A few days ago I had half an hour free while burger was messaging me about adding new nations to the game, so I decided to see what error message I would get if I tried to add new nations to the game.

Data-driven decision making is the only way to go
A few days ago I had half an hour free while burger was messaging me about adding new nations to the game, so I decided to see what error message I would get if I tried to add new nations to the game.
Ye olde’ Beta 2 release includes a lot of interesting things, including a score.xls file which notes how scores are calculated.
Since nobody has bothered to share that anywhere except on an advertising platform, I figured I’d dump its contents here. I’ve named the categories myself, but these are grouped in the spreadsheet already.
I haven’t double-checked these values with manual testing or reverse engineering, so it’s entirely plausible that they aren’t exactly the same as the release version of the game. But maybe they are! You should check it out and report back. Do it you coward.
Continue reading “The probably-outdated formula for RoN’s score calculations from Beta 2”As part of a uni unit on public policy,1 I had to complete a 750 word policy briefing based on the report Fossil fuel subsidies in Australia 2025 by The Australia Institute. Instead of trying to be maximally efficient and doing a good job relatively quickly, I made the mistake of getting genuinely interested in the subject matter and so spent four days on the assignment, cutting an enormous amount of interesting or useful context and background information from my briefing and then getting to the point where I was rewriting parts of individual sentences in order to claw back extra word count.
I didn’t want to just permanently lose that information, so I’m dumping an edited part of my policy briefing, except with these changes:
The context of the original assignment was that we were pretending to use our policy briefing to brief Jim Chalmers2 for an upcoming meeting which he had. This meant that this was an economically-focused briefing rather than, say, an environmentally-focused one.
If the subject matter interests you, I definitely recommend you check out the report itself (and other sources!) as they can go into a lot more detail than I can even in this “extended briefing”.
As we approach Christmas, in keeping with the tradition of giving each other gifts, we have been gifted a comedy spectacle. I hope you enjoy this archived content as much I did. This seems to be the sequel to Wait, why did you leave the RoN Discord?
Continue reading “Christmas comedy-drama special”A few years ago I heard that RoN’s random RNG was bad, and that each nation only had a handful of possible matchups in a 1v1. I wasn’t able to find any documented testing on this, and nobody I talked to was able to say what the matchups were or confirm the details with certainty. So, of course, I sat down and ran 165 1v1 matchups and recorded the results.
Back then that was enough to complete the primary objective: to see whether the nation RNG only allowed for certain matchups in 1v1 (true), and I lacked the skills to parse the data to find out what each of those matchups actually was in a time-efficient way. Now I don’t, so here are the results of a not-quite-large-enough sample.
I’ve been personally urged to clarify this by one of the server’s admins.
Continue reading “Wait, why did you leave the RoN Discord?”Traditionally the Red Fort is used in a defensive role, or occasionally for comical rapid battlefield support if playing as Americans. These are perfectly viable uses, but the Red Fort can also be used much more offensively by making use of its rapid healing.
While wasting my life testing a unit that nobody builds in a game that nobody plays, I noticed the title occurring in some of my testing.
Continue reading “Manually selecting targets increases the DPS of Machine Guns”It turns out a +30% damage bonus generally doesn’t translate into actually killing units faster.
Continue reading “The MG42 is a scam”