Disable Difficulty Handicaps for Testing

[Thamis]

Hi!

Just wanted to let you know of a little hack that lets you disable any handicaps associated to difficulty level. It may be useful for testing the balance in your mods.

You need to change your preferences file. Change the campaign difficulty to a value that doesn't exist, such as 4. That will make the game ignore any bonuses and maluses on the difficulty level. You can do the same for battle difficulty.

campaign_difficulty 4; # campaign_difficulty <int>, Sets the handicap for campaigns.  Positive gives advantage.  -2 is vhard, -1 is hard, 0 normal, 1 easy #

THIS COMES WITH NO GUARANTEES! It may cause game crashes. It is not a supported feature. It may stop working at some point. Do this at your own risk!

[sage2]

Hi!

Just wanted to let you know of a little hack that lets you disable any handicaps associated to difficulty level. It may be useful for testing the balance in your mods.

You need to change your preferences file. Change the campaign difficulty to a value that doesn't exist, such as 4. That will make the game ignore any bonuses and maluses on the difficulty level. You can do the same for battle difficulty.

campaign_difficulty 4; # campaign_difficulty <int>, Sets the handicap for campaigns.  Positive gives advantage.  -2 is vhard, -1 is hard, 0 normal, 1 easy #

THIS COMES WITH NO GUARANTEES! It may cause game crashes. It is not a supported feature. It may stop working at some point. Do this at your own risk!

Hey Thamis, that's awesome and very helpful.

Out of curiousity, is there anywhere where the BAI handicaps, or other BAI values, are exposed ala the CAI handicap values?

[alpaca]

Thanks Jan, that should be handy

[D3nn16]

I just tested this (1.3 patch) and it seems the difficulty value defaults to 1 when the one chosen in preferences file is not valid.

First I used the above method and I set campaign difficulty to 10 in the preferences file and started a new campaign.
Then I tried to figure out where was the -60% drop in recruitment cost for cavalry (default 940, shown 376) coming out from for Prussia : -10, -5 from monarch, -10 from army minister and a -5 from type of government which total to -30%. So there where -30% percent missing that I found by looking at the campaign_difficulty_handicap_effects_tables.
To test my supposition was correct I used PFM to create a mod by changing the -30 into -10 and when I started a new campaign the new recruitment cost was 564 which is -40% so the reduction is the same I did on the campaign_difficulty_handicap_effects_tables mod : -20.

[Roslolian]

Have you tried loading a file after changing the preferences without picking a new game?

[D3nn16]

Roslolian, after reading your post I did a small test like this :
I started a new Prussian campaign with no mods and saved it.
Then in my mod I changed the upkeep for Prussian line infantry, started game with mod and reloaded the saved campaign.
The modification on the upkeep was present in the campaign I saved while the game did not use the mod.

[Mooncabbage]

Very useful, thank you. I have been having trouble with testing my changes in battles. Actually I'm surprised this never occured to me before, I guess I was distracted