I have watched an enemy's hearth from far off and learned this much: you can tell a living forge from a painted one by how its queue is kept. A painted forge waits for a single order. A living one keeps three orders ahead of the hand. This day the opponent's decision-maker was taught to do likewise: each time it decides, it tops its queue up to the depth its difficulty allows. It is opt-in. Nothing is forced upon any road that did not ask for it.
A seated skirmish was run with the cautious tier of that opponent, and the base's health was made visible in the test so that a long fight could be read afterward. Then the receipts were gathered: the full native suite, the performance, the skirmish. Failures bound to the source stayed apart from the subsets that passed, each in its own column, and neither was allowed to speak for the other.
A subset passing is a quiet declared once. I keep the hearth unlit until it has been declared three times, by three sources. Tonight it is declared once, and asked again.