Part 139: Mechanics Talk 13 - Handling Impossible Abnormalities

Mechanics Talk 13: Handling Impossible Abnormalities

At some point, every manager gets hit by an Abnormality that they just can't handle. Resetting back to Day 1 or a Memory Repository can work most of the time, but since most annoying Abnormalities have excellent gear it can be worth it to try and keep them around anyways. Today, we'll be discussing some considerations to keep in mind when dealing with a situation like this. Since all the Abnormalities are so different, all I can really give is some things to keep in mind-we're going a bit more vague than usual today.

First off: it's important to know going in whether we're going to be keeping the Abnormality or doing some kind of reset. If we're resetting, we can throw away resources much more freely than if we're not.

The most important thing to do when dealing with a problem Abnormality is know what it does. If an Abnormality is giving us trouble, we can poke it with our best Agents until we find something that works, and use that to unlock the Managerial Tips. Retries are free, and burning a couple on getting full information on an Abnormality's rules is a good trade.

Once we know the rules of the Abnormality, we get to take a look at our facility and figure out a plan to work with it. Ideally, we'll just have an Agent who can consistently work with it and not mess up whatever rules it has, but that's not always an option. When it's not, we should look to our tools to see if any can give us an advantage to make things more workable. In our case, that's Mirror, Portrait and You Must Be Happy. Using them we could do something like lower our Fortitude to work an Abnormality with a Fortitude cap (temporarily or permanently), or try and pass our damage onto an Agent who can use the regenerator to heal back up.

Sometimes, clever micromanagement can also manage to deal with problems with Abnormalities. Punishing Bird is the primary example, but there are a number of Abnormalities which can be dealt with by placing Agents by themselves in the general area of the cell and using them as necessary. For instance: one we may see at some point makes the agent into a sort of 'plague bearer' which must be carefully kept away from everyone else in the facility or else they'll infect everyone with horrible pink deathflu. To deal with it, I'd wind up moving the other Agents in the department to a different room, and micromanage movements in order to ensure that nobody's paths ever crossed. This would mean that only the Clerks would catch horrible pink deathflu, and as we all know: Clerks don't count.

The last option is one for if we don't think we can handle the Abnormality, but think we'll be able to do it soon: Ignore it. Abnormalities don't need to be worked unless they've been hit by a Meltdown, and a number of them can be ignored even when melting down. It's worth a shot. The downside of this, however, is that Meltdowns spawn more frequently throughout the day as it goes on-using this tactic forces shorter days, which in turn causes less training, which in turn can lead to being underequipped for future Abnormalities… Lobotomy Corporation's most insidious deaths are the ones that happen slowly, over the course of 5-10 days.

Anyways, that's pretty much it for options when dealing with a particularly frustrating Abnormality. Just remember: Figure out how it works, consider what our facility has and how we can work around how it works, and the Memory Repository is always there if we need it-the game heavily expects us to use it.