Issue Options Analysis

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Greetings, wretched sacks of flesh.

Now, unlike others in this game, my tech knowledge has barely advanced past the caveman stage, so my analysis is not going to involve some ungodly data set which I managed to drag off of the API using some form of programming witchcraft. I do, however, have absolutely no life at all, so have spent the last however many years constructing a thicc spreadsheet to allow me to play the issues game as efficiently as possible. Behold:

Now, let me give you a quick rundown of the organised insanity going on here. Each row corresponds to an issue (whenever I get a new one I just paste it at the bottom and then sort alphabetically to get it into position), and each column corresponds to one of my nations. Whenever I get an issue, I will put the option I chose for that nation in the corresponding cell. I will then look at the results of the issue and colour-code the cell accordingly. It’s a fairly simple traffic light system that isn’t worth getting into here.

The next time I receive that issue on that nation, I will go to that cell again and either choose the same option as before (if it was good), or choose another option or dismiss (if it was not). Dismissals, by the way, are the blue highlighted cells with a dash in them. In order to prevent myself from rechoosing a bad option in the future, I will put it in brackets to let future me know that I definitely shouldn’t pick that. Otherwise, I would keep wondering ‘I wonder what this option does?’, and continue to choose bad options like a pigeon repeatedly electrocuting itself because it’s utterly moronic.

Asleep yet? Continuing reading because you pity me? Good.

For this analysis, I’m only interested in the options that I’m currently choosing, i.e. the number at the front which is not in any brackets. As such, I used Excel’s handy little ‘LEFT’ formula to extract just that number for every issue for every nation. I then used a ‘SUMIF’ to see which options I chose the most on each nation, which is the entire point of this analysis. Oh yeah, there is some analysis happening here in between my therapy session, remember?

Let’s have a look at the data:

Aah my eyes! This isn’t useful at all. The problem is that due to issue eligibility criteria, my nations have all answered different numbers of issues. Let’s get these numbers as a percentage of total issues answered and make it colourful.

Well that’s much better. The interesting thing to look at here is my differing dismissal rates. The nations which are quite finely balanced, or have few stats which I am targeting, (Pencil Sharpeners, Pallidonia) have higher dismissal rates than the nations which focus on a wide range of stats (Pterodoria, Pencil Sharpeners 2). There’s still a problem, Options 5+ rarely appear in issues, so are screwing up my colour system. Let’s get rid of them, and the dismissals, and just focus on issues where I answered options 1-4.

Ah, now we have some patterns! The one which jumps out at me immediately is option 2, and how it is far more prevalent among 3 nations: Pterodoria, Pallidonia, and Pencil Sharpeners. These nations are all run in a sort of Ancap way (some better than others…), so it seems that option 2 is often the ‘leave the government out of it’ or ‘the problem can be solved with MORE freedom’ kind of option.

Option 1 is answered most often in Iguanarctica, which is loosely based on my IRL views. Now, unlike most people who choose to forgo human contact in favour of staying in their parent’s spare room and making spreadsheets all day, my political views are pretty much Centrist. It seems that option 1 is often presented as a sensible(ish) solution to whatever problem the issue poses, before the wackier later options arrive. Option 1 is also pretty popular in Thalasse (the governmental manifestation of Twitter wokeness), and Heliosphere (imagine if Stalin loved computers and science more than he hated humanity), which implies that the sensible first option is often left wing? #NSModsAreBiasedProof.

Option 3 is a bit more even across the board with my nations, which makes it difficult to say anything about it. So I won’t

Option 4 doesn’t appear very often in issues, so answer rates are pretty low across the board. It seems that my religious nations answer this more often though, so maybe there’s something in that.

In conclusion, this is inconclusive. However, some patterns do appear. It seems the most common (though not particularly prevalent) issue format is as follows:

Limitations:
Because of an apparent crippling desire I have to talk about how everything I’ve ever done is wrong, let’s have a look at some of the limitations of this analysis:
- My spreadsheet still has plenty of red cells in it, i.e. issues where I have no good option yet. My analysis is done on the basis that all the options I choose are ‘good’ for my nations, but this isn’t the case.
- Due to eligibility criteria, options may not have the same number between nations.
- My issue-answering is constantly evolving due to changing priorities, changes in the issue coding, and changes in how stats affect each other. Therefore, the options I’m choosing now may change in the future - they aren’t always locked in.

However, all of these cases are pretty rare in the big scheme of things, so I doubt they’ll have a had an impact on my analysis.

I don’t think anybody will read to this point. Potatoes.