Data-driven decision making is the only way to go
The amazing 2003/2004 RTS by Big Huge Games (2014 Extended Edition available on Steam — though that version is riddled with gameplay bugs!)
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.
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.
It turns out a +30% damage bonus generally doesn’t translate into actually killing units faster.
I realised long ago that late-game combat in RoN is less than stellar, but it turns out it’s even worse than I had already thought. 🫠
Continue reading “A couple more reasons why RoN’s late-game combat sucks”