I don't like the combat in Endless Legend that much and for the most part I don't want to fight 90% of the combat so I'm wondering what is most effective for the AI resolution of auto combat (either offensive of defensive if those make a difference) and what I should be building and how I should upgrade them. Is range worth having at all and do things like stacking initiative as high as it you can get it pay the best dividends?

Basically, auto-combat is just a regular combat, played out by AI only. If you want to see how an auto-combat plays out, you can fight a manual combat and just rely on the default orders for each unit, seeing what happens.



There are a few situations where the AI fails pretty hard at tactical combat. It doesn't use buffs or healing well. It doesn't take advantage of some important capacities like charge or auras (ancients, dust bishops, caecator). It gets hung up on narrow chokepoints. It doesn't do a good job of keeping its units adjacent for morale bonuses. It deploys ranged/support as far to the rear as possible and infantry/cavalry/flyers as far to the front as possible, splitting the force.



In order to deal with those problems, your best bet is to use armies composed entirely of one type of unit. Either ranged or flyers are best, in order to deal with poor behavior in the presence of chokepoints. For flyers, "Glory or Death" on titanium necklaces is a particularly nice capacity, because the units are more likely to be adjacent to enemies than to allies. Initiative is still worth something, but not nearly as much. A full army of Dekari Rangers or Necrodrones would work pretty well.