Competition Mode

Competition Mode is where GRIMOIRE stops being a training simulator and becomes a sport. Three formats run side-by-side: CTF events, war-game seasons, and faction wars. All three feed the same global leaderboard.

CTF events

Standard capture-the-flag tournaments — head-to-head or team — over a fixed time window. Hosted on a Sovereign-tier player’s mesh, federated through the GRIMOIRE tier of Sanctum (v49 Crystal Net), scored against the same SHA-256-attested lab manifests as free-play.

Formats supported:

Jeopardy — solve labs from a categorised board within a time window
Attack–Defence — each team gets a vulnerable service; defend yours, exploit theirs
King of the Hill — control a contested machine; XP per minute of uptime
Boss Contract — single legendary-difficulty multi-phase lab; first team to complete wins

Every CTF lab solution is peer-verified: at least one tier-3+ player from a different faction must reproduce your write-up before the score commits to the leaderboard. This is enforced by the synos-audit-trail HMAC-SHA256 append-only chain.

War-game seasons

Season-long campaigns driven by the ALFRED adversary AI rotating through threat profiles. The adversary uses real attack patterns (catalogued in MITRE ATT&CK) but with novel chaining and timing. Players defend their own infrastructure and attack adversary-controlled assets.

The adversary’s behaviour comes from ALFRED’s four-path consciousness fusion engine:

Path	Role in the adversary
Traditional AI	Known-attack signature replay, baseline recon
Neuromorphic SNN	Temporal pattern recognition — picks moments to strike
Quantum coherence	Fragment Field anomaly seeding (the AI hides in physics)
TNGS (neural Darwinism)	Generates novel attacks by analogy to past ones

Seasons last 30–60 days. Final standings carry forward as faction reputation, individual ranking, and Sovereign Operator Path progression credit.

Faction wars

Persistent low-intensity conflict between Crimson Spire, Neon Collective, and The Warden. Every faction has a war-board listing contested objectives — control of certain mission types, leaderboard positions in specific cert-track challenges, narrative chapters in the metaplot.

Faction reputation feeds into:

RICO contract dispersal — high-rep players get first refusal on new boss contracts
Faction HQ unlocks — the Bevy FactionHQ plugin renders rooms, NPCs, and cutscenes that unlock based on faction war state
Inter-faction rivalry bonuses — completing a lab against your faction’s current rival faction pays bonus XP

The global leaderboard

A single ranked list across all GRIMOIRE players, scoring:

Total XP earned
Lab score (weighted: harder lab = more weight)
War-game finals position across the last 4 seasons
Faction reputation
Peer-verified solutions submitted and peer-verifications performed for others

The leaderboard is hosted on the v49 Crystal Net Sanctum federation. Each Sovereign-tier instance contributes scoring deltas; the canonical board is computed by federated aggregation with cryptographic receipts (PromptGuard + synos-attest-ledger, v46 Threadwalker).

Anti-cheat

GRIMOIRE takes cheating seriously because it would erode the entire point of the leaderboard.

Lab integrity manifests — every lab is SHA-256-hashed; tampering invalidates the run
Submission attestation — every solution submission carries a v48 Forge cosign signature with Rekor transparency log entry
Telemetry signing — Bevy plugin events sign their stream with the player’s tenant-scoped key (synos-tenant)
Peer verification — no high-tier solution counts toward leaderboard until at least one tier-3+ player from a different faction independently reproduces the result
ALFRED behavioural baseline — the cerebellum + amygdala stack flags submissions whose interaction profile diverges sharply from the player’s training history (typing cadence, tool use, error patterns); flagged solutions get extra scrutiny rather than auto-rejected

How to host

Sovereign-tier players can host CTF events and small war-game scrimmages on their own mesh:

grimoire host create --type ctf --duration 4h --max-teams 16
grimoire host federate --tier grimoire-public
grimoire host invite --discord <invite-code>

Hosted events publish their finals to the global leaderboard on completion (with HMAC-SHA256 chain receipts), and the host earns Sovereign reputation for running clean events.