That's really all I have to say about it. I constantly take absurd loses from fights that are pretty much land slides. I lost a necrodrone + had 2 foragers die when fighting 2 centaurs. It was 2 centaurs versus 3 forangers + 1 necrodrone. A necrodrone ALONE beats a Centaur yet somehow they fought through four people to kill 3?



Anyway figured I'd open a thread about this as it has long annoyed me.

hashinshin wrote:
That's really all I have to say about it. I constantly take absurd loses from fights that are pretty much land slides. I lost a necrodrone + had 2 foragers die when fighting 2 centaurs. It was 2 centaurs versus 3 forangers + 1 necrodrone. A necrodrone ALONE beats a Centaur yet somehow they fought through four people to kill 3?



Anyway figured I'd open a thread about this as it has long annoyed me.

I agree, sometimes auto combat is ridiculously unbalanced. But its the case in most of the strategy games...



I hope It will change and break the stereotypes.







Update : Wtf I said ?! Sorry misstyped.

One of the other problems with auto-combat, that I hope gets fixed, is that it does not reveal a section of the map the same way that manually conducting a battle does. If fighting a battle on the edge of the area you have explored reveals a section of map (as it must) then this should also happen when using auto-combat.

Dalwin wrote:
One of the other problems with auto-combat, that I hope gets fixed, is that it does not reveal a section of the map the same way that manually conducting a battle does. If fighting a battle on the edge of the area you have explored reveals a section of map (as it must) then this should also happen when using auto-combat.

That would be a little weird.



But I get it.

I am not sure why you think that would be wierd. Right now, when you fight a battle in manual mode, whatever hexes make up the battlefield get revealed on the strategic map. The battle system needs to work that way. It can be rationalized by the armies spreading out and seeing more of the area than if they had simply straight line marched through it.



The wierd part is that auto combat does not give you the exact same map reveal. It should.

I actually have to agree with Dalwin. Especially in the early game or when scouting enemy territory, I often pick Manual Combat even on battles I am pretty much guaranteed to win, simply to get the benefit of the battlefield doing my scouting work for me. It can be a quiet substantial chunk of land if two corners of the battlefield are unexplored or you're close to a cliff.

The idea of a hexagonal battlefield had been kicked around in a different thread, which may reduce this effect, depending on size.

That's interesting, I find auto combat to be extremely unbalanced in my favor most of the time, but every now and then I do get random heavy losses.

Vokram wrote:
That's interesting, I find auto combat to be extremely unbalanced in my favor most of the time, but every now and then I do get random heavy losses.

This is a problem with many such systems, and I consider it a very important issue.



4x Games: The player schism

In all 4x games, you have two main groups of players. You have players that want heavy tactical combat, they want to control the fights. Then you have the players that just want to get back to controlling their empires.



In truth though, there is a middle third camp that I think a good amount of people fall into, myself include. I personally like heavy tactical combat.....once in a while. A few fights where I do my tactical moves is a lot of fun. But the problem in all 4x games I've played that are tactical....is I have to do it over, and over, and over again to the point of complete boredom on my part.



Autoresolving is not a factor of math, its a matter of TRUST

Now in theory the autoresolver fixes this. But all of the ones I've played (Endless Legends included) have this fault: They don't respect the loss of control from the player.



4x games are about control. Now with an autoresolver, I give up control in the interest of speed....but respect that as a player I am nervous whenever I use it!! I have given up precious control of my units, and that trust is a very fine line.



Even if it is once in a while, if I lose a critical unit or, god fore-bid, a hero in a fight that is anything but a huge disadvantage for me going in....I am going to flip out! I will lose faith in the autoresolver, and then I will have to deal with the endless tactical battles that I don't want to do...and then I will lose interest in the game.





The solution

The key is....your autoresolver needs to think very carefully before it kills any unit, and especially when killing a high value unit or hero. I don't care about the straight up math, realize that a player would do everything in their power to keep those units alive beyond the simple math of the combat, so the autoresolver needs to factor that in.



Instead focus on damage. If my hero or high value unit gets way more damage than I expect, I will grumble about it a lot, but I will move on. But if those units die in a "needless" battle, that's the ballgame. And it only has to happen once.





It happened in AOW3 for me. I loved the tactical battles in that game, had a lot of fun, but again I didn't want to do tactical battles all the time. I used the autoresolver several times...one time my hero died in an "average difficulty" fight. I never went back to the resolver. Then I got tired of all the battles...then I stopped playing the game.

Calling this an issue of trust seems quite right. Losing units can be especially aggravating when you know that in a manual battle, the enemy never would have had a chance to damage you, e.g. when a single enemy Silic is facing of against four or 6 powerful ranged units. One time, I lost an Atachi Zeealot out of a group of four to a single enemy Bos Centaur, simply because the auto-resolve decided he would reach me before I could shoot an deal enough damage to kill one in a single blow. I have never again used auto-resolve against fast units.

Making the AI less willing to sacrifice units in general would be a great step forward. Perhaps it should be dependent on the stance you choose at the beginning of combat, with a defensive stance being even less willing to take losses than an offensive stance. For that matter, even in manual combat, I hate to see units at low HP on a defensive stance just throwing themselves at enemies and dying. I'd rather see units on a defensive stance retreat when below a certain threshold of HP to make room for other units, instead of getting themselves killed for one more attack.

I don't really use it because I know I can beat my enemy without anyone getting hit as I usually just use ranged units. However if it isn't as broken as using auto resolve with a fleet that is all ranged resulting in no deaths for you a la Rome 2 then it is probably as good as it will get as most games like this sim combat poorly.

I'm fairly new to the game, but I stopped using auto combat early on because of this. I'm much happier manually choosing positioning and targetting, and often even beating the odds.



Has anyone tried saving right before a substantial battle then auto running it repeatedly to see how variable the outcomes are?

Speaking of the auto-resolve in AoW3, my son and I ran into a bit of a quirk with it. There is an option during setup to only have manual combat between humans, but the lable is a lie. What it really means is manual combat only between players whether human or AI controlled.



If you are asking yourself, "what else is there?", there are all the neutral things running around. These are the routine fights. These are the ones you want to skip. Having a game setting that forces everyone to auto-resolve those routine fights is great. You don't have to worry about some other human player getting an edge by manually fighting all the routine battles. You can even worry less about the AI being a weaker player, because you have lowered yourself to the AI's level for the routine fights.



I would love to see a similar setting in EL. Instead of it only being a case by case decision for each individual fight, have a setup option that would make auto-resolve mandatory for the routine fights (those agaisnt wandering neutral units), but allow the option for manual on all the other fights.

Usually in multiplayer 4X games it is usual to have an option to auto resolve ALL combat in an automatic way. I had a friend who when played Heroes of Might and Magic would manual every combat and spend enormous amounts of time rounding up the numbers of his troops. We were playing hotseat so we could not do sth about that but imagine this happening in an 8 human player 4x game.



The option that was referred in the previous post would be awesome if it was possible. Auto resolve all combat between the player and neutrals or even AIs and let human vs human battles play manual. That would not make the game that tedious, and it would also push people to use setups that would be more balanced for auto combat than setups that would only be used while in micromanaging manual combat like using full ranged units spread.

Hi, sorry for the late answer.

The "auto" battle will resolve the battle the same way than in manual more, except that the player is replaced by an AI.

So by doing "manual" battle, you add your own knowledge of battle tactics to aim for a better outcome than what the AI can do.



Our team is working hard to improve the AI so that battles will be more challenging against the AI, and at the same time the "auto" battle will result in more logical/balanced outcomes.

Meanwhile, we'll see what we can do about the additional vision range the battle should give in "auto" mode.

I hope the auto-battle AI does get reworked because right now it's pretty crummy, I understand what you mean by manual batles allow you to add that extra tidbit of knowledge tot he fight but when playing against trivial enemies one shouldnt even take damage at times let alone almost die.

One of the things that AoW did right with auto-combat, is they gave the player the option to watch the battle after the combat. From this, I was able to learn how the AI would "auto-play" my heroes.. and it quickly became obvious that the reason valuable units were lost was due to move speed. Faster units quickly outpace the slower units and charging one by one into the enemy horde is typically not how human players approach tactical fights.



The solution? Make sure your frontline units are tanky and not much faster than your supports. So far, that mantra has been very effective in making me "trust" the auto-combat in Endless Legend.