SP - Battles & Sieges Simulated battles outweigh the need to play them yourself? WHY?

[High chief Kieran]

i do agree it is weird that you get more exp for troops in autoresolve, still i prefer to fight instead of auto resolving.
for some reason whenever i autoresolve at least one of my battanian fian champions dies, even in battles of 100 of my elite troops against 5 looters. i think keeping my fians alive is a lot more important than getting a bit more exp for my other troops, especially since battanian nobles can be a bit hard to find.

 

[TrashMan]

Are you forgeting that auto-battle means the player is NOT involved and thus, the XP he would normally hog goes to the troops?

Auto-resolve and manual bettles are NEVER going to match. They never had in any game in history. They cannot without fully simulating the battle, whihc make the point of the function moot to begin with.

 

[High chief Kieran]

Are you forgeting that auto-battle means the player is NOT involved and thus, the XP he would normally hog goes to the troops?

you have not seen me play, there are a lot of battles where i just command my troops and do nothing else. on my gambler rp playtrough i did 0 dmg, i had my "mercenary" troops to do that.

 

[suissaK]

Looters - autoresolve

All other battles, play manually as I hate losing men.

Definitely this.

 

[eddiemccandless]

Given that this is currently the only reliable way to train new troops, I actually don't see it as a problem. You are not going to autocalc the battles that you really want to fight anyway.

 

[Wolfsblut]

It's not that simple. The simulation abstracts things like the XP bonus for headshots, fight it out manually and your troops could score more or less headshots than the simulation assumes, so even if you redistibute the XP gain evenly you'd still get inconsistent results between the two.

I know, thats why i wrote "roughly the same" amount.
Will never be the same i suppose, each fight goes different.
But as it is now, auto-fights seem to be the by far better way to train your troops and that shouldn't be the case.
To fight the battles yourself and take 3-4 times longer is not really having an option.

That may have to do with the amout of tactic skill a player has (can't say i like the idea of having a skill that alters the outcome of
auto battle at all).
Not sure about that though, its far beyond my pityful skills to dig into these data.

I realized the troops trained up alot faster by bashing looters in auto fight than they did in another session when i fought everything by myself, but
i can't tell anymore if i had tactics skilled or not in one of them.

 

[giltirn]

I agree that manually fighting should be as good, if not better, than autoresolve.

 

[Varileztra]

So what if you gain better results with auto resolve against bloody looters? They are boring enemies after the first ten minutes into a campaign, why would you even CONSIDER fighting them for real? they are not even worth the loading screen.
And against every other enemy you lose like three times the troops you would, if you competently managed your troops on the field, if you auto resolve.


OOf, if i just think about the hundreds of palatine guards in my garrisons and i would have needed to load into the map for every looter party i fought for them.... OOOOOOOOOF, id sit at 300hrs + playtime instead of my 60, Game is a big enough time sink as it is already,

 

[Archonsod]

That may have to do with the amout of tactic skill a player has (can't say i like the idea of having a skill that alters the outcome of
auto battle at all).

I'm not sure it's a huge issue to be honest. Low level troops have always punched above their weight in autoresolve, while high tier troops have tended to suffer. There's already an incentive to avoid autoresolving anything but the most trivial battles simply because there's a much higher risk of losing your most valuable experienced troops. Unless there's a couple of perks to boost their hitpoints that's likely to remain the case irrespective of any other skills. The question really is whether the problem is that autoresolve is an efficient means of training up your troops or if the bigger issue is that it's worth seeking out such one-sided battles simply to train your troops in the first place. Ideally you'd expect every battle the player engages in to be sufficiently high stake or interesting that they feel they need to fight it rather than trust to the vagaries of the auto-resolve. If that isn't happening I doubt the problem is autoresolve.

 

[Bloodninja87]

Edit: Also - with the exception of looters, I do significantly better actually fighting my battles - so even if there was an XP bonus (which I don't think there is) it still wouldn't make sense to auto calculate for it.

I think it ultimately depends on Tactical Skill Levels and RNG. I have won battles at 3:1 odds with sim battles, but I have also had 50+ troops killed in sim battles that had zero deaths and zero wounded when I fought them myself.

 

[Skatan]

"There's already an incentive to avoid autoresolving anything but the most trivial battles simply because there's a much higher risk of losing your most valuable experienced troops "

Agree. I've tried it out in a late game campaign and in my experience I tend to have a higher risk of losing tier 5-6 units in autoresolved battles than when I play them out manually. Battanian Fians, Cataphracts etc can all die vs looters in autoresolve and often do. It may be coincedence, but after trying it out 20 times or so it sure feels like it happening. Though at that point it matters little anyways since I was swimming in high tier units and a death or two didn't matter.

 

[durbal]

"There's already an incentive to avoid autoresolving anything but the most trivial battles simply because there's a much higher risk of losing your most valuable experienced troops "

Agree. I've tried it out in a late game campaign and in my experience I tend to have a higher risk of losing tier 5-6 units in autoresolved battles than when I play them out manually. Battanian Fians, Cataphracts etc can all die vs looters in autoresolve and often do. It may be coincedence, but after trying it out 20 times or so it sure feels like it happening. Though at that point it matters little anyways since I was swimming in high tier units and a death or two didn't matter.

Autoresolve battles killing more units than they should isn't a real argument for having autoresolve give more XP than manual battles. Both are separate issues.

 

[Skatan]

I agree, I never said they should. I just trailed the conversation.

 

[Lorenzzo]

auto-resolve actually being viable against low-level enemies unlike Warband makes the game way less grindy when training your troops. They should keep it as it is. Like people have pointed out, using auto-calc isn't even worth it against anything other than looters anyway. There's no value in forcing players to play out these trivial battles like in Warband.

 

[mangalore]

This. If this is true they need to remove it, or at the very least buff the personal fought battles, so they would give the same outcome.

"This if it is true"... not the strongest fact based argument out there. Is it true?

 

[Wolfsblut]

I'm not sure it's a huge issue to be honest. Low level troops have always punched above their weight in autoresolve, while high tier troops have tended to suffer. There's already an incentive to avoid autoresolving anything but the most trivial battles simply because there's a much higher risk of losing your most valuable experienced troops. Unless there's a couple of perks to boost their hitpoints that's likely to remain the case irrespective of any other skills. The question really is whether the problem is that autoresolve is an efficient means of training up your troops or if the bigger issue is that it's worth seeking out such one-sided battles simply to train your troops in the first place. Ideally you'd expect every battle the player engages in to be sufficiently high stake or interesting that they feel they need to fight it rather than trust to the vagaries of the auto-resolve. If that isn't happening I doubt the problem is autoresolve.

From this point of view you're right of course.
Roaming the land and search battles for the only sake to train/grind up you men shouldn't be nessecary.
Its battles, not football matches after all, and a certain amount of losses are/should always be to expect.

 

[Cspump]

I don't really see an issue with this. I get that you could cheese your way through early game to get stronger units faster. If that's your goal, there is much faster ways to do it. I.e. creating a party and taking their troops.

However once you get to mid game and into late game this is more of a saving grace. When you are 500 days in and you are at war with multiple kingdoms; I don't mind the fact that I can mass recruit and hammer out some auto-resolves to build my army back to a respectable level. Getting this done in 30-60 min is nice, instead of spending a handful of hours all over again.

IMO it can be summarized to;
Pros of autobattle would be an even exp gain to troops,possibly an exp bonus (as people think ITT), and saving time on the easy wins.
Cons are outside of the looters and low numbered bandit groups auto-resolve has a high possibility of losing top tier troops, even with a staggering high win chance. In more even battles you will lose much more troops. You don't gain any character battle xp.

 

[Lorenzzo]

It's pretty funny how the forums is split into two camps with one side saying the game is two grindy and the other side (this one) who thinks the game should be more grindy.

 

[zeidrich]

Autoresolve battles give more exp. Here's the decompiled code for the GetXpFromHit which determines how much skill XP you get from a strike, and how much XP a troop gets from a strike against an opponent.

        public override void GetXpFromHit(CharacterObject attackerTroop, CharacterObject attackedTroop, int damage, bool isFatal, bool isSimulated, out int xpAmount)
        {
            int num = attackedTroop.MaxHitPoints();
            xpAmount = MBMath.Round(0.4f * ((attackedTroop.GetPower() + 0.5f) * (float)(Math.Min(damage, num) + (isFatal ? num : 0))));
            if (isSimulated)
            {
                xpAmount *= 8;
            }
        }

isSimulated is true when the battle is auto-resolved. The damage calculations are a bit different in a simulated hit, but ultimately both a kill from simulated damage and a kill from regular damage will deal about the same amount of damage overall.

This means a simulated battle will grant about 8 times normal experience, and this is consistent with my in game experience. You would probably have recruits leveling up multiple times in some single battles, only they stop gaining XP until you manually upgrade them.

I don't know WHY they've decided to grant much more exp for simulated battles, but it's the way it currently is.

 

[Lorenzzo]

Autoresolve battles give more exp. Here's the decompiled code for the GetXpFromHit which determines how much skill XP you get from a strike, and how much XP a troop gets from a strike against an opponent.

        public override void GetXpFromHit(CharacterObject attackerTroop, CharacterObject attackedTroop, int damage, bool isFatal, bool isSimulated, out int xpAmount)
        {
            int num = attackedTroop.MaxHitPoints();
            xpAmount = MBMath.Round(0.4f * ((attackedTroop.GetPower() + 0.5f) * (float)(Math.Min(damage, num) + (isFatal ? num : 0))));
            if (isSimulated)
            {
                xpAmount *= 8;
            }
        }

isSimulated is true when the battle is auto-resolved. The damage calculations are a bit different in a simulated hit, but ultimately both a kill from simulated damage and a kill from regular damage will deal about the same amount of damage overall.

This means a simulated battle will grant about 8 times normal experience, and this is consistent with my in game experience. You would probably have recruits leveling up multiple times in some single battles, only they stop gaining XP until you manually upgrade them.

I don't know WHY they've decided to grant much more exp for simulated battles, but it's the way it currently is.

and they should keep it like that