You asked
How much does a city cost to build?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Scythebg-169786-en-1e
Answered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but Scythe has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
I looked through Scythe's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.
The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
You can build structures (structure tokens) to enhance your actions, control territories, and get end-game bonuses. The resource used to build structures is wood. To build a structure, pay the cost, pick up any structure from your Player Mat, and place it on a territory you control with at least one
12 Pay the cost ($1) and gain one of the following: POWER: Increase your power by 2 on the Power Track. Power is the commodity you will spend in combat. COMBAT CARD(S): Draw 1 combat card. Combat cards are used to augment the power you spend in combat (you may spend up to 1 combat card per character
Number of tunnel territories adjacent to your structures. Only count each tunnel once. A Mine does not count as a tunnel for this purpose, and rivers do not break adjacency. Number of tunnel territories with your structures on them. A Mine does not count as a tunnel for this purpose. Number of lakes
The Factory is the centerpiece of the Scythe board. It is a place of technological innovation and untapped power. Unlike most other territories, the Factory does not produce any resources. At the end of the game, the Factory is worth a total of 3 territories (instead of just 1) to the player who con
14 The bottom-row actions are in the same order on all Player Mats, but the costs and benefits vary. The Player Mat visuals and the default costs and benefits explained in this section are based on the starting position of each Player Mat. OVERLAPPING TURNS: Usually when a player starts to take the
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- warm abstain
-
- this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
- corpus profile
- live,vps
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 78 ms · ask 2336 ms · total 2418 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 2418 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 18, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You can build structures (structure tokens) to enhance your actions, control territories, and get end-game bonuses. The resource used to build structures is wood. To build a structure, pay the cost, pick up any structure from your Player Mat, and place it on a territory you control with at least one", "headingPath": "BUILD", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "12 Pay the cost ($1) and gain one of the following: POWER: Increase your power by 2 on the Power Track. Power is the commodity you will spend in combat. COMBAT CARD(S): Draw 1 combat card. Combat cards are used to augment the power you spend in combat (you may spend up to 1 combat card per character", "headingPath": "CONTROLLED BY CHARACTER AND/OR MECHS · BOLSTER · TRADE", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Number of tunnel territories adjacent to your structures. Only count each tunnel once. A Mine does not count as a tunnel for this purpose, and rivers do not break adjacency. Number of tunnel territories with your structures on them. A Mine does not count as a tunnel for this purpose. Number of lakes", "headingPath": "BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The Factory is the centerpiece of the Scythe board. It is a place of technological innovation and untapped power. Unlike most other territories, the Factory does not produce any resources. At the end of the game, the Factory is worth a total of 3 territories (instead of just 1) to the player who con", "headingPath": "THE FACTORY", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "14 The bottom-row actions are in the same order on all Player Mats, but the costs and benefits vary. The Player Mat visuals and the default costs and benefits explained in this section are based on the starting position of each Player Mat. OVERLAPPING TURNS: Usually when a player starts to take the ", "headingPath": "PRODUCE · BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS · UPGRADE", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "When you reach a pinnacle of empire building, your faction rewards you with a star. Stars are worth coins at the end of the game. Here are the ways to place stars, as shown on the Triumph Track: Complete all 6 upgrades Deploy all 4 mechs Build all 4 structures Enlist all 4 recruits When you achieve ", "headingPath": "PLACING STARS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Pay the cost (depending on what is shown on all exposed red rectangles before taking the Produce action), choose up to 2 different territories you control, and all workers on those territories may produce. On the territories you selected for production, each worker may produce 1 token. The resource ", "headingPath": "PRODUCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The ashes from the first Great W ar still darken the snow in 1920s Europa. The capitalistic city-state known simply as 'The Factory, ' which fueled the war with heavily armored mechs, has closed its doors, drawing the attention of several nearby countries. With characters from five factions convergi", "headingPath": "BACKSTORY · OBJECT OF THE GAME · GOAL", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 114 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 114 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 21 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 19 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 17 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- debug row retained until
- Nov 12, 2026 06:58
retrieval — what the passage search returned
what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.
per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| fused rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | BUILD | p.18 | 0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | CONTROLLED BY CHARACTER AND/OR MECHS · BOLSTER · TRADE | p.12 | 0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS | p.19 | 0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | THE FACTORY | p.25 | 0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | PRODUCE · BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS · UPGRADE | p.14 | 0.030769 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | PLACING STARS | p.27 | 0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | PRODUCE | p.13 | 0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | BACKSTORY · OBJECT OF THE GAME · GOAL | p.1 | 0.029412 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it
what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.
candidate pool: the answering read scored 43 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.
floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.
arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.
| read at | document | heading | page | fused rank | fused RRF score | carried by | how it got its slot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | BUILD | p.18 | #1 | 0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | DEPLOY · SAXONY | p.15 | #13 | 0.013699 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one)) | vector | the re-ranker chose it |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | PLACING STARS | p.27 | #6 | 0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | TOP-ROW ACTIONS · MOVE | p.11 | #9 | 0.014493 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one)) | vector | the re-ranker chose it |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | PRODUCE | p.13 | #7 | 0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | PLACING STARS · GAME END AND SCORING · EDGE CASES · SAMPLE SCORING ROUND · END-GAME SCORING | p.28 | #14 | 0.013514 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one)) | vector | the re-ranker chose it |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | BACKSTORY · OBJECT OF THE GAME · GOAL | p.1 | #8 | 0.029412 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) | CONTROLLED BY CHARACTER AND/OR MECHS · BOLSTER · TRADE | p.12 | #2 | 0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 78 ms · first delta 2281 ms · total 2418 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 0 ms · retrieval 78 ms · ask 2336 ms · gateway work 2418 ms · total 2418 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3537
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 152.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.059 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s ago)
- stream path
- streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
- watchdog
- first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
- num_ctx · think posture
- both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
disposition
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
-
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 2), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one
Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.