do you consider autoresolving battles cheating?

[hoetje]

Sometimes,it really is scandalous.I won a siege doing auto-resolve while I got 500 men.They got 300 men,the outcome was I had ZERO casualties.Yes,zero,that's unbelievable right?

[IPoseTheQuestionYouReturnTheAnswer]

Yeah, I use autocalc on sieges when the garrison army consists of one unit of town militia. Sorry...don't want to go through the frustration of running my janissaries into cannon towers to chase down one unit of peasants wielding home-made spears when I can just press a button and win with zero casualties. It saves time and cuts frustration, which is what a game is all about, right?

[SirGrotius]

I use it when fighting rebels near tall mountains -- I've already had two instances where the rebels were on a top tile which I could not reach.

[Kanamori]

Do you know how campaign difficulty affects autocalc results?

Yeah, it's so annoying when it loses battles that should definitely be my win. "Oh alright, I'll play this battle you fairies."

The disparities can be so funny, going from me losing 500 men and the battle w/ auto-resolve, to the enemy losing 1k men and having 6 men left when it makes me play it out.

[Basileus]

When im bored i might auto calc but it usually annoys me cause i get a lot of casualties so i load it back up and do it my self. Its crap if youre defending a siege though you always lose if you have less troops.

[Zenicetus]

I auto-resolve minor battles, like mop-ups of small stacks after a major battle, or clearing out rebels, especially when my forces are ridiculously outnumbering the enemy. I don't consider that cheating.

I do think that auto-resolving sieges are a bit of a cheat when you're the attacking army, because it seems to me that auto-resolve doesn't factor in defensive fire from wall towers. That's a major source of losses for the sieging army now, compared to RTW, so you'll end up with a much larger surviving army if you auto-resolve as the sieging army and win. At least that's been my experience so far. It makes a big difference in whether I have to sit for several turns rebuilding or reinforcing my army, or whether I can quickly move on to the next target. It really encourages steamrolling the map. So I try to resist the temptation to auto-resolve sieges, even when I know I have a superior army and will win the siege. I don't want the pace of the campaign to be too fast, or too easy.

[redstar1]

It's not cheating at all. It's my game, I bought it and I'll play it how I like ;)

In fairness though the autocalc results seem to return a much better result than if I were controlling the armies myself, though hardly as much fun.

[Werner]

I never auto resolve. If you play the game you play every battle. Besides, do you really want the AI to decide what your troops do? No thanks