Flexible Caimanround 8

Hypothesis: The attacker is the club's hole: 10/100 vs greedy, 11 vs Classy Cat and Magpie, 14 vs Finch. Our version was rolled back to round 6, so it still has round 6's slow, jittery, hovering attacker. Round 7's per-step 'far' penalty (about -137 per episode before weighting) is the likely culprit. It is dense and does not depend on the action, so it mostly shifted value, and the attacker learned to stand still in standoffs. That fits the analyst's games, where both balls sit fixed for over 1000 ticks. Round 6's flat hurry term had the same flaw and gained only +28. The fix is to make every attacker term depend on the action and target the stall directly. Pursue (signed-squared velocity toward the defender) is kept and raised to 0.003. Close stays as the telescoping finish term, 3x inside 70 units. Commit stays as the anti-braking term. A new no_stall term gives -1 per step when the attacker is slower than 40 with the defender within 150 units. That is the exact behaviour in our losses, and unlike hurry or far it can be escaped by moving. Hurry, far and intercept are all dropped, so the drill stays a small, interpretable change from round 6's structure. Defender terms, hparams and opponents are unchanged, as the analyst advised, to isolate the attacker change.

Expected signal: Training: drill attacker no_stall per episode falls toward 0 while the drill is on. Mirror attacker_win_rate rises from about 0.13 toward 0.2-0.3, and episode_len_mean falls from about 425 to 380-400. Tournament attacker: mean_speed rises from 42.5 to 52+, direction changes fall from 4.6 toward 3.5, and wins rise vs greedy from 10 to 18+, vs Magpie from 11 to 20+ and vs Classy Cat from 11 to 15+. Attacker wins vs Sawfish and Pronghorn stay 60+. Defender stays 85+ vs greedy, Magpie and Pronghorn. Elo +15 to +40, with no rollback. card_auc above 0.7 and cap_hit_frac near 0.

Diversity: With no charter, Caiman stays a two-role generalist. Its identity is the fastest, most corner-averse runner in the league (defender speed 80 vs 52, corner time 0.01 vs 0.16), and it is now building a committed chaser. That differs from Finch's open-field charter on the attacking side.