How do they work?

Here’s an example image of a simple track from the simulator, of a Late Surger uma in the Ibis Summer Dash race. The red line is the uma’s current speed.

There are four phases of a race, but for the most part we can combine the last two. These phases are: the Opening Leg, which lasts for the first 1/6th; the Middle Leg, which lasts for the next 3/6ths; the Final Leg, which is the next 1/6th; the Last Spurt, which is the final 1/6th. Skills refer to these phases, for example, On Your Left! triggers in the Final Leg, and In Body and Mind triggers in the Last Spurt.

Each uma has a target speed during each phase. For the formulas, check the Technical Doc linked below. For the most part, you can simply know that umas will run faster in each phase, except for Front Runners who run slower in the Middle Leg than the Opening Leg. The Final Leg and Last Spurt use the same numbers, so they can be considered as one phase.

Before the Final Leg, your Speed stat doesn’t affect your target speed. Only Wit affects it slightly. In the Final Leg, after your uma begins her spurt, both Speed and Guts affect your speed. The spurt is when your uma starts spending all her energy to try to finish the race.

When you’re not at top speed, you’re accelerating. Power affects how fast you accelerate. Umas start out stationary at the start of the race, then accelerate to their Opening Leg speed. They then accelerate to the Middle Leg speed once that phase starts, and then to their Final Leg speed when that starts. If your uma doesn’t start her spurt immediately when the Final Leg starts, she’ll later accelerate to her spurt speed. During these periods, Acceleration skills are useful, but outside of them, Acceleration skills are useless. The reverse is also true. Speed skills are useless while accelerating, though they can last beyond the acceleration, and if they last into the accel, then your starting point is raised, saving time. (see Spurt Speed Carry-over)

Your uma’s speed in the final leg is affected by her remaining HP. When the Final Leg starts, she will decide how fast to run and when to start running fast based on that HP, with higher Wisdom making her do more optimal decisions.

Let’s see a chart with a late spurt to see the implications. Red will be the healthy uma, and the blue will be an uma without enough Stamina. This uma lacks the required Stamina for the track, so she had to delay her spurt. The dip in the speed at the end is what happens when an uma runs out of HP: their speed quickly drops. If your uma is severely lacking in HP, she might not spurt at all, making your Speed stat useless.

If an uma uses a recovery during the last two phases, she’ll reconsider her strategy and might alter it. (This is an update that happens later. This doesn’t happen on Global currently. Recoveries that happen in the final leg are wasted on Global.) Here’s an example. (The blue recovery line is covering the red spurt start line) In the above graph, the uma didn’t have enough HP remaining to start her spurt immediately. However, the Breath of Fresh Air recovery triggered, restoring 5.5% of her HP. With the newfound HP, she decided to start her spurt right then. This isn’t as optimal as having the recovery trigger earlier. As you can see, there’s a plateau before the recovery, where she wasn’t accelerating. If the recovery had triggered earlier, she would have been accelerating all the time, like in the first graph. But, it’s still better than in the second graph.

To show the impact of acceleration skills, let’s look at a well-timed Turbo Sprint. This increased acceleration resulted in the blue uma winning by 3.5 lengths. Acceleration skills are very powerful when they work and the meta tends to revolve around them for this reason.

There are some other features of tracks.

Corners: If you remember your high school math classes, the circumference of a circle is Pi * 2 * radius. That means that, the closer you are to the inside of the corner, the less distance you have to run. Umas will naturally move inside for this reason. As a consequence, it’s harder to pass someone on a corner, as you have to run a bit more distance than them by going around. Note that each capsule-shaped track has four corners, not two.

Uphills: It’s harder to run uphill. Umas will slow down when running uphill, though the higher their Power, the less they slow down. Power becomes more important if there are many uphills.

Downhills: It’s easier to run downhill, but only if you know how. While running downhill, umas have a chance, based on their Wit, to get a speed boost and use less HP. On tracks with long downhills, this makes it so high Wit umas have lower Stamina requirements, as well as getting a lot of bonus speed. Wit becomes more important if there are many downhills.

Final Corner: The final corner is what it says on the tin. It’s the last corner of the race. On the final corner, the umas will begin to spread out, which helps avoid blocking in the spurt.

Final Straight: The final straight is the straight that comes after the final corner. There must be a corner for there to be a final straight. On Ibis Summer Dash, the track we were looking at, there is no corner, and therefore, no final straight.