"Using campaign difficulty for auto-resolve does make sense if you consider that auto-resolve is part of the campaign game, not the battle engine."
I hadn't read that entry in the FAQ. Interesting.
The programmers let their programming show through. They construct the battle engine as a separate unit from the campaign game and try to keep such things as difficulty settings separate. To the designers, auto-calculated battles are considered part of the campaign and thus completely unrelated to the battle engine.
However, from the perspective of an end user who knows nothing about the game's code base and only cares about how it plays, it doesn't necessarily make sense for battle difficulty not to apply in auto-calculated battles. The player is more inclined to view battle, auto-calculated or not, as one thing: battle. So, from that point of view, the player expects battle difficulty to apply to, as the name implies, battle (and thus auto-calculated battles as well as manual ones).
Ultimately, part of the game doesn't work the way many players intuitively think it should. However, the designers think it makes more sense for campaign difficulty to affect auto-resolved battles based on the way they structured the code. In my opinion (and presumably the opinions of most players), features like this should be made intuitive for the player, not the designer. After all, the player is the target audience, not the designer (in the case of commercially developed games, anyway).
It took me about eight times as long to write this as it should have. I think that's my cue to get some sleep.
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