problem with auto combat

[henri51]

I am playing RS Roman faction. I usually leave the battles to the AI, but I have noticed that my casualties are always too high. After many battles, I have NEVER had a battle where my casualties were lower than those of the AI. This is understandable when I am fighting the 10-star leader of some faction, but in one case, I had a 3-star general commanding a force 3 times larger than the enemy and I got about 3 times as many casualties as the enemy! My legion consisted of a standard mixture of early Roman maniples supported by cavalry and javelineers and the much weaker enemy had no commander (therefore a captain).Has anyone else noticed this?

Is this programmed to encourage players to fight the battles themselves? If so I strongly disagree: players should be free to play the game any way they want,and combat results should approximate the expectd results given the opposing forces, auto combat or not.

Another smaller problem is the difficulty of getting all of one's units into the defence of a city. In one case, the AI had 4 more or less full stacks attacking one of my cities, so I gathered 3 full legions to go fight them off. But I was unable to get all of my units into the battle before the city fell. I did manage to get my units to fight and win against 3 of the enemy units, but my units in the city did not participate, and where wiped out when the city fell (probably due to time running out). It seems to me that all of my units including the ones in the city should have fought against ALL of the enemy units. I had positioned all my units as close as possible to the city, but the presence of 4 enemy units made it difficult to place them where I wanted.

Given the problem in the first paragraph, despite strongly outnumbering the enemy, I lost my whole legioninside the city and over half of the force outside. I fortunately had enough left to retake the city on the next move, due to my navy preventiong the Sicilians from bringing in reinforcements, but that is not the point.

Comments?

Henri

[Mattzo12]

It's a game flaw in the engine I think. The computer will just take the fact the you have spear unit and they have a cav unit and put them against each other. So an army of elite cataphract archers against some militia spears the spears would win, even though had you commanded them yourself you would of one.

I think..

[Brusilov]

I think with auto resolved battles they are processed at a unit at a time. So, the idea is to put your light units towards the end of the row.

Personally, I hate to even let the AI take control of any of my armies in battle (I've seen such battles where the AI rushes my archers into the enemy phalanx). If you are forced to go down the route of AI controlling your army on the battlefield I'd suggest no light units.

[ReD_OcToBeR]

I think with auto resolved battles they are processed at a unit at a time. So, the idea is to put your light units towards the end of the row.

I also beleive that theory is correct as I have always noticed the first units in the stack take causalities while the last ones never seem to, and if they so its rare.

The only Auto- Res's I do is for my armies that go around with the sole purpose of killing rebel armies that continuously pop up in large empires. It's too time consuming fighting every one of these "stupid annoying" battles.

Also I have a question: Is it true that Chariots PWN in auto resolve if placed near the front cards of a stack when auto resovling? I ask because I have hardly ever used them playing RTW over the years.

[Brusilov]

I also beleive that theory is correct as I have always noticed the first units in the stack take causalities while the last ones never seem to, and if they so its rare.

The only Auto- Res's I do is for my armies that go around with the sole purpose of killing rebel armies that continuously pop up in large empires. It's too time consuming fighting every one of these "stupid annoying" battles.

Also I have a question: Is it true that Chariots PWN in auto resolve if placed near the front cards of a stack when auto resovling? I ask because I have hardly ever used them playing RTW over the years.

I think the units at the start of the list get more experience in auto resolved battles. I guess that's true of all units as well - autoresolve appears to result in more experience for units. I don't know if that is caused by the casualties are greater (so the experience is given to smaller number of men in the unit).

I autoresolve against piddly slave stacks.

I tend to not use chariots as I prefer to use cavalry (they can survive in a melee and be pulled out of a melee for another charge). Chariots do have the ability to scare the enemy though.

[Aristedes]

I almost never do Auto-Resolve (only when I get attacked and don't have enough time to finish the battle, for example when I have to go to guitar lessons and in the last minut I get attacked, I do Auto-Resolve), and NEVER let the AI control my reinforcements, they always screw up (As Brusilov said: archers into phalanx, ...). Always fight battles on the map, even when you know you can't win. You'll do more casualties to them then you would with Auto-Resolve.

[Redolegna]

Also, what is the difficulty of your battles? If it is H, or VH, you'll get a lot more casualties than if you were on M. Try varying the level of difficulty. I nearly never auto-resolve, except sometimes against tiny rebel armies that are not worth my time, and I even got my butt handed to me one time with a huge numerical superiority (to say nothing of the qualitative side). This is quite normal, because above M difficulty, the AI gets bonuses.

[henri51]

Also, what is the difficulty of your battles? If it is H, or VH, you'll get a lot more casualties than if you were on M. Try varying the level of difficulty. I nearly never auto-resolve, except sometimes against tiny rebel armies that are not worth my time, and I even got my butt handed to me one time with a huge numerical superiority (to say nothing of the qualitative side). This is quite normal, because above M difficulty, the AI gets bonuses.

I am playing on hard with battles on medium.

Strangely when I fought the same battle on the battle map against a 10-star general with a 4-star and about equal forces, instead of losing heavily I won when I put everyone under AI control. When I tried the same thing under auto-resolve, I lost and took twice the casualties of the enemy, and my general was killed.

So the lesson seems to be to go to the battle map but put one's units under AI control if one does not want to take the time to fight the battles. It still takes a lot longer that auto-resolve though. So apparently the latter should only be used if one is resigned to taking more casualties than the enemy even when outnumbering him by a large margin.

The alternative is to put the battles on easy for fighting on auto-resolve. That worked fine with the original RTW, but I don't know if this mod changed that or not.

It's really too bad if the mod can't be adjusted so that auto-resolve battles yield comparable results to what one would expect from a battle on the battle map. That means equal forces, a random result, and if one side or the other has a significant advantage, he should win most of the time and the weaker side should have heavier casualties. Is that so difficult to program?

Henri