Category: RoN

The amazing 2003/2004 RTS by Big Huge Games (2014 Extended Edition available on Steam — though that version is riddled with gameplay bugs!)

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CBP Alpha 10 Patch Notes

After slightly too much work and slightly too many whiplash-inducing pivots about what the patch’s contents would be, what formally started in 2023 as a small bugfix patch but which slowly evolved into a gargantuan patch has now been split up slightly so that a cut-down implementation of Alpha 10 can be released and players can consolidate on one version instead of splitting across Alpha 9 and Pre-Release versions. The changes that were pulled for the sake of timeliness have been pushed to later versions which will release as time and inclination allow.

Even this “lite” version — with many of its planned changes pulled — is substantial, probably the largest single update CBP has ever had, and is the result of a lot of unpaid modding / balancing / software development / testing / etc work which I hope a few people will still appreciate.

Early versions of CBP were more nerf-focused,1 sanding down a lot of elevated nation powers and unit stats and requiring nations and units to sort of “re-justify” why they might need the higher values in a modern meta that has evolved since the last official (intentional) balance changes from over 20 years ago. Now, finally, we’re getting more buff-focused changes, with a variety of targeted changes to help bring up some of the weakest rares / nations / units etc.

This update also includes important technical changes to how CBP works, including moving to a new mod format which better supports utilizing new “hardcoded” changes in the game’s code.

Patch contents

  • Balance changes: high (very high quantity, but mostly modest changes)
  • Bugfixes: high (very high quantity, but mostly small fixes)
  • Enhancements: very high
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The probably-outdated formula for RoN’s score calculations from Beta 2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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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.

Continue reading “Limited results for RoN’s random nation RNG in 1v1s”