Sieges and Autoresolve

[Traffik]

Usually when I siege a town or castle pre-heavy artillery, I end up having much more casualties than if I autoresolved the battle to begin with. Usually I can manage killing the enemy army at a good ratio compared to my units, but autoresolving often yields less casualties on both sides (but regardless the enemy army is always routed and settlement captured). So my question is twofold, is there a way to take over settlements in an efficient manner without too many casualties on my side (besides artillery) and how many of you autoresolve versus playing out siege battles? Thanks!

[TevashSzat]

Autoresolve usually gives you much less casualties than what you would have if you played it yourself because I believe the autoresolve program doesn't take into account terrain and defending advantages whenever they autoresolve. The ai just plays the battle as if there were no cities and it was just one army verse another significantly lowering the enemy advantages

[HoreTore]

Well, the auto-resolve doesn't seem to take walls as hard as it should. Also, it calculates that you will rout the enemy army instead of fighting them to the last man in the town center. So, it's practically impossible to beat the autoresolve results.

As for tactics, I generally split my forces into two equal(roughly) parts, take their walls and then hit the center from two sides. Usually works pretty well. Be careful with the general though, if he dies, you're almost certain to rout.

As for what I do myself, I play the battles, except the small ones against 1-5 defending units. I don't have a good graphics card(integrated actually), so I don't really feel like putting up with around 20 minutes with an FPS rate of about 1 just to lose a big part of my army...

[Rozanov]

For me the problem is the other way round.

I've got stuck on 3 different campaigns now, due to being unable to fight to the finish a siege where I was defending. One against 2 mongol armies, the other 2 against Timurids.

If I autoresolve I lose the battles, which I know I wouldn't do if I played to the end, but if I try and play the out the game, it crashes every time. (with the Timurids it's the blooming stupid elephant artillery bug.) (even with 1.1 patch)

(is there any way to mod a save file so I can remove the elephant artillery - change it cavalry or summat?)

[HoreTore]

The "bonus" goes to the attacker, AI or player doesn't matter.

[Traffik]

Yeah, I never autoresolve when I defend. One can withstand a massive army with a relatively light number of militia that would otherwise be defeated using autoresolve.

[Rozanov]

Solved my log-jam caused by the autoresolving or CTD dilemma.

auto_win defender is your friend in these circumstances.

Interestingly the auto_win gives almost the same result as I achieve in similar battles at the same location - "Heroic Victory"

As for the Timurid elephant artillery bug, I fought a subsequent battle in Acre against a Timurid army with elephant artillery but the game didn't crash even though all the ellies got killed. My surmise is that the crash is caused by the way they get killed. If the tower ballistas get them - and they do a very good job at close range - then that's OK. But if a treb or similar firing flaming ammo kills one then that's when the crash seems to happen. As one fires flaming ammo at ellies for a very good reason, that's a bit of a nuisance.