# Rivalry and fights

*Two gangs, one grudge. A gang fight is a **crime** — booked, attributed, and fed back into the colony's
climate of order.*

Gangs do not just supply themselves; they collide. Where the network is about who shares, rivalry is
about who is opposed — and, crucially, about turning gang violence into something the rest of the
suite can *see* and *police*.

## Who is a rival

```
AreRivals(a, b):
    ga = GangOf(a); gb = GangOf(b)
    return ga != 0 && gb != 0 && ga != gb
```

The definition is exactly as blunt as it reads: **two pawns in two different gangs are rivals.** Both
must actually be in a gang (a non-zero id), and the ids must differ. From the source:

> Two pawns of DIFFERENT gangs are rivals — inside the wire or out on the street.

Note what is *not* required. There is no separate "hostility" flag, no rival-declaration event, no
threshold to cross. The moment two crews exist, their members are rivals of one another. Rivalry is a
structural fact about the membership map, not a mood or a relationship value.

Two consequences fall straight out of that:

- **Non-members are nobody's rival.** A pawn with gang id `0` — everyone in a healthy colony — is never
  a rival to anyone, because `AreRivals` requires both ids non-zero. No gangs, no rivalry.
- **Same gang, never rivals.** Members of one crew fail the `ga != gb` test. Within a gang there is no
  rivalry to book; there is the network (see [Networks and Smuggling](Networks-and-Smuggling.md)).

Where do two *different* gangs come from in the first place? From the affiliations pawns already have —
rival factions and rival ideoligions form into separate crews. That is the subject of
[Affiliations and Segregation](Affiliations-and-Segregation.md); the short version is that gangs mesh
with the colony's existing social fault lines, so **rival factions run as rival gangs.**

## A fight is a crime

The payoff of tracking rivalry is `RecordFight`. When a rival-gang attack happens, it is not treated as
generic brawling — it is booked as a crime through the same Justice pipeline as any other offence.

```
RecordFight(attacker, victim):
    if attacker == null || victim == null: return
    if !AreRivals(attacker, victim):       return    -- only rival-gang violence counts
    Justice.RecordCrime(attacker)
```

So the guard is precise: the two pawns must be **rivals** (different gangs) for anything to be recorded.
A scuffle between gangmates, or between two non-members, is not a *gang* fight and is not booked here.
When it *is* rival-gang violence, the whole event routes through one call — `Justice.RecordCrime`,
against the **attacker** — and that single call does three things at once (it lives in Institution:
Justice, but this is what Gangs is leaning on):

| Effect of `Justice.RecordCrime(attacker)` | Owner |
|---|---|
| `crimesCommitted` on the attacker's record goes up | Core's `CriminalRecord` |
| `lastCrimeTick` is stamped to now | Core's `CriminalRecord` |
| the colony's **deterrence** nudges **down** (a crime happened; order slipped) | Justice's `MapComponent_Deterrence` |

The mod's integration test confirms the loop end to end: it builds two rival gangs, records a fight,
and asserts both that the attacker and victim *are* rivals and that the attacker's `crimesCommitted`
went up as a result.

## Inside the wire and out on the street are the same offence

This is the design point the source is emphatic about:

> A gang fight is a CRIME — it goes on the attacker's record and moves the colony's climate through
> the same Justice loop as any other, so it can be investigated, attributed and policed. Rival-gang
> violence inside a prison and out on the street are the same offence.

There is no separate code path for a prison-yard shanking versus a colonists' brawl in the dining
room. `RecordFight` reads only `AreRivals` and calls `Justice.RecordCrime`. A free colonist who is a
gang member attacking a rival is booked identically to a prisoner doing the same in a cell block. The
gang system does not care which side of the wall the violence is on — only that it was between rivals.

This is what makes gang violence *legible* to the rest of the suite. A fight is not a one-off flavour
event that scrolls past in the log; it is a record entry with an attributed perpetrator and a timestamp,
which means it can be investigated, blamed on a specific pawn, and answered.

## How it feeds deterrence — and back into joining

Here is the loop that closes the whole suite:

1. A rival-gang fight fires `RecordFight` → `Justice.RecordCrime(attacker)`.
2. That nudges the colony's **deterrence down**. Order has visibly slipped.
3. Lower deterrence *raises* the nurture multiplier for **every** disposed pawn on the map
   (deterrence scales nurture via `×Lerp(1.3, 0.7, deterrence)` — less deterrence, bigger multiplier).
4. Higher nurture pushes more pawns over the `Nature × Nurture ≥ 0.9` join bar (see
   [Joining](Joining.md)).
5. More members → more rivals → more fights available to be booked.

Left unanswered, gang violence is self-reinforcing: each booked fight makes the next one likelier. The
brake is the other half of Justice — **punishment raises deterrence back up** (`RecordPunishment`
nudges it up), which lowers nurture, which drops borderline pawns back under the bar. The integration
test checks exactly this seesaw: a punishment raises the deterrence level, and a subsequent crime
lowers it again.

## How to play it

- **Respond to booked fights.** A gang fight is real feedback that deterrence has slipped. Punishing the
  attributed attacker is not just retribution — it is the mechanical lever that pulls deterrence back
  up and cools the whole map's propensity.
- **Don't manufacture two gangs where there was one.** Rivalry needs two different crews. Housing pawns
  of hostile factions or clashing ideoligions together is what creates the second gang and the fights
  between them — see the next page.
- **Read the record, not the moment.** Because every fight is attributed to a perpetrator, a thick
  record of gang violence points you at *who* to segregate, discipline, or parole — the same tools the
  rest of the suite already gives you.

---
*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.*
*AI disclosure: developed with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).*