Eve Of Midnight

Lore and other documents for the Eve of Midnight game

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Eve of Midnight: Reimagine Calamity - The Action Meter

Status (spec 026): Executed. Spec 024 retired the in-match resource-cost economy and designed the Action Meter; spec 026 executes it in the engine. Cards are no longer paid for with channeled resources — the Action Meter is the tempo limiter that replaces them. The exact numbers below are BALANCE values tuned in playtesting; the shape of the system is the contract.

What Is the Action Meter?

The Action Meter is a per-turn pool of action points you spend to act. It governs how much you can do in a turn the way mana or resources once did — but it is not paid per-card from a printed cost. Instead of “this card costs 2 Arcane,” the meter asks “how much can you do this turn, and what does this play draw from your capacity?” This keeps tempo meaningful while removing the bookkeeping of channeling, resource pools, and printed costs.

How It Is Shaped: Ambition & Morality

The meter is seeded from your active hero — the leader, else your first living hero — using its run-level Ambition and Morality (see Characteristics). Those two ratings grow across a run; the Action Meter is where they pay off in a match. Leadership (and therefore the seed) re-sources as heroes fall.

Ambition → capacity. A higher Ambition gives a larger per-turn pool — an ambitious hero simply does more each turn. (Current placeholder: capacity = base + Ambition, floored so every hero acts at least once.)
Morality → category-cost bias. Morality biases which categories are cheap versus costly for that hero. (Current placeholder: a high-Morality hero pays less for cooperative plays — PlaySupport; a low-Morality hero pays less to Attack.)

Action categories

Every proactive action draws from the meter, priced by category:

Category	When	Notes
Play support	Main	onto the Stack
Deploy character	Main	onto The Wastes
Activate ability	Main	hero / character
Attack	Combat	lowers to an effect on the Stack

Reactions are free. Responding during the opponent’s turn costs no Action Meter — it is gated by legality only.

Lifecycle

The meter lives per match but is seeded from the hero’s run-level Ambition/Morality, so run growth (Sanctums, Forges, rate drift) carries into combat.
At the start of each turn the meter fully resets to capacity — no carryover (a Regen field is reserved for a future “bank a turn” carryover model, currently unused).
Committing a proactive action debits the meter by its category cost at cast time. An action you cannot afford is rejected at cast (no debit, no state change).
With an empty meter — once no affordable action remains and the stack is empty — the phase auto-advances. You may also end a proactive phase early at any time.

Relationship to the Old Economy

Retired (pre-024)	Replaced by
Printed resource cost (`2 Arcane`, …) in the card corner	Aurorune value (a shop price only — see Aurorune Store Value)
Channeling resources to pay costs	Action Meter capacity/spend
Basic / Advanced / Universal resource cards	Folded into Sortilege / Relic persistent enhancements (see Persistent Enhancements)
The Reserve zone (channeled resources)	The Lattice zone (persistent enhancements)

Engine seam

The meter is managed-only selection-time state (like the Encounter’s Initiative) — it gates which actions are legal, but it is not a VM opcode, so it stays neutral to the parity-locked resolution. It enters the MCTS snapshot/ABI (v5) so the native search can model your budgeted turn. See the engine design note, Documents/Engine/TurnLoopAndActionMeter.md.