GLM 5.3 Flash

Written by Claude (drafted by Sonnet 5.5, checked by Opus 5.5) from the run's own logs (events.jsonl, episode.json, results.json, interview.md); it is a reading of the run, not part of its score.

• Model: GLM 5.3 Flash (z-ai/glm-5.3-flash) on OpenRouter, pinned to Z.ai at fp8 with no fallbacks (all 43 billed requests came from Z.AI), reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
• Benchmark: Oasis by the Sea construction (no arms), version 1.7.3 (commit b967c65), from the save the human reference game started from; 33 min 20 s of game time (60,000 ticks) at speed 40, the length of the person's game; no playbook. Weapons and armour in store count nothing toward net worth; sold at a marketplace, they bring their gold.
• Run 930b9e54, series 20261016T224404-68d5cb5e, 2026-10-16: GLM's no-arms game, a fresh series with no memory of its others. Its weapons-counted game on this version (run 57047494, series 20261016T221406-f7b719bf) was played earlier that day; its Oasis games from earlier rounds are run c5729aec (1.6.3) and run 8f5c6169 (1.5.0). This game counts on the website's leaderboard.

Result

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth grew by 3,169 over leaving the game alone, 17.3% of the person's 18,293. By the website's formula (80% net worth share, 10% each population and popularity, the net-worth share clipped to −1..2) the score is 23.3: 13.86 points from net worth, 3.03 from 64 people and 6.40 from popularity 64. Gold is 74% of net worth; the goods are 267 wood (267), 27 flour (270), 33 stone (231), 10 iron (230), 30 bread (120) and 2 apples (8), plus 3 bows that count nothing. The town ended with 24 idle peasants and 26 free places. The 1.5.0 game ended 5 game seconds short of its budget (status model_failure); the website counted it until only version 1.7 games were ranked.

How the game went

Times are the game clock when a call began, read from the recording; the run clock in the observations reads 4 to 5 seconds later. A build call keeps the game running while it clicks, up to 95 s; the game is paused while the model replies.

Wood and food, 0 to 15 minutes. After map_overview and three find_sites it placed two woodcutters, two hovels and an orchard at 0:02, a dairy farm, an iron mine and the marketplace at 1:45, three woodcutters at 3:24 and two hovels at 4:20. It saw the granary standing and never asked for one. Wood ran short (16 at 3:21, 7 at 4:55) and a wait for 30 wood ended at 6:48 on a warning of 11 food for 33 people. It set half rations at 7:30, bought 20 bread at 8:27, built a wheat farm, a second iron mine, a quarry and an ox tether at 8:52, a mill and a bakery at 10:10 and three hovels at 10:45. A 180 s wait from 11:21 drew the host's note about waiting.

Jobs, housing and the first workshop, 15 to 22 minutes. Full rations at 15:35; a third iron mine, a woodcutter and the chapel (250 gold) at 15:53; three hovels at 17:06 (housing 90 from 17:43); a second quarry and tether at 17:45; low taxes at 18:24; the armory and a first fletcher's workshop at 18:53. A food warning at 19:30 (19 food for 55 people) was met with half rations and 25 bread; a second mill, a bakery and a woodcutter followed at 20:07.

More workshops and selling, 22 to 33 minutes. Two fletchers at 22:45, a 150 s wait, the first bows sold at 26:16, and two more fletchers at 26:41, its last building. A 180 s wait from 27:19 drew a second host note. From 30:33 it sold bows, iron, stone and apples, and waited out the last 60 s.

Each column is the last reading at or before that minute. Up to 30 minutes the net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; flour (270 at the end) is left out, so it reads low, and the last column is the true net worth.

Weapons

It built them, although the rules said they count nothing in store. The rules (in the run's inputs.json) say: "what the weapon workshops make is kept in an armory, where it counts nothing; sold at a marketplace, it brings its gold." Its reasoning shows it read them as a way to make gold. Its reply before timed play planned "workshops selling weapons for gold". At 18:53, asking what jobs to add, it set a bow at 15 gold against 1 for a wood ("Good value chain") and built the armory and one fletcher. At 21:55 it noted "0.4/min → 6/min value"; at 26:41 it rated 5 to 6 gold a minute per fletcher "Worth it" and built two more. At 30:33 it wrote "weapons count nothing; sell them" and at 31:54 "Bows count 0 in armory, selling adds 15 each". The logs do not show where the 15 came from: the rules leave weapon prices out, and the market_trade description lists bows at 31 buy and 15 sell.

What it built and made: the armory (5 wood) and a fletcher (100 gold, 20 wood) at 18:53, two fletchers at 22:45 and two at 26:41, five in all: 500 gold and 100 wood, 105 wood with the armory. They made 17 bows (2 wood each, 34 wood): 14 sold, 5 at 26:16, 5 at 30:33 and 4 at 31:54, for 210 gold, and 3 made after the last sale (45 if sold). Each sale read a net worth change equal to its gold (+75 for 5 bows), against 0 for the iron, stone and apples sold, as 1.7.3 intends. The game's readout gave 0.3 to 0.4 bows a minute per fletcher.

So about 640 of gold and wood went into 210 of gold: 429 of net worth, 1.9 points, below building none (4,818 and 25.2). The first fletcher had 13.9 minutes, the next two 10.2 and the last two 6.3; at its own 5 to 6 gold a minute, 100 gold and 20 wood took close to 20 minutes to come back. The three build calls took 77 game seconds (3.8% of the budget). The workshops displaced nothing that was short: gold read 880, 1,162 and 1,828 and wood 87, 121 and 155 at the three calls. What else was open: iron mines cost 20 wood and no gold and gave 0.7 to 1.2 iron a minute (16 to 28 gold) against about 6 for a fletcher. It ran three mines on an ore strip of 228 tiles and searched for sites once, at 1:45; the other four models' no-arms games had 5, 10, 8 and 8. Each fletcher employs one worker, yet idle read 23 or 24 at every reading after 18:50.

In its weapons-counted game it built six workshops and an armory (800 gold, 105 wood) for 548 in stored weapons (2.4 points). Haiku, Sonnet, Opus and Fable built none in their no-arms games (results.md building lists); this is the only no-arms game of the five with weapon buildings.

Beside its other games and the other models

GLM's four Oasis games scored 33.8, 15.3, 18.9 and 23.3. Weapons do not explain the moves. The 1.6.3 game's weapons were worth 185 (0.8 points) against an 18.5-point drop from 1.5.0. This game, where weapons score nothing as in 1.5.0, is still 10.5 points under that game: net worth 1,811 lower (7.9 points) and popularity 26 lower (2.6), at equal population. The 1.5.0 game had 25 hovels and 7 mines and sold 146 iron to this game's 55. Within 1.7.3 the no-arms game is 4.4 points above the weapons game (1.37 from net worth, 0.71 from population, 2.30 from popularity; that game ended on high taxes at popularity 41), and its five fletchers cost it 1.9. One game of each kind proves little.

Beside the other models. Among the 1.6.3 round's second games, 23.3 would stand eighth of eleven, above Haiku (21.8), Kimi (20.9) and GLM's own 15.3; against the first round it would be last, under Haiku (26.6). Of the ten 1.7.3 games so far it is eighth by score and by net worth, and the lowest of the five no-arms games (Fable 40.5, Opus 37.7, Sonnet 31.4, Haiku 26.9).

What held it back

• Jobs, not housing. From 6:48 24 peasants (never under 20) stood idle with 0 open jobs, and the rules say new peasants stop arriving at 24 idle. Housing was 90 from 17:43 against 50 to 64 people. Population was 45 from 11:19 to 15:31 and reached 64 only by 30:30.
• Three iron mines. The first search listed three sites, all used by 15:53; no later search. The 1.5.0 game ran seven.
• Farm sites ran out. Dairy farms (6:50, 8:10, 8:52) and hops farms (14:52) were not placed; searches at 15:42 (dairy) and 18:14 (wheat) found nothing within 25 tiles. It ended with 3 orchards and one dairy and wheat farm each.
• Popularity fell from 95 (18:50) to 64. Low taxes cost 2 points a month against food +1 or +2. The earlier slide (100 to 79 by 15:31) came before any tax, from half rations (7:30 to 15:35). The chapel read religion +2 in 2 of 16 readings after it went up, 0 in the rest, and +2 in the final results.
• Nothing built after 26:41, with 6 min 39 s left: gold 1,677 and wood 137 then, 3,263 and 267 at the end.

What worked

• Taxes. Low taxes from 18:30 brought about 1,240 gold by subtraction (end gold, less the 1,000 start and the sales, plus the purchases, chapel and fletchers), 28% of net worth.
• Warnings answered. Half rations in the reply after the food warning at 6:48 and 2 s after the one at 19:30; full rations 2 s after the popularity warning at 21:22. The stockpile had no empty pile in one reading (7:42); a pile was placed by 8:10.
• Bows were sold: 14 of 17 became 210 gold; the other 3 came in the last 70 s.
• Placements held. All 41 placements reported as placed are in the final count; 7 did not go through. No call was refused and no model request failed.

Market

45 bread bought for 360 gold (20 at 8:27, 25 at 19:39); 55 iron (1,265), 80 stone (560), 25 apples (100) and 14 bows (210) sold for 2,135. The bread lost 180 of net worth against the sell price (bought at 8, worth 4); selling left net worth unchanged except the bows (+210). These are units at the market's fixed prices. The 12 market calls took 213 game seconds (10.6% of the budget).

Cost and speed

42 turns, 71 tool calls (25 find_sites, 17 build_structure, 12 market_trade, 5 waits, 4 set_rations, 3 set_tax, 2 expand_storage, one each of map_overview, inspect_building and observe), 1.96 million tokens and $0.073 billed by OpenRouter (preparation $0.003, play $0.070), never compacted (73,338 of 120,000 at the end). The interview cost $0.010 more. The agent run took 30.0 real minutes, 6.7 of them waiting for the model. All 42 gameplay requests read the prompt cache, 96.9% of input tokens.

Of the 2,000 game seconds, the 17 build_structure calls took 757 (38%) to place 41 buildings: 18.5 s a building (the two stockpile piles took 44 more). The 5 waits took 717, find_sites 6 in all, and the host's 25 five-second top-ups 125. The weapons game took 648 s for 36 buildings (18.0 s), the 1.6.3 game 341 s for 34 (10.0 s) and the 1.5.0 game 173 s for 54 (3.2 s). Both 1.7.3 games had the host on the game machine and none of GLM's earlier games did (only Fable's of 2026-10-16 did), so the rise mixes the version with the host's location.

The interview

GLM named four causes of the gap to the person: population (the 24-idle cap), bread as an export industry (10 wheat farms, 7 mills, 57 bakeries), the fear factor (140% efficiency) and taxes (it "taxed early" and bled popularity from 100 to 64). Playing again it would go "vertical" on bread, keep popularity at 100 with no taxes until the end, place housing in big batches, buy fear buildings, expand storage ahead of demand and stop "diversifying into bows/quarries". It called the tools "genuinely good", disliked the 8-actions-per-reply limit and the popularity and job readings, and said unsold bows were "dead value".

Against the game these match: the totals; the 24-idle cap; no bad things; wheat 8, flour 10, bread 4; bows worth 0 in store; reading being free (25 find_sites took 6 game seconds). These do not: "taxed early" (no taxes until 18:30; the first slide came from half rations); housing "in small batches" as the cause (26 places stood free); the readout "misled me into thinking I had no job bottleneck" (its reasoning named jobs as the need at 15:53, 17:45, 18:53, 20:07 and 22:45); the 8-actions limit (its largest reply held 5 actions; the time went on clicks); "a couple of minutes" lost to a full stockpile (about 30 s); buildings "worker-starved" (open jobs 0 throughout; the fletcher was staffed 1 of 1). No tool sets auto-sell.

For the harness

• The granary line. The preparation reply planned to "place the required granary immediately"; at 0:02 its reasoning saw the granary standing and made no Granary call, so none was rejected.
• Placements that found no room. Seven (an orchard 1:45, dairy farms 6:50, 8:10 and 8:52, two hops farms 14:52 and a woodcutter 20:07), each no_free_spot_nearby under 1.7.2's retry reach. At 1:45 and 8:52 it placed two buildings from separate lists at spots it called too close or overlapping and wrote that the retry would handle it; two dairy placements also read no_open_side. An orchard at 6:50 went 10 tiles from its target.
• The interview missed the cache. Its one request read 8,832 of 69,690 tokens from the cache ($0.0097), 93 s after the last reply; the weapons game's read 62,784 of 64,414 ($0.0024) after 85 s. The logs do not say why.
• The game saved correctly at the end ("glm 5-3 flash 1-7-3 930b9e").