You asked
When the barbarian ship reaches the end of the barbarian track and the barbarians win the attack, how is the barbarians' strength calculated, and can a city holding a metropolis be pillaged?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Catanbg-13-en-1e
I looked through Catan'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.
This 'Catan Almanac' contains detailed, alphabetical entries and examples for Catan . These are not the 'Game Rules.' You do not have to read this material prior to your first game. Instead, use the Game Rules. Then read this to enjoy the complete experience. This almanac includes advanced rules and
You cannot build a city directly. You can only upgrade an existing settlement to a city. You pay the required resources, return the settlement to your supply, and replace the settlement with a city on the same intersection Y . Each city is worth 2 victory points. You receive double resource producti
The robber begins the game in the desert Y . It is moved only by rolling a '7' Y or playing a Knight Y card. If the robber is moved to any other terrain hex, it prevents that hex from producing resources. Players with settlements and/or cities adjacent to the target terrain hex receive no resources
You may only establish a city by upgrading one of your settlements. When you upgrade a settlement to a city, put the settlement (house) piece back in your supply and replace it with a city piece (church). Cities produce twice as many resources as settlements. You acquire 2 resource cards for an adja
On your turn, you must roll the dice for the turn's resource production. The number rolled determines which hexes produce resources. Each number appears twice-except for '2' and '12,' which only appear once. All players who have settlements Y or cities Y on the hexes indicated by the roll receive th
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 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 107 ms · ask 2691 ms · total 2798 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 2798 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "This 'Catan Almanac' contains detailed, alphabetical entries and examples for Catan . These are not the 'Game Rules.' You do not have to read this material prior to your first game. Instead, use the Game Rules. Then read this to enjoy the complete experience. This almanac includes advanced rules and", "headingPath": "almanac", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "You cannot build a city directly. You can only upgrade an existing settlement to a city. You pay the required resources, return the settlement to your supply, and replace the settlement with a city on the same intersection Y . Each city is worth 2 victory points. You receive double resource producti", "headingPath": "Cities", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The robber begins the game in the desert Y . It is moved only by rolling a '7' Y or playing a Knight Y card. If the robber is moved to any other terrain hex, it prevents that hex from producing resources. Players with settlements and/or cities adjacent to the target terrain hex receive no resources ", "headingPath": "roBBer", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "You may only establish a city by upgrading one of your settlements. When you upgrade a settlement to a city, put the settlement (house) piece back in your supply and replace it with a city piece (church). Cities produce twice as many resources as settlements. You acquire 2 resource cards for an adja", "headingPath": "c) City Y Requires: 3 Ore & 2 Grain", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "On your turn, you must roll the dice for the turn's resource production. The number rolled determines which hexes produce resources. Each number appears twice-except for '2' and '12,' which only appear once. All players who have settlements Y or cities Y on the hexes indicated by the roll receive th", "headingPath": "resourCe produCtion", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If you roll a '7' for resource production, none of the players receive resources. Instead: Each player counts their resource cards. Any player with more than 7 resource cards (i.e., 8 or more) must choose and discard half of them. Return discards to the supply stacks. If you hold an odd number of ca", "headingPath": "rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The island of Catan lies before you. The isle consists of 19 terrain tiles surrounded by ocean. Your goal is to settle on Catan, and expand your territory until it becomes the largest and most glorious in Catan. 1 There are five productive terrain types and one desert on Catan. Each terrain type pro", "headingPath": "almanaC index", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "If you roll a '7,' no one receives any resources. Instead, every player who has more than 7 resource cards must select half (rounded down) of their resource cards and return them to the bank. Then you must move the robber Y . Proceed as follows: You must move the robber Y immediately to the number t", "headingPath": "a) Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
- 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 43 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 43 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- debug row retained until
- Nov 12, 2026 23:53
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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | almanac | p.6 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Cities | p.6 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | roBBer | p.11 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | c) City Y Requires: 3 Ore & 2 Grain | p.5 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | resourCe produCtion | p.10 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer | p.11 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | almanaC index | p.16 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | a) Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber Y | p.5 | 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 74 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | endinG the Game | p.5 | #28 | 0.011364 (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 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Illustration R | p.13 | #73 | 0.007519 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | viCtory points | p.14 | #12 | 0.013889 (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 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Illustration A | p.3 | #71 | 0.007634 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | R P | p.3 | #72 | 0.007576 (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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | set-up, variaBle | p.13 | #40 | 0.01 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | p.1 | #74 | 0.007463 (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 | |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | endinG the Game | p.7 | #11 | 0.014085 (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 |
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 107 ms · first delta 2716 ms · total 2798 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 107 ms · ask 2691 ms · gateway work 2798 ms · total 2798 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 870
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 147.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.061 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 24s 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 1), 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.