Sometimes it’s necessary to test some battle “offline” before it actually takes place in MP game. How many soldiers you need to capture that tough indy province? How to better position your troops and mages in upcoming big battle with enemy’s army? Will your Tart Cyclop be able to defeat 50 Green Lions and what items he needs to do it?
You can test all this by manually creating .map file putting both side’s armies there, then creating a game, setting the orders and changing the placement, then moving the armies to one province and watching the battle. However, manually adding all the commanders, equipment and units to the map file can take a long time, and you’ll need to move the files here and there after that if you want to test some battle several times. So I was always wondering why there’s no simple tool to automate parts of process and make it faster.
After some particularly long testing session I decided to make it myself. So, the aim of the project:
Create GUI for making small test .map file with 2 armies ready to engage each other. Automate the process of creating the test game and running the test.
Here is version 0.2 of the utility that I called Dominions 3 Extended Tester (dom3xTester). Currently it’s possible to select commanders and give them equipment, units and extra magic, and create a working .map file with nation vs nation or nation vs indies setup.
How to do it:
1) Select commander by unit ID or unit type (possible variants will be listed when you start typing commander’s unit type).
2) Give him items and magic (hope no explanation needed here).
3) Double-click on the tree area to add commander to list.
4) Add more commanders and/or units.
5) Choose nations for both sides or for one if you want to test fight with indies.
6) Select “Make .map file” from File menu.
7) During the process, if you feel your commander “build” can be useful later, you can save it by pressing “Save” button. The commander will appear in small list area and you’ll be able to load him by double-clicking at any time.
After that you can copy the map file (with the name xtestX_vs_Y.map) to dominions map folder and create a game (automation part is not done yet). Select the same nations you did in the dom3xtester (important!) and set both nations to human. Do the usual stuff and start the battle by moving both armies to province 1. Repeat if necessary.
I have to warn that it's really 0.2 version, so many buttons do nothing, probably there are some horrible bugs and so on. If you have good advice or can help with the project somehow, please comment here!
BTW, the program is written in QT/C++, so it should compile without problems on Linux and Macs, too.
Here's the link to get 0.2 version
http://rapidshare.com/files/40576197...st0.2.rar.html
UPDATE 16.12.10
https://rapidshare.com/files/3891512788/0.5.rar - link to latest version (0.5)
Attached dumpItems.rar that should be extracted to data folder for compatibility with CBM 1.71.
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