

Ghast and Tombstone and such augmented squares

Tombstone removes the death square for an ally Ghast as well.
Tombstone's "On Magic" only refers to itself, not any Magic action you do.
With Ghast, you cannot teleport onto the same spot that an augment is on (if you wanted to waste a turn), same for RoyalGuard.
Death squares caused by enemy Pikeman and Bomber retaliations appear on the ally unit's original spot, not the attacked unit's spot.

Comet and Aquarius

You cannot target enemies that are magic-immune OR status-immune with the special action. (This might change next update.)
This is unambiguous but Comet's passive takes effect even if it dies to other causes.

Nice Destroy Bug

There is a nice bug with Destroy where the unit that is using Destroy is temporarily treated as not existing, so it won't get affected by things like Aquarius, and there is even the possibility of Aquarius pushing a unit underneath the unit that is being used, causing a permanent imprint of the unit-underneath on the screen (and I think effectively preventing the unit from being used).

Lust

The special action is actually treated like a (Ranged) action. If a FrostMephit is in the target squares but it's blocked by a unit in between, Lust does not get frozen.
This is completely unambiguous but I should mention that Lust and Samurai have synergistic trigger orders and are intentionally designed to combo.

PhoenixEgg

When two Phoenixes attack each other, their eggs appear in their original locations, but also the attacking Phoenix's death square will be on the attacking Phoenix, not their egg (if I recall correctly).
There is also a definitely-unintended behavior, if a PhoenixEgg is a turn away from reviving and gets poisoned, it will actually revive as if nothing happened 3 turns later.

Dove

There is an ambiguity involving two doves on different teams trying to get to the same spot, which will only be made worse.
Yes, ally doves behind each other will travel as a group, as it should be.

Trigger Order

Lust, Guardian, and Shieldsman have a problem involving trigger order, as they can aim at the same target and it's ambiguous what happens. For all cases, triggers only happen once (there is no lust-pull instant combo), and use "a1, a2, ..., h7, h8 trigger order, meaning it scans from bottom-to-top, left-to-right from White's perspective. You can use Guardian and Shieldsman's visual FX to see which will swap.

I have no real idea what happens if two Guardians target each other, but I'm pretty sure only one swap happens...

^{Thanks Grand. Oh and by the way, after the enemy SoulKeeper attacks, the poisoned Guardian swaps to the right Guardian, which I cannot at all explain.}

Location Effects

There are 3 location effects currently: butterfly, thundermark, meteor.
You cannot target the same location with the same location effect. If your opponent uses thundermark you cannot thundermark it yourself until the timer ends.
Butterfly happens before thunder on the same turn, so thunder kills the butterfly immediately if it revives on the same turn effect. I believe the same applies for meteor.
Meteor does not work well with Dove. The push appears to happen before the Dove death so no enchants happen.

Butterfly's effect is really 20.5 turns while Thundermark and Meteor are 4 and 6. A practical reason of this mattering is GravityMage, as you cannot use your own Thunder or Meteor to sync well with GravityMage since your opponent gets a turn to move the pulled unit away.

GravityMage

By "move" it means "move as far as possible".

Value Caps

FireElemental, Vampire, and Gluttony value caps at 100. Pride value does not, and Grand pretends this is a feature and in fact this is so intended there was an entire contest made requiring it.

Taurus and Displacement-Immune

Displacement-Immune means that it cannot be moved in any way by other units (not swapped, not moved, not teleported, etc.).
Castling does not count as displacement and you can displace Displacement-Immune units with it.
Taurus's special action cannot target Displacement-Immune units at all.
Taurus and Wisp is a special spaghetti I will not touch.

Frog and Toad (Leap-Attack)

Should be unambiguous, but chained leap attacks are on a single line.

Leap-attacks fail if the leaping unit's location would be past the board edge. For a concrete example imagine an enemy on a2. It could only be leap-attacked on a1 and a3, and untargetable on b1, b2, or b3. This means it is completely impossible to do a leap-attack on enemies in the board corners.

Also, the whole attack counts as (Unblockable), mostly relevant for the armor nuance.

Gluttony

Samurai autoattack counts as a melee attack as usual, and actually so does leap-attack. Don't know if Taurus's special action counts as melee.

Minion orientation is flipped 'properly', which is not a bonus. This means taking an enemy Pawn will overwrite Gluttony's forward squares, not its backward squares.

This unit probably creates so much spaghetti.

Turn Start/End Effects

In the code, it goes like this:

Turn start:

• ResolveDeathQueue
• Whoever's turn it is, -3 morale if king lost, -1 morale if morale decay active.
• End of turn trigger effects happen.
• Then there is a check for continueStartTurn, not sure what this part is.
• Compel effect
• Meteor effect, the kill comes before the push (supposedly, though my testing says otherwise)
• Check promotions
• Butterfly effect
• Turn trigger scan for start and hybrid effects.
• FireElemental decay check
• Turn trigger scan for Shieldsman and Guardian.
• Scan for augmented effects
• Princess start-of-game enchant effect
• Hostage rescue scan
• Patience activation
• All status effect timers drop by 1
• PhoenixEgg check, if no statuses inflicted, value +1, then if value threshold met then transform to PhoenixEgg
  (The "no statuses inflicted" check actually checks if the status timers are 0, which is the cause of the poison glitch since the poison death effect has not happened yet)
• EarthElemental transform check
• AirElemental transform check
• Saplings get +1 value if not team to move
• Status effect effects update, most important is poison triggers
• Thunder effect
• Fireball dies if any freeze
• FireElemental and WaterElemental die if value <= 0
• Final "death flag" check (currently only seems to affect Butterfly)
• Dove check and ResolveDeathQueue
• Calculate total morale and end the game if any player's morale <= 0

Unfortunately I'm likely lacking crucial code context, so even this is inaccurate.

Hopefully this massive list of memorable and interesting game mechanics serves you well in your nuanced journey of the living board game and living meme Chess Battle Advanced Deluxe Evolved Full Version v0.054 Online.