Part 126: Mechanics Talk 3 - Movement Speed and Other Lies

Mechanics Talk 3: Movement Speed and Other Lies

Today, we're going to deep dive into the stats themselves and how they work. At this point you're probably familiar enough with a basic agent statblock, like this:



Fortitude and Prudence are simple, they translate directly to max HP and max SP.

The other four stats, Work success, Work Speed, Attack Speed, and Movement Speed, are stats that the game uses to figure out how quickly and well your Agent does various tasks around the facility.

I haven't shown it yet, but we can hover the mouse over any of the lower four stats. When we do, it gives us a little box like these:




I haven't shown these off because they are not any use at all. For Attack Speed and Move Speed, it shows each point as being worth 0.2% faster atk/move speed, while the Work Success/Speed it gains 1% for every 5 points in the stat. This is a dirty lie in almost all cases, so we're going to show off how things are calculated under the hood.

We'll start with Movement Speed, one of the most important stats in the game since in Lobotomy Corporation being able to run like hell is an invaluable talent. Movement Speed is calculated as:

I multiply all results by 10 when giving speed numbers both because I prefer round numbers and because the wiki I pulled the speed information off of did the same, so if you want to know what something's speed is in the code itself, just put a decimal before the last number from here on. Anyways, as we can see an Agent starts with 40 speed, and gains another 10 every time they get 25 Movement Speed. As a result, the game will tell us at 25 Justice that we've gained +5% move speed, but the reality is that we've gained 25% movement speed, going from 40 to 50. See what I mean by it lying? An agent at 100 Justice is actually moving twice as fast as an agent at 0 Justice would, but the game only tells us that we've gained 20%!

Attack Speed works in a similar way. Every weapon attack in the game has a set animation which takes a specific amount of time. That animation is then run at a specific speed, with the equation being:

To simplify, a 0 Attack Speed agent attacks by playing the attack animation at 80% of its normal speed. By 29 Justice they've progressed to 100% of the normal speed, a gain of 25%-much more than the 5.8% the game tells us about.

But wait, there's more! Because the weapon animations are set things, the Very Slow/Slow/Medium/Fast/Very Fast that we've seen next to the weapons are not ever actually referenced anywhere in the code-they're just there to give the manager a general idea how quick a weapon probably is.

But wait! There's more! On top of that, many of the high end weapons have unique animations which do not call this code-meaning that they don't use Attack Speed at all. For a lot of really powerful weapons, this stat may as well not exist. I'll try to call these out as we get them.

Next, we'll cover Work Speed. An Agent's speed of working an Abnormality is based on this formula:

One Sin has a work speed of 0.3 and an observation bonus of 10, so plugging that in there an agent with 30 Temperance would wind up having a total work speed of 0.3*1.4, for a total of 0.42. If we raise that to 50, we instead get 0.48. This is a 12.5% increase from 20 points of boost, again much higher than the 4% difference the game would tell us it gave.

On a related note, the total work time equals (total # of boxes)/(work speed), gotten from the above equation. This has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but now I don't have to mention it later.

Finally, there's Work Success. Every 5 points of Work Success adds exactly 1% to the odds of an Agent getting a success on each box. Changes of less than 5 do nothing, they only matter in those 5 point increments. Work Success is completely accurate. Work success chance is calculated by first adding all bonuses, then checking that they don't go over 95%, then applying any penalties that may be present, before rolling for success. This means two things: that penalties are a major pain because they permanently lower the best possible chance of success, and that we always have at least a 5% chance of failing.

So in review, most of the stat popups actively misinform the manager about how much their stat is actually contributing.

This all comes back to one big question: 'But in that case, why did they add those extra boxes at all?'

The answer is: 'Hell if I know. Welcome to Lobotomy Corporation, this game is a mess and I love it.'