When the Plan Changes: A Strategic World Testbed for Dynamic Multi-Agent Coordination

Abstract

Changing an objective does not automatically revise agents'earlier plans or delegated tasks. Acknowledgment can coexist with obsolete execution, while misleading instructions can redirect work or discard retained constraints. We present a Strategic World simulation testbed that separates authoritative objectives, local plans, notice receipt, and consequential action. Six intervention families vary objectives, conditions, authority, membership, and communication. Matched protocols and deadlines establish feasibility for the tested disturbances. Controlled trajectories demonstrate that identical completion and acknowledgment summaries can conceal uninformed obsolete work, obsolete work after receipt, or blocked unsafe intent. Local language-model trials and instructed action probes reveal competence limits that constrain interpretation of dynamic failures. A further 16-episode comparison evaluates an engineered guard that prioritizes pending notice submissions over local work. It completes 4/4 held-out settings, compared with 1/4 for a calibrated assisted baseline. Each episode contains one large language model actor and two fixed peers. These results establish diagnostic distinctions and bounded policy feasibility under explicit simulation assumptions; they do not establish frontier-model reliability or autonomous team adaptation.