Fauxia wrote:Can you better explain to me this beta? I don’t understand why it changes my stats by about 40%.
You are mostly affected by the part described as "Reduce effect of opposition to Defense industry and anti-crime..." which I admit is pretty mysterious.
What it's referring to is that NationStates tracks all your decisions that would reduce crime, and the size of your Defense industry, and almost everything else, even if it's already effectively at zero. That is, we don't merely note that a nation has reached a zero-size Defense industry; if you continue to make decisions that oppose Defense, we track just how hostile to the existence of a Defense industry you have become. These are sometimes called "underlying" values.
Weaponization draws on the underlying values of Crime and Defense Industry. Which is fine, but a given decision will stimulate Weaponization by the same amount regardless of whether the nation is (for example) actually shrinking its Defense industry, or just increasing its opposition to an industry that doesn't even exist.
The beta does still draw on those two underlying values, but it places less weight on them once the real values fall below zero.
In your case, you have effectively no crime in real terms, and a strong anti-crime underlying value, which means it will take quite a bit of change for crime to reappear in your nation. The beta gives less weight to the anti-crime part, which means it's less able to offset other things, such as Fauxia's relatively lax gun controls.