Is auto battle a sure way to loose the game?

[Gone_4Good]

If I play on auto combat, will I loose the game? or will it win the game for me ?

[Sifer2]

Depends on how you build your army. The battles are played for real which is why you can watch a replay. Keep that in mind.

[Pantagruel]

Auto battle plays your army with the same logic for your army as is used for the AI army, so in general if you have a superior army (note that army strength is a rather poor indicator) it will win, though often taking losses that a human player would avoid.

[GrandMajora]

Early game, not so much.

Late game, most likely so.

AI is notoriously stupid when it comes to late game battle calculations. I've managed to score a couple victories on what the computer told me were "impossible" battles.

[darkholyPL]

Depends on how you build your army.

The AI is not capable of 'clever' setups. It works best with basic, straight forward armies.
That's why it needs a numbers advantage against the human player.
If you keep that in mind, and keep adding fodder then you should win if you chose your battles well.

[Råb!d]

If you go into a fight with a well balanced stack that is overwhelming for the situation then you'll usually be fine. But going off of the point difference can be very deceiving.

For example, spiders can be really tough to beat on auto. At least in my experience.

[MrLuckless]

Not at all, in many ways the auto-battler can be better than expected....provided you build around using it. The AI is notoriously bad with skirmishers and ranged units, but can generally do well with builds focused on buffs and healing. Likewise it will prioritize using abilities as soon as possible regardless of whether that's the best possible move.

the AI doesn't do so well when you make builds that require a bit more hands on control, so factions like Dark or Reavers can have a lot of difficulty if you have to rely on auto-battles more often, like in multiplayer matches.

[Emilia Tempest]

Originally posted by Gone_4Good:

If I play on auto combat, will I loose the game? or will it win the game fir me ?

Depends, if you have a superior amount of army or just the upperhand in terms of strength then you'll win easily
Sometimes the AI in autoresolve even won when I thought "lol I lose 100%", a scout vs 1 unit, should always lose but it used spells to win (so a win from 20 power vs 200)
Or when there is a 3v3 clash, the AI did better than I did at times (most of the times it is worse tho), sure the autoresolve took like 1 minutes to get done but it was still better

Early on the auto resolve can be quite bad as more often than not it gets one or two units killed or the entire army heavily damaged (meaning you gotta recover in your territory for 2-3 turns) which can slow down the clearing speed of neutral armies, on top of that you wont be able to put down a city pretty early when you gotta recover that often

However, you should fight most your battles manually unless you do not care about the autoresolve result
Like, only autoresolve when you feel like it should be fine to do (for example, an army of an enemy ruler is at your throne city, autoresolving that away should be fine if no other army is anywhere near). In solo you can ALWAYS do manual combat after if you didnt like the autoresolve resolution (in multiplayer it depends on how the realm is set up and how much turn time you got)

[The Big Brzezinski]

Think of it as an additional difficulty setting.

[Janthis]

It depends, sometimes it would lose units which I wouldn't have lost if I played, but occasionally it also did better than I would have in a tough fight. Especially in big 3 vs 3 encounters, I will sometimes forget to use abilities or not position everyone optimally, but the AI doesn't have this problem.

[PlutonArioch]

There is no guarantee either way. It heavily depends on whether or not you can do better than the AI in each situation separately. To me personally, 99.9% of the time letting the AI fight the battle means I will take more damage and losses than if I played it myself. There have been many situations in which the AI would have lost everything I brought, while I won the battle with minor losses if any.

You should play a single player game, click autobattle first on every battle, and then redo the battle yourself every time. This way you can find out how well you do in general compared to the AI, and you can get a feeling whether it helps or hinders you to use autobattle. You may even get a feeling for which situations you can leave to the AI and which you should handle yourself.

[.Master Jiren, The Strongest]

i cleared a Gold wonder using Tier 1s and a level 5 Dragon Lord, using auto-resolve.
I forgot you can watch the replay. I sure would like to know how thats possible, because the AI in auto usually just runs up to the enemy smacks them in the face. Its not worried about taking damage or casulties, its just taking whatever action is available to it that reduces the enemies hp.

I'd assume that, if your army is mostly melee units with maybe 1 healer, then auto resolve would go quite well, as i think that fits nicely into what the AI wants to do. But if for example your stack is full of archers, that probably wont do well. The AI will run away, taking opportunity attacks, and get as far away as it can, and then miss every shot because of range.

Maybe im wrong of course, but i'd say your odds increase when your stack is something that plays into the strat the auto-AI uses. because its not going to know what strategy you had in mind. (and i would absolutely love a dragon age style AI system where we can set priorities for the AI to focus on, though I mainly want this so I can turn some of my stacks in a siege into AI instead of having to control 18 characters + 6 summons.)

[Bomjus]

you do not need to manual battle to succeed vs brutal AI unless you give them a combat advantage.

however that's assuming you are using a decent "build" with enchantments/transformations that boost relevant units. if you research a bunch of racial transformations, but don't use a lot of racial units, you probably won't do well. if you use a lot of support units, try and get good support enchantments. if you're main armies are built at cities instead of summoned, get draft boosting tomes etc. etc.

also i find the AI is still pretty bad at dealing with combat summons. combat summon heavy setups/armies/spells usually do very well against them. (spider matriarchs, the T3 summoner unit from mystic culture, ritualist hero class, totem of the wild are all prime examples)

[Godsheal Powerloader]

Autocombat is just a time saver. It will waste troops or even lose much more life than it should. Not to forget that if you are rolling things that require some precision (like troops that need to survive in order to evolve or duelist heroes) you are guaranteed to be screwed by it.

[IlluminaZero]

As the game actually simulates the combat rather than doing some janky estimate - The auto battle is not only predictable but can be fun to play around. Kinda like Ogre Battle or Unicorn Overlord.

[[HN]]

Honestly, the AA resolve is surprisingly good (especially compared to the clown fiesta of other games, looking at you total war warhammer), and while its not perfect I've noticed that a lot of time when I try to get a better result by hand, I end up getting something pretty close to it anyway.