Introduction

In May 2005. Your's truly, One_Dead_Angel and Mokon had a chance to visit Mad Doc to talk to them about Empire Earth 2 and learn all the inner workings of the game. Matthew "Mr_Game" Nordhaus, a designer at Mad Doc and programmer that did the Auto-Balancer tool for the game was kind enough to write an article for us to describe how to use this great tool to test out unit balance and collect statistics on unit effectiveness. This tool will probably prove invaluable to modders to verify and collect similar statistic for their own balance or total conversion mods. It will probably be very useful for experts players (with penchant for number crunching) to find out just which units are most effective in the game.

Now that being said, the Auto-Balancer is not an officially supported tool by Mad Doc or their publisher VUG, so you should use it at your own risk (so any useability issues, crashes or bugs associated with it are your own responsibility), and only address questions about it either here at our Heaven Games forums or their official site's forum. This would be the best way to get additional answers for questions you may have about this tool, instead of going to them directly. The Tool is meant for use by advanced modders and developers, not the average Empire Earth 2 player.

How to Use the Auto-Balancer

The autobalancer uses comma separated value file (.csv) to create battles between different groups of units automatically. By creating lists of units and resource amounts you can generate hundreds or thousands of battles to check on the cost effectiveness of different units. The CSV files are simple text files with commas separating columns of values, that are best and most often generated using Microsoft Excel. For best results this file should be viewed in a fixed font such as Courier.

Setup

You will need an "AutoBalance" directory/folder in the same location as your EE2 executable (typically C:\Program Files\Sierra\Empire Earth II\) but this depends on where you installed the game. In this directory (referred to as the "run directory") create a directory called "AutoBalance" as mentioned.

Within the "AutoBalance" directory create two more directories called "RunInfo" and "UnitLists". The autobalance logs are generated within a directory called "ABLogs". This folder will be created in the C:\My Documents\Empire Earth II\ directory by default. If you wish them to be created in the run directory, you can place the following line in your myconfig.cfg file:

s_generateUserDataInRun = 1

Setting this value to 0 will default the location of ALL log creation to the C:\My Documents\Empire Earth II\ folder. This may effect MP compatibility, so please use at your own peril.

CSV Files

The basic file type of all the files used in the EE2 autobalancer are comma separated valye files, with the .csv suffix. Each line of these files is separated by a linefeed/return, and each item on each line is separated by a comma from the other values around it. You can exit these files with a standard text editor, but we found that Microsoft Excel worked pretty well, displaying each value in it's own cell.

Any line that begins with "//" (a double back slash) is ignored by the parser/autobalancer. These lines are used as formatting breaks or to add comments to the files.

Important: Many bugs are caused by badly formed files (ie. lacking commas or returns in the right places) Most other bugs are caused by having duplicated Name ietms in the files. (See the next section of file structure).