When people defend new autoresolve, that Total War is about fighting battle, show them this video

Processing#6286

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/toxn4u/the_virgin_autoreslove_vs_the_chad_oneclick_fight/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Change that damn autoresolve CA, it doesn't make the game harder, but tedious.

People will only quit campaigns sooner and finish them even less than they already do.

Captain_Rex#1635

Haven’t seen anyone defending the atrocious AR.

nyobien#9819

ArneSo said:

Haven’t seen anyone defending the atrocious AR.

I've seen the biggest troll on this forum defending it but that's to be expected

Mr_Finley7#4571

I know this sounds insane, and straight up wrong in the eyes of popular opinion, but I actually do like it as it encourages me to play more battles.

But I played TWW2 with a mod that made auto resolve more punishing so I’m predisposed to liking it.

GettoGecko#7861

Its just atrociously bad, in my current Khorne L run I lost more units in the AR against the 2 remaining and half dead units of Slaanesh mortals than manually beating the whole army before.

Whoever thought off and whoever approved that just using a fixed multiplier based on the campaign difficulty should be used instead of the former variables that went into the calculation should be fired. This is not only lazy its also *stars* up on a logical level, if players can handle the amount of armies L throws at them they probably can do that because they perform better in battles anyway and AR should reflect that.

AR is taking my armies as hostages to blackmail me into playing boring fights because a sadistic and brain dead dev thought that it is fine to ruin the fun of players playing on higher difficulties by doing unneccessary, boring and unchallenging chores.

Scottishclaymore

Outcome should be better if you fight the battle properly. That does seem to be an extremely bad AR but i haven't found it is that bad in most cases.

Neodeinos#5871

Mr_Finley7 said:

I know this sounds insane, and straight up wrong in the eyes of popular opinion, but I actually do like it as it encourages me to play more battles.

But I played TWW2 with a mod that made auto resolve more punishing so I’m predisposed to liking it.

Encouraging to fight battles is good but the current auto resolve is too broken currently.

Bayes#3307

Him having to manually fight that battle is clearly very challenging which is why it makes sense that it is affected by campaign difficulty.

GloatingSwine#8098

Rebel4ever85 said:

Outcome should be better if you fight the battle properly. That does seem to be an extremely bad AR but i haven't found it is that bad in most cases.

It depends what campaign difficulty you have selected.

Warhammer 3's autoresolve has a scaling casualty factor which just causes the player more casualties the higher their campaign difficulty. At higher difficulties it is so egregious that almost no battles can be safely autoresolved, the AI will be awarded so many casualties that it is unreasonable to do so, even against extremely weak forces.

Which stops autoresolve being what it is supposed to be, a qol feature to allow the player to skip otherwise trivial fights without sitting through the loading screens.

MODIDDLY1#9212

I will say, I don't really like the new AR that shows exactly what units will be lost. I kinda preferred the older one

GreenColoured#2445

Meh


I fight my battles anyways. The new system telling you which units will be lost is **** anyways, took out all the risks involved.


Just play the damn game

Surge_2#1464

That video isnt nearly as bad an example as you could have.

I've had 'Medium Casualties' expected, stuck ALL my Melee inside some trees to hide them, walked my lord into the opposing army, and come out replenished in some scenarios like that.

The AR is an absolute joke.

Processing#6286

ArneSo said:

Haven’t seen anyone defending the atrocious AR.

I have, mostly on reddit though.

GettoGecko#7861

GreenColoured said:

Just play the damn game

Players massively dropping the game and this is one of the issues the game has. Stupid devs telling them "just play the damn battles" whether you like it or not and players answer " *stars* you".

#902441

Generally I'm all for fighting battles, but from what I've seen of those minor settlement battles, I'd hate having to play every single one of those.

Surge_2#1464

GreenColoured said:

Just play the damn game

I would, if it was entertaining.

Minor Siege Spam is not, and never will be, entertaining. I will AR them, every time.

overtaker40#8926

Mr_Finley7 said:

I know this sounds insane, and straight up wrong in the eyes of popular opinion, but I actually do like it as it encourages me to play more battles.

But I played TWW2 with a mod that made auto resolve more punishing so I’m predisposed to liking it.

I'm actually in the same boat. I found I autoresolved too much in wh2 now I'm getting better at battles, micro and taking less damage. There definitely need to work on some of the easier battles.

Vanilla_Gorilla#8529

To be fair very few people defend it. There's one so far in this thread, I don't imagine we'll see many more. It's quite bad.

GettoGecko#7861

overtaker40 said:

Mr_Finley7 said:

I know this sounds insane, and straight up wrong in the eyes of popular opinion, but I actually do like it as it encourages me to play more battles.

But I played TWW2 with a mod that made auto resolve more punishing so I’m predisposed to liking it.

I'm actually in the same boat. I found I autoresolved too much in wh2 now I'm getting better at battles, micro and taking less damage. There definitely need to work on some of the easier battles.

Well than they could just reverse the multipliers so that on easy you get the x4 while its set to 0 on legendary, that way people on lower level would have to learn how to fight battles and when they improve the AR would get more useful reflecting their improvements on how to do battles.

Even in WH2 it could happen that you took more casualties for using the AR on L/VH in the mop up fight than in the manual first round but it was rare and not the default thing it is now. It is just hilarious that you have to plan with more casualties from using AR for the second round than from playing manually the first round. Most people aren't streamers or youtubers that play most battles to entertain their audience, most people play the game to get entertained and not to earn money with doing boring chores.

If you think the AR in WH2 was "too much" and couldn't reach its outcome than you are lacking in battlefield performance and probably knowledge. In WH2 on L/VH with a 50/50 AR meter you could go afk with the right unit composition and deployment and win, I have taken a dump several times while doing so. I also did the end game battle of the WE DLC while being afk, its simply astonishing to me when people claim "AR was strong", no it wasn't it was also bad in game 2. Just because you do poorly doesn't mean the game should comfort you by telling you that its fine what you are doing when its not.

If they think pressuring people into doing boring battles is their design philosophy than they should at least do it with the players who obviously have room for improvements and not ruin the gameplay for those who already are barely challenged by the battles and make it even less fun for them.

Fingolfin_the-Golden#2157

On easy, normal and hard auto resolve works well.

On very hard and legendary it is punishing. I think because people always complained about boring auto resolve campaigns and the game too easy, so they thought fight battles or take the punishment and show your skill.

Another case of poor game design decisions. They listened to the ‘it’s too easy’ and ‘autoresolve snoozefest’ crowd.


It’s meant to be this way, for better or worse.

Fingolfin_the-Golden#2157

GreenColoured said:

Meh


I fight my battles anyways. The new system telling you which units will be lost is **** anyways, took out all the risks involved.


Just play the damn game

This what CA based their design on, players opinions like this.

GettoGecko#7861

Fingolfin_the-Golden said:

On easy, normal and hard auto resolve works well.

On very hard and legendary it is punishing. I think because people always complained about boring auto resolve campaigns and the game too easy, so they thought fight battles or take the punishment and show your skill.

Another case of poor game design decisions. They listened to the ‘it’s too easy’ and ‘autoresolve snoozefest’ crowd.


It’s meant to be this way, for better or worse.

But I have never seen a L/VH player complain about AR being too strong.
I have seen 2 H/N players who where constantly **** about how easy and boring L/VH while at the same time complaining that the AI "cheats" makes it unfair and thats why they rather play on H/N.
Just because some idiots watching certain youtubers/streamers claim that AR on L/VH was too easy while actually not playing it themself doesn't make it a valid point.

Every campaign gets easier over time no matter what difficulty its played on and L/VH players probably know enough about the game to reach the point of domination earlier than players on lower difficulties. But making the AR more punishing is a sign of complete cognitive dissonance on the dev side, the game doesn't become any more challenging when you force players into fights that aren't challenging for them. It just reduces the proportion of challenging fights compared to the number of manual battles and therefore make the game less enjoyable over all.

Increasing the challenge would have ment more usage of higher tier and well performing units but since there were already complains about "too much doomstacks" even when it were just tier 3 armies, that wasn't a way to go.

AR wasn't strong nor does AR rating impact the actual challenge of a battle or campaign.

Processing#6286

Vanilla_Gorilla said:

To be fair very few people defend it. There's one so far in this thread, I don't imagine we'll see many more. It's quite bad.

Considering disagrees, lots of people do. I guess people love playing battles that they would manually with 0 casualties all the time.

SnakeMajin

The Hard/Hard Auto-resolve felt pretty balanced, from what I've played. In my 5 campaigns, I got to AR 2/3 of my battles. I got a little more manual battles as Ku'gath because I kept 5 Nurglings even in late game. And I'm one to AR only when no unit is lost.

I think being incited to play battles manually for the sake of playing battles manually is meaningless. Campaigns take hours and hours, and there are several to play : we should only "need" to play tough and meaningful battles. There are already enough of them.

CA should abandon the VH and Legendary AR. They are crap.

Aic#3164

I'm fine loosing 2-3 times as many troops with AR then if i'd played manually. But even playing on hard campaign mode now AR usually gives me 10-20 times the losses I'd take playing battles manually. I specially like when is says AR low losses and then preceded too take 1/3-1/2 of your army as losses.
This is especially painful when you're playing races like Slaanesh or Tzeench who are basically stuck at perpetual 8% replenishment. So any galled you AR means the army's stuck in a city replenishing for 3 turns afterward, While if you played it manually your be able to replenish over the end turn and then keep moving.

Vanilla_Gorilla#8529

Processing said:

Vanilla_Gorilla said:

To be fair very few people defend it. There's one so far in this thread, I don't imagine we'll see many more. It's quite bad.

Considering disagrees, lots of people do. I guess people love playing battles that they would manually with 0 casualties all the time.

Good news. Disagrees are wholly valueless.

SusaVile#9835

First you guys need to realize what AR is all about, and then start talking about it.

Autoresolve is what the AI does vs the AI. You can wish to autoresolve a battle, which is in essence saying, "if this battle was between 2 AI's, what would be the outcome?" and it has difficulty layers to it, so a better outcome on easier than on legendary.

And of course realize that there is no battle at all, it is just numbers being calculated. And the value of those numbers is concerning balance between the units, the lord attributes, magic, etc. One of the biggest causes for issues right now is the fact that it does take into account when it is a minor or major siege battle, and the amount of supplies (and probably the biggest issue with it). And still on this point, balance is at its early stages, it will change drastically the more units are modified or added, magic is modified or added, etc.

Now, this means that the autoresolve impacts everything: how fast or slow every single faction expands, how eager it is of getting into a fight or siege, what types of units it prefers, etc. For example, changing any values in favor of the Kislev army roster would imply them having an even larger expansion rate, for the sake of the player having a better AR when fighting as them. Or, imagine some changes are done to the Ogre Kingdoms for their AR to become better: they are already powerful in my campaigns, imagine being better than that and running over the map without opposition. Again, it is not just that they become more powerful in battle, it is also that they perceive they are more powerful and want to get into battle (as in, the AI will not retreat as often as it currently is doing against other AI and just keep expanding).

What we need is 2 different sets of autoresolve: one that is focused on the player, while maintaining the same autoresolve calculations for the AI vs AI fights. Then perhaps we can have a deal here. All that CA would need to do is simply tweak the player bias in order to ensure a more accurate or helpful AR, and that is it. When they want to tweak one faction that is getting too powerful as an AI they can touch the AI autoresolve calculations.

However, the biggest deal with this is what value to give to the average player? If they do it just right, statistically, 50% of players will get an autoresolve that works better than what their own performance is, and 50% of the players will say autoresolve works worse than their own performance.

GettoGecko#7861

SusaVile said:

First you guys need to realize what AR is all about, and then start talking about it.

Autoresolve is what the AI does vs the AI. You can wish to autoresolve a battle, which is in essence saying, "if this battle was between 2 AI's, what would be the outcome?" and it has difficulty layers to it, so a better outcome on easier than on legendary.

And of course realize that there is no battle at all, it is just numbers being calculated. And the value of those numbers is concerning balance between the units, the lord attributes, magic, etc. One of the biggest causes for issues right now is the fact that it does take into account when it is a minor or major siege battle, and the amount of supplies (and probably the biggest issue with it). And still on this point, balance is at its early stages, it will change drastically the more units are modified or added, magic is modified or added, etc.

Now, this means that the autoresolve impacts everything: how fast or slow every single faction expands, how eager it is of getting into a fight or siege, what types of units it prefers, etc. For example, changing any values in favor of the Kislev army roster would imply them having an even larger expansion rate, for the sake of the player having a better AR when fighting as them. Or, imagine some changes are done to the Ogre Kingdoms for their AR to become better: they are already powerful in my campaigns, imagine being better than that and running over the map without opposition. Again, it is not just that they become more powerful in battle, it is also that they perceive they are more powerful and want to get into battle (as in, the AI will not retreat as often as it currently is doing against other AI and just keep expanding).

What we need is 2 different sets of autoresolve: one that is focused on the player, while maintaining the same autoresolve calculations for the AI vs AI fights. Then perhaps we can have a deal here. All that CA would need to do is simply tweak the player bias in order to ensure a more accurate or helpful AR, and that is it. When they want to tweak one faction that is getting too powerful as an AI they can touch the AI autoresolve calculations.

However, the biggest deal with this is what value to give to the average player? If they do it just right, statistically, 50% of players will get an autoresolve that works better than what their own performance is, and 50% of the players will say autoresolve works worse than their own performance.

So what does that has to do with that they changed how difficulty is translated to AR and why do they think it should influence AR at all.

Than again AR isn't influenced by factions its done on unit roles, for your Kislev example you would have to increase the hybrid units values because most of their units are hybrids but that would affect all hybrid units no matter which faction they belong to. You can't buff or nerf a specific faction with AR.
The "anti player bias" is campaign behavior if its set to passive or defensive the AI won't go for other AIs or players even if AR would show it would win with its armies. For aggressive AIs they will go to war when their balance of power ist higher and/or the diplomatic relations worse enough but even than they would only attack when their AR shows it can take on a specific fight. Thats why on higher difficulties players get declarations of war from factions across the world which will never attack because the diplomatic penalty is so much on players but as long as the balance of power is in their favor no army will come and even if the AI sends one at some point its likely that it will get in trouble with other AIs on its way.
Also AR doesn't influence what units the AI gets, the AI will build armies based on whats buildings it has in the recruiting province and when that means building an army with crap AR values than it will do so, when it mean that it only has the choice between SE and artillery than it will build a "doomstack" with highest tier SE and highest tier artillery.

You mix up very different systems, sure they are connected at specific points but thats all and non of the systems give a logical reason to have AR be influence by campaign difficulty to *stars* up players.

SusaVile#9835

GettoGecko said:

SusaVile said:

First you guys need to realize what AR is all about, and then start talking about it.

Autoresolve is what the AI does vs the AI. You can wish to autoresolve a battle, which is in essence saying, "if this battle was between 2 AI's, what would be the outcome?" and it has difficulty layers to it, so a better outcome on easier than on legendary.

And of course realize that there is no battle at all, it is just numbers being calculated. And the value of those numbers is concerning balance between the units, the lord attributes, magic, etc. One of the biggest causes for issues right now is the fact that it does take into account when it is a minor or major siege battle, and the amount of supplies (and probably the biggest issue with it). And still on this point, balance is at its early stages, it will change drastically the more units are modified or added, magic is modified or added, etc.

Now, this means that the autoresolve impacts everything: how fast or slow every single faction expands, how eager it is of getting into a fight or siege, what types of units it prefers, etc. For example, changing any values in favor of the Kislev army roster would imply them having an even larger expansion rate, for the sake of the player having a better AR when fighting as them. Or, imagine some changes are done to the Ogre Kingdoms for their AR to become better: they are already powerful in my campaigns, imagine being better than that and running over the map without opposition. Again, it is not just that they become more powerful in battle, it is also that they perceive they are more powerful and want to get into battle (as in, the AI will not retreat as often as it currently is doing against other AI and just keep expanding).

What we need is 2 different sets of autoresolve: one that is focused on the player, while maintaining the same autoresolve calculations for the AI vs AI fights. Then perhaps we can have a deal here. All that CA would need to do is simply tweak the player bias in order to ensure a more accurate or helpful AR, and that is it. When they want to tweak one faction that is getting too powerful as an AI they can touch the AI autoresolve calculations.

However, the biggest deal with this is what value to give to the average player? If they do it just right, statistically, 50% of players will get an autoresolve that works better than what their own performance is, and 50% of the players will say autoresolve works worse than their own performance.

So what does that has to do with that they changed how difficulty is translated to AR and why do they think it should influence AR at all.

Than again AR isn't influenced by factions its done on unit roles, for your Kislev example you would have to increase the hybrid units values because most of their units are hybrids but that would affect all hybrid units no matter which faction they belong to. You can't buff or nerf a specific faction with AR.
The "anti player bias" is campaign behavior if its set to passive or defensive the AI won't go for other AIs or players even if AR would show it would win with its armies. For aggressive AIs they will go to war when their balance of power ist higher and/or the diplomatic relations worse enough but even than they would only attack when their AR shows it can take on a specific fight. Thats why on higher difficulties players get declarations of war from factions across the world which will never attack because the diplomatic penalty is so much on players but as long as the balance of power is in their favor no army will come and even if the AI sends one at some point its likely that it will get in trouble with other AIs on its way.
Also AR doesn't influence what units the AI gets, the AI will build armies based on whats buildings it has in the recruiting province and when that means building an army with crap AR values than it will do so, when it mean that it only has the choice between SE and artillery than it will build a "doomstack" with highest tier SE and highest tier artillery.

You mix up very different systems, sure they are connected at specific points but thats all and non of the systems give a logical reason to have AR be influence by campaign difficulty to *stars* up players.

AR values are directly influenced by how much gold, basically, the units are worth, not their roles or perceived prowess in the battle ahead. If you change the value of the units, you will directly change the value of autoresolve. For example, set a basic Boyar with 2 Armoured Kossars vs a Cathay basic lord and 2 Jade warriors. Look at the strength bar on top; now redo the battle, but give 9 Experience to each of your Armoured Kossars. Their value increases, hence the strength too. Now put a Bear cav vs a Sky Junk (1600 gold vs 1500 gold) and the value as for the strength bar is the same, although the battle has nothing to do with that value at all. Once the lord is dead, Sky Junk will route and it is an easy win, but that is not reflected at all because the values cannot perceive this. Another example, try 4 bear cav (4x1600) vs 8 Jade lancers (8x800). Same value, but we all know anti-large cav will win.

You can watch this video on Combat Prowess by Zerkovich ( to get an idea of where those values come from. Note that the values changed in accordance to the units' XP (which changes gold value), ammunition, etc.

GettoGecko#7861

SusaVile said:

GettoGecko said:

SusaVile said:

First you guys need to realize what AR is all about, and then start talking about it.

Autoresolve is what the AI does vs the AI. You can wish to autoresolve a battle, which is in essence saying, "if this battle was between 2 AI's, what would be the outcome?" and it has difficulty layers to it, so a better outcome on easier than on legendary.

And of course realize that there is no battle at all, it is just numbers being calculated. And the value of those numbers is concerning balance between the units, the lord attributes, magic, etc. One of the biggest causes for issues right now is the fact that it does take into account when it is a minor or major siege battle, and the amount of supplies (and probably the biggest issue with it). And still on this point, balance is at its early stages, it will change drastically the more units are modified or added, magic is modified or added, etc.

Now, this means that the autoresolve impacts everything: how fast or slow every single faction expands, how eager it is of getting into a fight or siege, what types of units it prefers, etc. For example, changing any values in favor of the Kislev army roster would imply them having an even larger expansion rate, for the sake of the player having a better AR when fighting as them. Or, imagine some changes are done to the Ogre Kingdoms for their AR to become better: they are already powerful in my campaigns, imagine being better than that and running over the map without opposition. Again, it is not just that they become more powerful in battle, it is also that they perceive they are more powerful and want to get into battle (as in, the AI will not retreat as often as it currently is doing against other AI and just keep expanding).

What we need is 2 different sets of autoresolve: one that is focused on the player, while maintaining the same autoresolve calculations for the AI vs AI fights. Then perhaps we can have a deal here. All that CA would need to do is simply tweak the player bias in order to ensure a more accurate or helpful AR, and that is it. When they want to tweak one faction that is getting too powerful as an AI they can touch the AI autoresolve calculations.

However, the biggest deal with this is what value to give to the average player? If they do it just right, statistically, 50% of players will get an autoresolve that works better than what their own performance is, and 50% of the players will say autoresolve works worse than their own performance.

So what does that has to do with that they changed how difficulty is translated to AR and why do they think it should influence AR at all.

Than again AR isn't influenced by factions its done on unit roles, for your Kislev example you would have to increase the hybrid units values because most of their units are hybrids but that would affect all hybrid units no matter which faction they belong to. You can't buff or nerf a specific faction with AR.
The "anti player bias" is campaign behavior if its set to passive or defensive the AI won't go for other AIs or players even if AR would show it would win with its armies. For aggressive AIs they will go to war when their balance of power ist higher and/or the diplomatic relations worse enough but even than they would only attack when their AR shows it can take on a specific fight. Thats why on higher difficulties players get declarations of war from factions across the world which will never attack because the diplomatic penalty is so much on players but as long as the balance of power is in their favor no army will come and even if the AI sends one at some point its likely that it will get in trouble with other AIs on its way.
Also AR doesn't influence what units the AI gets, the AI will build armies based on whats buildings it has in the recruiting province and when that means building an army with crap AR values than it will do so, when it mean that it only has the choice between SE and artillery than it will build a "doomstack" with highest tier SE and highest tier artillery.

You mix up very different systems, sure they are connected at specific points but thats all and non of the systems give a logical reason to have AR be influence by campaign difficulty to *stars* up players.

AR values are directly influenced by how much gold, basically, the units are worth, not their roles or perceived prowess in the battle ahead. If you change the value of the units, you will directly change the value of autoresolve. For example, set a basic Boyar with 2 Armoured Kossars vs a Cathay basic lord and 2 Jade warriors. Look at the strength bar on top; now redo the battle, but give 9 Experience to each of your Armoured Kossars. Their value increases, hence the strength too. Now put a Bear cav vs a Sky Junk (1600 gold vs 1500 gold) and the value as for the strength bar is the same, although the battle has nothing to do with that value at all. Once the lord is dead, Sky Junk will route and it is an easy win, but that is not reflected at all because the values cannot perceive this. Another example, try 4 bear cav (4x1600) vs 8 Jade lancers (8x800). Same value, but we all know anti-large cav will win.

You can watch this video on Combat Prowess by Zerkovich ( to get an idea of where those values come from. Note that the values changed in accordance to the units' XP (which changes gold value), ammunition, etc.

Dude the whole video is about the army strength bar within a manual battle and how it is affected.
AR uses a optical similar bar but it is calculated completely different.
Army strength and AR value aren't the same and aren't connected in any way or form, yet again you mix up game mechanics that are different systems.

GloatingSwine#8098

SusaVile said:

First you guys need to realize what AR is all about, and then start talking about it.

Autoresolve is what the AI does vs the AI. You can wish to autoresolve a battle, which is in essence saying, "if this battle was between 2 AI's, what would be the outcome?" and it has difficulty layers to it, so a better outcome on easier than on legendary.

NB: In Warhammer 2 Autoresolve did *not* have different outcomes on different campaign difficulties.

It isn't supposed to. Campaign difficulty is supposed to affect what the AI brings to a fight, not anything that happens within the battle.

That's the problem with Warhammer 3's autoresolve at the moment. Campaign difficulty, which is not supposed to affect battles except in what the AI brings to them, is having an effect on the autoresolve calculations which is so egregious that battles which are absolutely mind-numbing to play out manually cannot be autoresolved because they cause wildly, incomprehensibly, high casualties *only to the player*.

Autoresolve scaling on campaign difficulty does not make the campaign more difficult, it only makes it more tedious. It needs to be changed so that campaign difficulty has no effect.. This was designed by someone who doesn't play the game.