When to Auto Resolve Combat???

[DeathJest]

Are there favorable times... to let the game auto resolve the combat for you???

For instance...

Right after a Save...
I get attacked by a Faction Leader and 2 of his brats.
With 0 other troops.

and in the province I have 300 men... Two Spears One Peasent.
And a couple units of Hobilars.

If I do the battle my self... The King & Sons usually tear apart my foot troops...
I charge the Hobilars into their flanks... and usually take out a prince or two... before their King makes a break for it. (and of course... the Hobilars can't catch 'em.)

This pretty much turns all of my units into hamburger with at least 50%+ casualties.

Reload the game... try it again... same thing.

but if I let the game auto resolve the combat...
I only lose 20~30 men... win the day... all is good... Huzzah

Am I just fighting the battle wrong?

I know Royal Knights are tough... but a lone old fogie king surrounded by 200 men... shouldn't kill 75% of them... and then trot off unscathed.

or is it that the auto resolve knows you should win if you have a zillion to one advantage.

[Jxrc]

I usually only auto-resolve sieges when I do not have any equipment (catapult, trebuchet, etc...) In most cases I loses a lot less men doing so.

[TheViking]

to autocalc a battle is like cheating, specially if you attacking a castle, IMO.

The ai probably just look at the number of men then calc it.
I was outnumberd 4-1, the enemy had 16000 i had 4000, I won a great battle, then i reload to see how it was if i autocalc. then i would have lost my entire army and only killed 1000.

And if you want to become a greater fighter you have to fight every battle, even if it looks like your gonna lose

[Ueriah]

One thing I can say for 100% certainty: You can not learn tactics if you autofight. If you chose to slug it out, you might win less, but you will learn new tactics in your wake.

You won't win every battle. Nobody does, or has historicialy either. The trick is to learn to do the best that you can do. The other night I had a _great_ fight that looked hopeless... it was my King and Prince and about 300 Vikings against 3500 Peasents. Talk about a slugfest I suprised myself by inflicted over 800 casulaties, capturing over 1000, and winning the battle, suffering less then 170 losses At the end of the day, the king had some nifty new virtues that I hadn't seen before. I doubt that the king would have gotten them had I auto-resolved... and I surely wouldn't have learned the merits of criss-crossing my flank advance http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[_Martyr_]

One time as the turkish I was besieging the byzantine emperor, all by himself with no other troops with him at all, (I had killed them), he came out to fight and I auto resolved to see what happened... he killed about half of my armyof 600, i reloaded an fought it myself, and just used spearmen against him, and he only killed about 20. He was a rank 5 though. I advise strongly against auto resolving although I do it a lot myself

[wtom]

Usually AI retreats from province or doesn't attack if it feels it can't win the battle. But I had one interesting case: the enemy attacked my province with significantly lesser forses than I had there. I fought that battle againg and again and always my suckers was running as real battle begins http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mad.gif I did all my bests But they always was running It appears that the matter was an enemy general was skilled attaker and had few stars more than my one. I got angry and selected autoresolve battle. Oops... my suckers won easily Besides of autoresolve battle helps sometimes very much, one question arises: how AI decides to attack or to not attack? It seems like that it uses different algorithms when makes such a decision and when autoresolves battle...