EDIT: Seems like Intelligence also plays a in the below. Oh boy. Agility is the most important stat without question. That is not to say you should ignore the other stats, but if you watch this video you will understand how a party with very low agility will not make it far.

Agility does the following: Speed (Order of Attack, low agility rarely goes compared to high agility) Hit Rate% (Physical and Magical) Evasion (% of how often an enemy will miss an attack on you)

STR adds additional damage on top of the damage rolls from your weapon. 2-11 STR adds nothing, 12-15 STR adds 1, 16-19 STR adds 2, and 20 STR adds 3. Beyond that the Strength spell adds +4 damage on the receiving character.

INT only seems to affect Initiative and Magician's starting MP.

AGI affects To-Hit, Evasion, and Initiative.

The full explanation of how Initiative works: Each of your characters has a starting initiative = random[0,9] + agility + intelligence + weapon initiative + currentHP - maxHP.

Monsters have a simpler formula replacing the non-random components with a value in the monster record.

The current turn is based on the highest initiative. In case of ties, monsters (in their order 1, 2, ...) go first followed by player characters (in their order).

Taking a turn drops your initiative by 5 (set to 0 if you had a positive score but less than 5 points left). When everyone's initiative reaches 0, the initiative round is over and the numbers are all rerolled. Monsters can choose to pass their turn which deducts from initiative without taking an action.

There are 2 major bugs with how initiative works.

The first bug is the initiative underflow glitch. This is a really good bug. You'll notice that your initiative is penalized by the amount of damage you've taken. If all of the other factors are bad you can underflow to 255 initiative. Since each turn costs 5 initiative this often gives you 30+ turns of action in a row before anyone else gets to go. Unfortunately your bad stats will make the character suck so it requires careful building. The best way to exploit it is using a warrior at 2 intelligence with a low-initiative weapon that has high to-hit (luckily the Ruby Sword fits this) and with as much agility as you can get away with safely.

The second bug is the zombie attack glitch. This is a really bad bug. When a monster gets killed, it's initiative gets set to 0 to take it out of combat. Monster HP is never checked again so when the initiative round ends dead monsters get a new initiative value just like everyone else. This lets all of the dead monsters rejoin combat and start attacking again. Since they're already dead there's no way to kill them again to stop it from happening.

For party members the basic combat formulas are:

To-Hit = random[0,9] + agility + weapon to-hit Evade = agility + AC

Your attack is successful if player to-hit >= monster's evade. The other way around it's monster to-hit roll > player's evade.

When calculating to-hit monsters roll a random[2,12] choice.

If 2 <= random < 11 then to-hit = random + monster base to-hit if random >= 11 then to-hit = 128 + monster base to-hit

So I had to experiment with that first glitch and I did this. Kind of skeptical of its use in Any%. Maybe in the longer one where you have a longer time to build up the crappy character's health for a better chance to activate the glitch and to be able to actually HIT the darn enemies!

Anyway its a variation of that first one. The start of the battle seems to do that same calculation. Only seems to calculate stats of the members that are alive.

The bad thing with this is that if you try and run away then while the first guy seems to run away it is really likely someone else is gonna get smacked a couple times.

That second unkillable zombie pack glitch sounds horrendous!