Live Tuner - How representative are the results?

[sman1975]

Hi!

Just finished a mod/scenario that has 6 playable civs. I used Live Tuner to play dozens (if not more) of games to test balance, overall competitiveness of the set up. From what I observed, one or two of the civs tended to win more often, but the other civs won some games here and there. From these results I assumed Live Tuner demonstrated results similar to what the human player experience would be, and the scenario seemed balanced enough to publish.

My question - is this a valid assumption ? Does anyone have an opinion about the games Live Tuner plays?

I'd like to make certain that these results are helpful in determining a scenario's balance. If they aren't, I'd need to use completely different approaches to ensure balance, most of which are considerably more time-consuming that Live Tuner running game after game in the background.

Thanks,

Sman

 

[Enginseer]

Why not play it yourself on a higher AI difficulties and see if you're able to have fun with it at least.

I say that because Fall of Rome Live Tuner has a bias because Western Rome gets screwed due to its bad AI combats while players who are heavily experienced and lucky are able to keep all of their cities.

 

[sman1975]

One thing I noticed today - I set combat and moves to "quick in single player" while LiveTuner was running the scenario. Speeds things up considerably.

Unfortunately, I'd designed an "super" great general and gave him some melee capability. In quick combat, everything works fine. When regular combat is selected, the game crashes to desktop when that unit attacks anything. Ugh....

I'd overlooked the fact that great general art defines UnitMemberCombats didn't include the EnableActions and the associated GR2 files don't include animations for generals to attack or defend - so, when in doubt, CTD... So now, I have to recode all those generals as something else.

So, it looks like LiveTuner can replicate some of the aspects of gameplay so you can evaluate scenario balance, but it doesn't catch everything.