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The probably-outdated formula for RoN’s score calculations from Beta 2

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.

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Fossil fuel subsidies in Australia FY2024-25: some notes

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:

  • Selectively including more info that I couldn’t fit into my assignment’s word limit (though I wish I’d had the time to write this up earlier because I’ve honestly already forgotten some of the stuff I didn’t write about).
  • Adjacent information interesting to me that would never have actually been in the real briefing, like getting sidetracked in politics or “trivia”-type errors in the report.
  • Informal referencing rather than anal APA7 referencing, and a more informal tone for any of the new or edited sections where I’m not completely copy-pasting from my original briefing.

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”.

Image credit: Policy Options (Institute for Research on Public Policy). Apparently this is under some undisclosed or otherwise implicit CC or CC-like license that I can’t find but my search engine can.
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Limited results for RoN’s random nation RNG in 1v1s

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.

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