Ridiculous auto-calc results.

I know that it's fairly standard that the chances of winning when a battle is auto-calculated are substantially reduced. However, when a 2-star general leading 4 units of horse archers, a unit of cataphracts and a unit of mercenary hoplites attacks a pallisaded town with a battering ram, you expect them to win....
I auto-calced and lost all except 2 hoplites, all of my cataphracts and about half of my horse archers! My general never got a vice for this ignominious defeat, but he was reduced to 4 bodyguards in the assault.
I checked the status of the defending units and the 2 units of peasants and 1 unit of naked fanatics were reduced by about a third each. The defenders were led by a captain, not the 25-star uber-general I was expecting after this result.

What the hell is going on here? If I let a monkey play the battle it would have got better results than this!
Is this also why I get trounced in every naval battle aswell, even when I outnumber the opponent more than 2 : 1?

(Playing on Hard/Hard by the way)

when playing on hard you get a penalty in auto-calc :book:

That is one good thing about playing har or hardest: You don´t have to bother building big fleets, because you will lose anyway, regardless wheter you have more or less men.

Last time I had a "clear victory" in a sea battle on Vh, 1 ship vs. 1 ship! I couldn't believe it for 10 seconds and thought miracle happened. ~;)

campaign difficulty affects auto-calc results

I NEVER auto resolve anymore. My units just take too many losses on auto resolve.
It takes a lot longer to play a campaign when you fight on the battle map everytime but the result are much more satisfying.

I play vh/vh. The only time I auto-calc is when I am ahead 3:1 or more in strength and when I'm close enough to a town that I can pull the stack in and re-train on the same turn before the stack will have to fight again. Otherwise, the losses are too great to bear, so I'll fight it myself and suffer much fewer losses.