Automatic/Manual

[Tomcat]

It all depends what works for you and what you enjoy !

If you enjoy the strategy and not so much the battles, then stick to what you are doing now. You should almost always be able to achieve better results by fighting battles yourself over the AI auto-calc. Thus you have more men left after each battle - and the enemy will probably have less - and you should be able to complete the game in fewer turns. But some of the battles take a long time to play out, especially if there are lots of reinforcements for both sides. I like playing battles when the odds are really stacked against me, but I do not enjoy battles with more than about 2,000 troops each side since I find the way reinforcements are handled is not to my liking. My campaign is thus going to take a lot longer to play time wise than if I auto-calced all the battles.

So you maybe are going to become a really good strategy player because you get a lot of practice at it and that is where you are concentrating your effort, but maybe not such a good battle commander, while I may be the reverse because I like most of the battles and do not like delegating responsibility for these to the AI, although I do immensely enjoy the strategy part of the campaign too.

Do what you enjoy most and let the AI do what you find tedious, time-consuming or simply not to your liking. Fight the battles you want to fight and in the conditions you want to fight them. Everybody enjoys the game differently and there are so many different aspects to MTW which makes it so fascinating and enjoyable to play .

Tomcat

[doc_bean]

You should fight the battles you want to fight. While some can be very gratifying others are just boring (if you have twice the number of troops, and they're better equipped and trained). I tend to start off fighting a lot of my own battles but as the game progresses I focus more on the strategic side.

[bretwalda]

Yepp, I started out with the intent of fighting each and every battle, however around 1250 I stopped fighting all of them. (I overbuilt my army so losing a bit more was not such a big problem :) ) Now I am fighting the interesting battles ;)

You should fight the battles you want to fight. While some can be very gratifying others are just boring (if you have twice the number of troops, and they're better equipped and trained). I tend to start off fighting a lot of my own battles but as the game progresses I focus more on the strategic side.

[MidnitePiper]

I often let the AI handle skirmishes where my military or general vastly outmatches the opposition. The battles are half the game though; I have a friend who played the game like you describe - he got bored, said the game was easy and stopped playing - never admitting that by letting the AI run his battles he wasn't really playing the game at all, or getting even a portion of the enjoyment the game offers. I absolutely love the campaign-level play, but I try to play any battles that aren't a foregone conclusion - play on hard and you'll be surprised at how often the AI will do something that surprises and challenges you...