Proposal: How to Play the Synthesizer
Replace the first three paragraphs of “Synthesis” with:-
Each Genetic Engineer has a Planned Mutation, privately tracked by the Head Researcher: this is either a Mutation from the Mutations subrule along with any specified information that it requires, or is blank.
A Genetic Engineer may, as a Virtual Action, pay the cost of a Mutation to change their Planned Mutation to it, so long as they meet any Requirements that Mutation has. If the Mutation requires anything to be specified, they should specify it when taking the action. A Genetic Engineer may also set their Planned Mutation to blank, as a Virtual Action.
Submissions is the number of Genetic Engineers whose Planned Mutation is not blank, out of the total of Healthy Genetic Engineers, and is publicly tracked by the Head Researcher.
If every Healthy Genetic Engineer has a non-blank Planned Mutation, then the Head Researcher can and should perform the Synthesize action, an atomic action consisting of the following steps:
Add a rule called “The Filing Cabinet”:-
The Head Researcher may, at any time, set a Genetic Engineer’s Planned Mutation to match that Genetic Engineer’s most recent Mutation request under the ruleset prior to the enactment of “How to Play the Synthesizer”.
The Head Researcher may repeal this rule at any time.
Making “privately submit to the Head Researcher a single Mutation” into a virtual action so that it inherits all the boilerplate for that. Right now it has a hardcoded change-your-request option, but no option to just cancel a request, nor the ability for the Emperor to say if and why an action failed.
(I started spitballing a subtype of virtual action for “only process when every player has submitted an order”, but “set a decision as virtual, process when all are set” seems to do the job.)
