Autoresolve broken?

[Pantagruel]

I am new to Napoleon: Total War and started two days ago on the Italian campaign. I play on normal difficulty. Something that have been irritating me is the way autoresolve works, and I am unsure if it is just affecting me. I will try to illustrate with two incidents. Once I was attacking a lone general with about 12 or so in his bodyguard and a dragoon unit consisting of about 20; I had five line infantry, one grenadier, three cannons and one dragoon, all full stacks; in autoresolve I lost 150 or so troops and he managed to escape, and when I played the battle manually I got "heroic victory" by just blasting them away with the cannons, no losses. The second incident was after I had won a decisive victory against an army my same strength without losing more than maybe 1/9 of my troops; after the battle some of their units fled, about three beaten regiments of line infantry and one 12" cannon, while my army was still full and had in it three cannons; this time I though "I can't be bothered" and autoresolved, but then I lost 520 units, and my enemy lost 340 something; playing that manually I lost 20 troops.

This is how it is and it is quite a letdown to have to play every little skirmish. But is this how autoresolve works here? Is there a way to get around it?

[Pantagruel]

I guess it is also worth pointing out that the units that die in autoresolve are my toughest troops, not militia or poor line infantry, but grenadiers, dragoons, even cannons.

[irishron]

For me, autoresolve has been broken since Medieval1. Some have been able to mod/edit autoresolve some in Empire so there maybe a mod that does it.

[Pantagruel]

Autoresolve has never given me the same results as when I'm playing manually, of course, that is not the point, but here, in Napoleon, it seems to give me a penalty even when I have a major advantage in numbers, general's command, unit experience and unit quality. I have not had this problem in any other Total War titles, except maybe Empire.

[Steward Denethor II]

I agree. In Napoleon total war and Empire the autoresolve gives disproportionate casualties to the victor in autoresolves when one side hugely outnumbers the other. Combine this with high difficulty and you can be completely ridiculous results in some engagements where your causualties should be in the low tens. It is quite annoying I must say, as I have been forced to realtime that no one would want to. Note however that you can use this fact against the AI. I once saw a general with only 3 bodyguards who I was "disbanding" for cowardice kill 70 men in autoresolve against a full stack. He died of course but he restored his honour. I would go so far as to say that my armies would be more effective if I sent the first few units in piecemeal and pressed autoresolve.

Shogun 2 takes it in the opposite direction, you can usually autoresolve obvious victories but you might want to realtime obvious defeats because if you don't you do almost no damage while in a realtime you can might be able to make the enemy pay for their victory. I find the latter system much better, even though its not perfect, because obvious defeats are more fun than obvious victories and the defeats can be skipped over with less cost to the player.

[Pantagruel]

My last incident is actually attacking a single stack of previously beaten militia (now about 320/500 troops) with an army of about 3000 royal infantrymen, marines and dragoons, and in this battle I lost 700 troops. Not to mention I had four cannons. In manual battle I lost of course no troops, since the enemy routed in the first barrage of cannon fire ... This is indeed perplexing and irritating, not to mention time consuming; but what perplexes me most is why autoresolve is so different from the other games in the series, if we exclude Empire.

[Pantagruel]

In Fall of the Samurai I have noticed that autoresolve seem to greatly consider (in the equation or whatever) the presence of cannons. If I have enough of them I often get victories with nearly no casualities, as I also do when I play manually.