Part 130: Mechanics Talk 6 - LOB and Rankings

Mechanics Talk 6: LOB and Rankings

I've mentioned before that LOB is our currency in this game, which we use to buy new Agents and upgrade existing Agents as well. We get LOB at the end of every day based on our ranking. That ranking, in turn, is based on how many Agents survive at the end of the day. Casualties lower your LOB gains, so another, slower spiral this game has is one of surviving days but losing multiple Agents, meaning you have to pay LOB to replace them and power them up, but you don't get as many LOB because of the number of Agents you're losing, so they're less powerful, so they die, so you lose more LOB that you already can't afford to lose anymore.

Let's cover how rankings work next. Every day has a base number of LOB we can earn, and the rankings actually provide a multiplier to that base number, according to the chart below:



Basically, to get the most LOB we need to keep 90% or more of our Agents alive. To calculate LOB, we then shove that modifier into this equation:

LOB is the day's base LOB amount. This amount will go up the further into the game the day is, and also spikes whenever we open a new department. Penalty is a penalty for ending the day while Abnormalities are breaching. The various risk levels have different penalties applied, as seen here:



ZAYIN Abnormalities cannot escape, and so are not included.

Later on, we will get an upgrade that gives an additional bonus to our LOB gain by putting the number from the first equation through a second one seen here:

This is added on to our base LOB, so early game days would be giving 4 instead of 3, and so on. LOB generally becomes less of a problem as we go, so long as we avoid having to consistently replace Agents.

All of this is basically a lot of words to explain why I'm not immediately showing off things like Laetitia's heartfelt gift. We can't really afford to lose Agents this early since we're dropping at least 4 LOB on each of them to get them up to 2/2/2/1 for the mirror, on top of losing one Agent right now dropping our LOB gains by an additional 1-2 points. Throwing 6 points down a sinkhole on day 7-8 isn't wise.