The match plays fair: deeper pool, no regicide, serves from the line

"the player is too weak in this mode. also the killing by smashing occurs too
often. i cant really control it. maybe obsolete? also the serving after the
first serve does not happen from behind the groundline".

matchPlayerHp 8 — the match brings its own pool. The gore mode's 4 was an
inheritance, not a decision, and a real game has rallies you deserve to lose
without the run ending.

Regicide is out of the match (kept in the duel, where any-weapon-counts is
the point of sudden death). In a full game every hard serve that happened to
meet the body was a free kill nobody aimed. A match ball never damages the
opponent — it passes through like a soft ball and racketAI plays it — so the
wound stages are exactly the scoreboard. That also made hp-per-opponent
meaningless, so the ladder escalates in racketAI instead: +12% speed per body
felled, whiff chance x0.82 per rung.

And serving resets to behind the baseline with real deuce/ad mirroring:
setupPoint's "serve from wherever you're standing" branch now excludes the
match, which falls through to the tennis positioning. Verified live: second
serve from z 24.3, x mirrored to the ad side, opponent unwounded by anything
but the score.

38 tests, 15 seeds clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

test.js

@@ -531,23 +531,39 @@ test('a point won tears a wound stage off the body; only the game point fells it
   assert.ok(!zombies.includes(zb), 'the game-winning point IS the kill');
   const next = oppOf();
   assert.ok(next && next !== zb, 'a fresh opponent shambled on');
-  assert.equal(next.hpMax, TUNE.matchOppHp + TUNE.matchOppHpPer, 'with a deeper pool');
+  assert.equal(next.hpMax, TUNE.matchOppHp, 'same flat pool — the ladder escalates in speed/flub, not hp');
   assert.equal(G.runGames, 1, 'the ladder banked the game');
   assert.deepEqual(score.pts, [0, 0], 'and the points reset');
 });
 
-test('their points draw blood, and the fourth is the run', () => {
+test('their points draw blood from the MATCH pool, and running dry is the run', () => {
   startMatch();
-  G.hp = TUNE.playerHp;
-  for (let k = 1; k <= 3; k++) {
-    resolveInterlude('O');
-    assert.equal(G.hp, TUNE.playerHp - k, 'point ' + k + ' cost a wound');
-    assert.notEqual(G.mode, 'eaten');
-  }
+  assert.equal(G.hp, TUNE.matchPlayerHp, 'the match brings its own, deeper pool');
+  resolveInterlude('O');
+  assert.equal(G.hp, TUNE.matchPlayerHp - 1, 'a point costs one');
+  G.hp = 1;
   resolveInterlude('O');
   assert.equal(G.mode, 'eaten', 'blood only — and it runs out the way it always does');
 });
 
+test('a match ball never wounds the body: the score is the only way through', () => {
+  startMatch();
+  const zb = oppOf();
+  // a full-power ball straight into the opponent — the regicide path, now closed for matches
+  ball.active = true; ball.lastHit = 'P'; ball.y = 1.2; ball.pow = 1; ball.bounces = 0;
+  ball.x = zb.x; ball.z = zb.z; ball.vx = 0; ball.vy = 0; ball.vz = -1;
+  for (let i = 0; i < 5; i++) update(DT);
+  assert.ok(zombies.includes(zb), 'still standing');
+  assert.equal(zb.hp, zb.hpMax, 'and unwounded — "killing by smashing" is out of the match');
+});
+
+test('the ladder escalates in speed and reliability, not in hp', () => {
+  // pure arithmetic on the knobs racketAI reads — pinned so a future tuning pass cannot silently
+  // flatten the ladder again
+  assert.ok(TUNE.matchSpeedPer > 0, 'each opponent is faster');
+  assert.ok(TUNE.matchFlubKeep < 1, 'and whiffs less');
+});
+
 test('a game won heals, so a clean player can go the distance', () => {
   startMatch();
   G.hp = 1;