AoE2 Team Balancer

When I was hosting or joining a lobby, situations often arise where a balanced team arrangement is needed, but I couldn't find any tools online to do the team balance calculation. So some time ago I've made this little tool in Excel to help me quickly balance teams in my lobbies, base on player ELOs. In the past couple of years I have been asked to share the tool, and now I finally got around to do it, so here it is:

Aoe2 Team Balancer

Usage Example:

Say we're in a lobby with the following players:

We can simply enter those player ELOs into the spreadsheet, and it will return the most optimised team arrangement, which can then be copied then pasted into lobby chat:

12112221, Team1 average 1918.5, Team2 average 1917.5, no ELO adjustment.

However, if some players' skill is different to what their ELOs suggest, then we can use the "Manually Adjusted ELO" row to enter their estimated ELO base on their skill levels. Let's say P2's real ELO is 2200, and P6's is 1900:

Which returns:

12211221, Team1 average 1958, Team2 average 1954.75, with ELO adjustments: P2->2200 P6->1900.

This way all adjustments are shown in the output message, so the players in the lobby know exactly whose ELO has been adjusted to what.

Specific team arrangements can also be taken into account during the calculation. Continue from the example above, let's say P1 and P7 are friends and want to be in the same team, and we wants to explicitly split p1 and p2, then we can use the Force Team row to specify the arrangement:

Which returns:

12221211, Team1 average 1960.5, Team2 average 1952.25, with ELO adjustments: P2->2200 P6->1900.

The shared file is read-only online, in order to enter ELOs and use the tool, the file will need to be opened in Excel. The tool does not use VBA or C# scripts. It is also not password protected just in case anyone is interested in its inner workings.