Slitherine

Firstly I should say that I haven't purchased this game yet, but I have watched 6 hours of Lets Play videos, and I'm pretty close!

One of the things putting me off is the huge discrepancy between auto and tactical combat results. Obviously I would always expect tactical combat to give much better results for the player, however the differences seem to be huge.

In the Lets Play videos I watched, even though the player Das24680 did not seem to be particularly proficient with the game, he still managed to easily win every tactical battle while playing on Hard mode. In fact I believe he almost always annihilated the enemy without losing a single unit in any of the battles.

Conversely, in most of the battles in Auto mode (generally between other non-player nations), the combat often ended in stalemate, unless one side massively outnumbered the other. There were also several naval combats in which around 9 ships faced off against 4 ships, but not a single ship was destroyed.

Obviously for the player to always totally annihilate the enemy without losses is not a good thing. But Auto combat seems to end too quickly and indecisively - it is more a war of attrition.

I would like to see slightly more parity between the results obtained through either tactical or automatic combat. Currently the discrepancy between the two methods makes it seem as though the game does not know what type of game it wants to be. The game could be good with combat working either on the abstract level or the tactical level, but having both methods is very tricky, unless there is more parity.

Hi Fysh, there are a few things going on here that all interplay with one another.

First, as you've observed, some auto-battles are overly crushing. This is especially evident in play-throughs with Dragonhold, where it's neighbors are very warlike and have very aggressive AI's. (You'll tend to see less of that in the south and west.) This is tied to how long the AI decides to stay in battle, despite losses, and with aggressive realms, this starts getting suicidal. That's an AI task we are hitting early in EA.

The Autobattle system actually uses the same combat resolution as tactical battles. It matches up units and resolves combat based on their stats and special abilities. That said, there are a few issues with Autobattle selecting targets in a bad way. Ranged units do less damage to units as those units are damaged, and they need to spread their attacks to soften the enemy a bit better. We may also pare back the number of attacks each unit makes so that autobattle is slightly less annihilating.

In player controlled tactical battles, the AI has some targeted flaws that we will be addressing first and will continue to polish throughout EA. This is currently resulting in some crushing defeats of the AI. This combines with some of the annihilating autobattles (on the other extreme) to create a great disparity between the two modes. That said, we definitely like players having the edge when they can manually control their units in tactical battles. You have a certain number of heroes, and you should feel that these are your Schwerpunkt. If you are attacked elsewhere, you should feel a bit less certain, and that creates good tension in the game. While the disparity is too extreme at the moment, some disparity is good.

Good Hunting!

Breca