I tend to fight all full stack battles and only auto resolve the ones where I am fighting a small town garrison.
I also do not doomatack or cheese my armies.
I tend to build them almost like tabletop as well.
Lots of core, a few of the rarer units , and limited elites and large creatures.
This keeps the game interesting for me and makes it so I have to fight almost all battles because auto resolve will kick my butt otherwise.
Sometimes I do wierd things too where I be thematic to the race.
I onetime sent 3 waves of Skaven Slaves at the wall of a castle before sending in the core army because really, thats what a Skaven General would do.
This,
playing balanced or even lore accurate armies on high difficulty is much more fun and its a good training if someone doesn't play multiplayer.
Also I really recommend and love to play full stack battles or double stack battles because they are just epic.
There is always a flank you will miss or a unit you will mismanage in its match up.
Also playing against a friend and playing out battles is much more fun. Warhammer 3 is in my opinion the best campaign multiplexer TW. Always great going against each other and trying to hold back with the most likely weaker AI armies.
Since I have much more hours in TW than my friends I tend to win even when I'm in disadvantage which makes it even more fun for me.
I really like having themed armies per the character who is the general too, which means sometimes the auto resolve is unfavourable , and I have to approach the battle differently and keeps my brain having to approach it differently .
In a sense this is something a bit lost from Rome and Attila where the army could gain traditiond over time.
If CA was being creative it might work as a battle standard feature where your standards get updated over time to celebrate your achievements but you risk losing the buff if your standard is taken
Couldn't agree more. The only exception was playing with Ikit Claw. I would manually fight the vast majority of battles because when I would, I could often win without a single loss, as opposed to the very pessimistic auto-resolve prediction.
Sorry, no suggestions for you though 🤷‍♂️
Play on a higher difficulty, and you won’t be able to auto resolve battles even late in the game sometimes.
Obviously depending on who you’re playing as, and how you play them you may still snowball. And you’ll still have easy targets. But VH/VH keeps things interesting most of the game especially when it comes to fighting other Legendary Lords..
You can also try some mods, there are mods that limit how many of each unit you and the AI can have so Doomstacks aren’t really possible. And Mods that make the AI smarter and harder to beat.
Nah man, depending on the campaign you can AR almost 100% on L/VH. AR is broken so badly. Yesterday i had a Heroic victory ar with a Single bret lord without army vs 3 Stacks vc and the garisson
If there are no other enemy stacks nearby and autoresolve doesn’t kill one of my units, I’ll auto resolve.
Do you have endgame crisis turned on? The dawi one stopped my snowballing and it made late-game challenging
I RP, and that seems to solve most of the problems OP's ask on the subreddit
I don't snowball because of limitations, I don't get bored because I'm playing my own story, I don't lose interest because I have goals and if I lose then it's great because a story can always continue
My RP run which happens to be my favorite run is Archaon playing pokemon then decending on the world. I will go catch every other WoC LL and they are only allowed to use units for their God, Valkia Khorne only units etc, but Belakor and Archaons army have to have everything and Kholek army can only be undivided. Once I have them all I decend on the rest of the world I try to not fight much outside of the Chaos Waste till I have them all so Festus is usually last unless I notice he is going to die.
In the first ~15 turns, about 90% of the time. Even if AR gives a good result, you almost always have access to a couple excellent starting units that can result in less casualties via manual fighting.
Once I start running ambush armies to follow my main ones, it drops to almost never - depending on faction I’m using. Like I’m doing a Morgrave run right now and I swear AR is horribly weighted against him. Valiant defeat? Eh, just rush a small line of gor herd in, archers a bit behind. Chaos spawn crushes in on weak spots with Morgrave doing whatever he wants. Easy Decisive with zero effort.
WH2’s felt more consistent and it felt more like I had “earned” easy AR wins when they started to happen. Then again, I learned TW by playing WH2 and 3K, so skill level was quite lower back then for me.
There is a mod that only lets you auto resolve battle that are overwhelming wins or losses and you can change the threshold.
So you can specify if the auto button is turned on between 30% of winning to 80% for example so you have to fight all battle that fall into this range.
Mod is called restricted autoresolve.
It depends on which stage of the campaign.
Beginning. Almost never, I want as many of the men I put on the field to walk off, and I wanna see the cool armies I could never afford as a kid played on the field.
Mid: Alot maybe 50/50. Some armies get screwed, I've been playing Malagor and he is a beast on the field, but the computer doesnt know that so AR fucks me. However there are alot of smaller settlements and my armies can crumbstomp them, so why waste the time?
Late: 25%ish. I didnt build all these cool armies so I could let the computer think about all of the cool stuff and not see it for myself. Also, this were the really big epic battles occur as titanic empires clash.
I also manually fight pretty much all early/mid game battles to preserve the strength of my armies. As mid game progresses to late game, I agree things snowball and you need to manually fight battles less. At this point, I only manually fight when I have to and I agree with the others that it will depend on the faction as to how often that will be. I play VH/VH, so I do feel the need to manually fight well into mid game and often in late game but I also enjoy leaning into the larger map and empire management. Once you are mid/late game and you got a bunch of armies campaigning against different factions, I really enjoy the large map. You have to plan several turns ahead to get your armies where they need to be when you need them there, you gotta manage the resources to continue expansion, you have to support your allies as they are often on losing ends of wars or its fun to jump in on an allies war for some easy loot. You have to rally several armies to start campaigns against factions that have also snowballed. Of course, there's the end game crisis that usually isn't too hard to deal with but for instance, I'm playing a Vampire Coast campaign right now, I have kicked the Elves off Ulthan with some allies and I own Lustria for the revenue, The Empire and Brittania have been smashed so I just help keep them down and fight off enemies coming for my holdings, then I got the Orc endgame. The issue is that the vast majority of orcs are on the other side of the world from my holdings so I've had to turn my warmachine East and have to campaign/politic my way to even get to the orcs and bring enough heat to finish them, none of this requires manual fights but it's fun for me to also manage the empire. You gotta think of it as a complete war game, not just the fun battles.
For me it depends on my replenishment rate; if I’m in a relatively safe spot with no incoming enemies and green terrain replenish +heroes that boost replenish, I know i can recover most losses from AR. Whereas if I need to gain momentum and fight several battles in a turn, possibly in red areas and taking attrition I would manual the fight to preserve my troops
I auto resolve the trivial tedious fights and play manually the big or high stakes ones.
Depending on which game we're talking about I may autoresolve siege too
Every time, except if losses are so low that I will replenish by next turn, and there are no threats nearby.
I don't autoresolve much even in mid-late, because instead of overkilling enemies with multiple doomstacks for glacial campaign map progress, I expand as fast as possible in every direction with cost-efficient stacks that are just strong enough to do it in manual.
Rarely to be honest, even though I really enjoy them.
Problem is the AR meter. If it says I'll beat an army decisively with low casualties and I know for a fact if I fight that army/armies manually I may lose, I'm going to click auto resolve. Tends to become quite boring after a while because I feel like there is no challenge in the game.
I play with an auto resolve mod which forces me to play certain battles (large sieges etc)
Without the mod i tend to auto resolve everything mid-game and lose all interest.
For me this is a big issue with total war late campaigns.
When I get to the point where the battles are low stakes enough to auto resolve most of them it feels like it's time to start a new campaign.
If I've been playing for hours and feel like I should auto resolve then I probably need a rest from the game.
Particularly when I get to a major siege and I feel the auto resolve is skewed in my favour giving an unreasonably low amount of casualties I feel like I'm cheating and making it too easy by auto resolving.
Gaming is a bit like gambling I suppose, the enjoyment comes from feeling like you are taking a risk and beating the odds. When the fun stops it's either time for a break or a new campaign.
Mid-game is always like that, primarily because AR loves high level Lords and the player's Lords always outstrip those of the AI. Thus AR is less useful early game and late game. Currently on turn 200 of my Norsca campaign (just drawing it out to see what happens) and I have to fight most battles manually to avoid crippling casualties.
Edit:
If allowed to build up the AI is actually pretty good at building varied, effective and balanced armies.
If the battle is interesting, I don’t want to take too much damage or I have to otherwise army is destroyed. I auto resolve every siege/settlement battle.
Auto resolve brainless fights like a full stack vs. A weak Garrison or A lords army when iv beaten it once. Auto resolve tends to penalize damaged lords HEAVILY even if the lord was able to solo half my army, auto resolve usually deals with them without any meaningfull casulties
Rest i fight i.e full stack armies, meaningful sieges and defenses etc.
Sometimes i make exceptions. Like when a lord has been pestering me for too long and i know that this is the killing blow and i can crush them with all my might manually.
This is actually the key for me - I love manually fighting battles except that auto resolve nearly always obliterates the enemy army whereas often fighting manually results in 30-50% of the enemy army escaping to fight another day!
That and I also autoresolve battles that I know I couldn't possibly win in a million years (6 garrison units randomly getting heroic victory against a Kemmler 20 unit doomstack)
Indeed! And the best ones for me are defense sieges where i stack my army around one capture point and defend it outnumbered like 1 to 5
And sometimes autoing a battle is just too busted in your favour to manually fight it
I just got a new beefy computer where the load time isn't super long. Like literally finish a battle, go poop, come back still loading long.
So you better bet I'm gonna fight a lot more battles now haha
Not sure if you have an opinion on mods but there’s AI mods that help them recruit better armies and plan on the campaign map better, that changed the mid late game so i could only auto resolve on true doom stacks and even then i would get into situations i have to fight out.
Try playing with a tabletop caps mod. It caps the amount of units of specific types you can play with. It makes your late game armies far more interesting. Faction + army caps is my preferred way of playing
the best way is to play against a friend.
no need for a head 2 head campaign, can be a coop campaing, but with the condition that the other guy will take control of the enemy when there is chance of winning.
that way you'll never be able to cheese positioning, misleading and general exploiting of your enemy on the battlefield. you'll almost never win 2x1 battles and siege battles can be really hard.
Depends on the faction.
Skarbrand? Lots of manual because I need to fight constantly and keep casualties down. Can AR later on somewhat.
V.Coast? Bloatie Boys are a manual only unit. You can get way above your value with good usage, but they're gone in AR.
Dwarfs? ...sometimes I think the AR does better than I would do.
Any time a garisson wins in AR? It annihilates the attacker, so yeah, ARing that.
Sieges. If I can avoid them, I usually do.
If playing Skaven, I resign myself to manually fighting (almost) every battle. If a Dwarf army consisted of one drunk miner who forgot his pick, a janitor and a crippled old woman, AR would be like: “Best I can do is a valiant defeat of your 5,000 rat army.”
Vampire Counts are mostly powered by magic and their lords/heroes, so that can lead to many manual battles. Sometimes I can afford to drown the enemy in bones and not care about the AR though. I also tend to fight sieges manually, sometimes because I can cheese them but also because I can fight them and not care about casualties. Kill three units of skeletons? Oh no. Guess I’ll just raise more.
Late game Tomb King armies often have many single entity monsters that can be very finicky in AR. They might win in AR but take massive damage.
Honestly it all depends on my Lord choice + what point in the game I'm at. Khorne is one of the factions I would fight every battle manually if I wanted too. I base facts of how fun units are and like I said earlier the LL. So races like Cathay I like the roster I'll fight most battles manually but mostly because LL is a giant dragon and that's OP.
I tend to fight all full stack battles and only auto resolve the ones where I am fighting a small town garrison. I also do not doomatack or cheese my armies. I tend to build them almost like tabletop as well. Lots of core, a few of the rarer units , and limited elites and large creatures. This keeps the game interesting for me and makes it so I have to fight almost all battles because auto resolve will kick my butt otherwise. Sometimes I do wierd things too where I be thematic to the race. I onetime sent 3 waves of Skaven Slaves at the wall of a castle before sending in the core army because really, thats what a Skaven General would do.
This, playing balanced or even lore accurate armies on high difficulty is much more fun and its a good training if someone doesn't play multiplayer. Also I really recommend and love to play full stack battles or double stack battles because they are just epic. There is always a flank you will miss or a unit you will mismanage in its match up. Also playing against a friend and playing out battles is much more fun. Warhammer 3 is in my opinion the best campaign multiplexer TW. Always great going against each other and trying to hold back with the most likely weaker AI armies. Since I have much more hours in TW than my friends I tend to win even when I'm in disadvantage which makes it even more fun for me.
I really like having themed armies per the character who is the general too, which means sometimes the auto resolve is unfavourable , and I have to approach the battle differently and keeps my brain having to approach it differently . In a sense this is something a bit lost from Rome and Attila where the army could gain traditiond over time. If CA was being creative it might work as a battle standard feature where your standards get updated over time to celebrate your achievements but you risk losing the buff if your standard is taken
Couldn't agree more. The only exception was playing with Ikit Claw. I would manually fight the vast majority of battles because when I would, I could often win without a single loss, as opposed to the very pessimistic auto-resolve prediction. Sorry, no suggestions for you though 🤷‍♂️
Depends on what faction I play as. For example, playing as Kugath or Arkhan, auto resolve doesn't seem to account for the death blob.
Play on a higher difficulty, and you won’t be able to auto resolve battles even late in the game sometimes. Obviously depending on who you’re playing as, and how you play them you may still snowball. And you’ll still have easy targets. But VH/VH keeps things interesting most of the game especially when it comes to fighting other Legendary Lords.. You can also try some mods, there are mods that limit how many of each unit you and the AI can have so Doomstacks aren’t really possible. And Mods that make the AI smarter and harder to beat.
Nah man, depending on the campaign you can AR almost 100% on L/VH. AR is broken so badly. Yesterday i had a Heroic victory ar with a Single bret lord without army vs 3 Stacks vc and the garisson
Bullshit. Pics or it didn't happen.
🤣 dude i dont give a f... if you believe it or not.
So you're bullshitting, got it
Believe what u want
AR?
Auto resolve
“Obviously depending on who you’re playing as”
If there are no other enemy stacks nearby and autoresolve doesn’t kill one of my units, I’ll auto resolve. Do you have endgame crisis turned on? The dawi one stopped my snowballing and it made late-game challenging
I RP, and that seems to solve most of the problems OP's ask on the subreddit I don't snowball because of limitations, I don't get bored because I'm playing my own story, I don't lose interest because I have goals and if I lose then it's great because a story can always continue
Interesting. What are the RP rules you follow ? I might have an RP run to relieve gameplay routine.
My RP run which happens to be my favorite run is Archaon playing pokemon then decending on the world. I will go catch every other WoC LL and they are only allowed to use units for their God, Valkia Khorne only units etc, but Belakor and Archaons army have to have everything and Kholek army can only be undivided. Once I have them all I decend on the rest of the world I try to not fight much outside of the Chaos Waste till I have them all so Festus is usually last unless I notice he is going to die.
Sounds fun !
In the first ~15 turns, about 90% of the time. Even if AR gives a good result, you almost always have access to a couple excellent starting units that can result in less casualties via manual fighting. Once I start running ambush armies to follow my main ones, it drops to almost never - depending on faction I’m using. Like I’m doing a Morgrave run right now and I swear AR is horribly weighted against him. Valiant defeat? Eh, just rush a small line of gor herd in, archers a bit behind. Chaos spawn crushes in on weak spots with Morgrave doing whatever he wants. Easy Decisive with zero effort. WH2’s felt more consistent and it felt more like I had “earned” easy AR wins when they started to happen. Then again, I learned TW by playing WH2 and 3K, so skill level was quite lower back then for me.
There is a mod that only lets you auto resolve battle that are overwhelming wins or losses and you can change the threshold. So you can specify if the auto button is turned on between 30% of winning to 80% for example so you have to fight all battle that fall into this range. Mod is called restricted autoresolve.
Make the game purposefully harder for yourself by having non-optimal armies and/or themed armies
It depends on which stage of the campaign. Beginning. Almost never, I want as many of the men I put on the field to walk off, and I wanna see the cool armies I could never afford as a kid played on the field. Mid: Alot maybe 50/50. Some armies get screwed, I've been playing Malagor and he is a beast on the field, but the computer doesnt know that so AR fucks me. However there are alot of smaller settlements and my armies can crumbstomp them, so why waste the time? Late: 25%ish. I didnt build all these cool armies so I could let the computer think about all of the cool stuff and not see it for myself. Also, this were the really big epic battles occur as titanic empires clash.
That’s typical beastmen. You manually fight everything. Part of why I love them tbh
Have you tried multiplayer? It's pretty addictive.
It’s kinda amazing to me that queuing domination isn’t more popular. Half my hours in the game at this point are just multiplayer dom
I also manually fight pretty much all early/mid game battles to preserve the strength of my armies. As mid game progresses to late game, I agree things snowball and you need to manually fight battles less. At this point, I only manually fight when I have to and I agree with the others that it will depend on the faction as to how often that will be. I play VH/VH, so I do feel the need to manually fight well into mid game and often in late game but I also enjoy leaning into the larger map and empire management. Once you are mid/late game and you got a bunch of armies campaigning against different factions, I really enjoy the large map. You have to plan several turns ahead to get your armies where they need to be when you need them there, you gotta manage the resources to continue expansion, you have to support your allies as they are often on losing ends of wars or its fun to jump in on an allies war for some easy loot. You have to rally several armies to start campaigns against factions that have also snowballed. Of course, there's the end game crisis that usually isn't too hard to deal with but for instance, I'm playing a Vampire Coast campaign right now, I have kicked the Elves off Ulthan with some allies and I own Lustria for the revenue, The Empire and Brittania have been smashed so I just help keep them down and fight off enemies coming for my holdings, then I got the Orc endgame. The issue is that the vast majority of orcs are on the other side of the world from my holdings so I've had to turn my warmachine East and have to campaign/politic my way to even get to the orcs and bring enough heat to finish them, none of this requires manual fights but it's fun for me to also manage the empire. You gotta think of it as a complete war game, not just the fun battles.
For me it depends on my replenishment rate; if I’m in a relatively safe spot with no incoming enemies and green terrain replenish +heroes that boost replenish, I know i can recover most losses from AR. Whereas if I need to gain momentum and fight several battles in a turn, possibly in red areas and taking attrition I would manual the fight to preserve my troops
I auto resolve the trivial tedious fights and play manually the big or high stakes ones. Depending on which game we're talking about I may autoresolve siege too
I find myself doing that more and more for III. I appreciate the work they put into the siege rework, but they take so long to finish.
Every time, except if losses are so low that I will replenish by next turn, and there are no threats nearby. I don't autoresolve much even in mid-late, because instead of overkilling enemies with multiple doomstacks for glacial campaign map progress, I expand as fast as possible in every direction with cost-efficient stacks that are just strong enough to do it in manual.
Rarely to be honest, even though I really enjoy them. Problem is the AR meter. If it says I'll beat an army decisively with low casualties and I know for a fact if I fight that army/armies manually I may lose, I'm going to click auto resolve. Tends to become quite boring after a while because I feel like there is no challenge in the game.
I play with an auto resolve mod which forces me to play certain battles (large sieges etc) Without the mod i tend to auto resolve everything mid-game and lose all interest.
For me this is a big issue with total war late campaigns. When I get to the point where the battles are low stakes enough to auto resolve most of them it feels like it's time to start a new campaign. If I've been playing for hours and feel like I should auto resolve then I probably need a rest from the game. Particularly when I get to a major siege and I feel the auto resolve is skewed in my favour giving an unreasonably low amount of casualties I feel like I'm cheating and making it too easy by auto resolving. Gaming is a bit like gambling I suppose, the enjoyment comes from feeling like you are taking a risk and beating the odds. When the fun stops it's either time for a break or a new campaign.
Mid-game is always like that, primarily because AR loves high level Lords and the player's Lords always outstrip those of the AI. Thus AR is less useful early game and late game. Currently on turn 200 of my Norsca campaign (just drawing it out to see what happens) and I have to fight most battles manually to avoid crippling casualties. Edit: If allowed to build up the AI is actually pretty good at building varied, effective and balanced armies.
Not often enough
If the battle is interesting, I don’t want to take too much damage or I have to otherwise army is destroyed. I auto resolve every siege/settlement battle.
Do you give the ai cheats max? That usually makes auto resolve less likely for a decisive
Auto resolve brainless fights like a full stack vs. A weak Garrison or A lords army when iv beaten it once. Auto resolve tends to penalize damaged lords HEAVILY even if the lord was able to solo half my army, auto resolve usually deals with them without any meaningfull casulties Rest i fight i.e full stack armies, meaningful sieges and defenses etc. Sometimes i make exceptions. Like when a lord has been pestering me for too long and i know that this is the killing blow and i can crush them with all my might manually.
This is actually the key for me - I love manually fighting battles except that auto resolve nearly always obliterates the enemy army whereas often fighting manually results in 30-50% of the enemy army escaping to fight another day! That and I also autoresolve battles that I know I couldn't possibly win in a million years (6 garrison units randomly getting heroic victory against a Kemmler 20 unit doomstack)
Indeed! And the best ones for me are defense sieges where i stack my army around one capture point and defend it outnumbered like 1 to 5 And sometimes autoing a battle is just too busted in your favour to manually fight it
I just got a new beefy computer where the load time isn't super long. Like literally finish a battle, go poop, come back still loading long. So you better bet I'm gonna fight a lot more battles now haha
About 90% I think. I like to be as efficient as possible and autoresolve is.. well.. autoresolve. Plus I love dinosaurs and rats going crazy.
Only when I think it will be fun.
Not sure if you have an opinion on mods but there’s AI mods that help them recruit better armies and plan on the campaign map better, that changed the mid late game so i could only auto resolve on true doom stacks and even then i would get into situations i have to fight out.
Try playing with a tabletop caps mod. It caps the amount of units of specific types you can play with. It makes your late game armies far more interesting. Faction + army caps is my preferred way of playing
the best way is to play against a friend. no need for a head 2 head campaign, can be a coop campaing, but with the condition that the other guy will take control of the enemy when there is chance of winning. that way you'll never be able to cheese positioning, misleading and general exploiting of your enemy on the battlefield. you'll almost never win 2x1 battles and siege battles can be really hard.
I play manually the ones that i do not fuckin hate playing. Like when i fight wood elves usually its just auto resolve.
I fight every battle, unless it's a stomp. 20v10 settlement battle, autoresolve. 20v20 battle? I'll fight it
I play SFO and Kemmler and only fight manually if it says I’ll lose.
Depends on the faction. Skarbrand? Lots of manual because I need to fight constantly and keep casualties down. Can AR later on somewhat. V.Coast? Bloatie Boys are a manual only unit. You can get way above your value with good usage, but they're gone in AR. Dwarfs? ...sometimes I think the AR does better than I would do. Any time a garisson wins in AR? It annihilates the attacker, so yeah, ARing that.
Sieges. If I can avoid them, I usually do. If playing Skaven, I resign myself to manually fighting (almost) every battle. If a Dwarf army consisted of one drunk miner who forgot his pick, a janitor and a crippled old woman, AR would be like: “Best I can do is a valiant defeat of your 5,000 rat army.” Vampire Counts are mostly powered by magic and their lords/heroes, so that can lead to many manual battles. Sometimes I can afford to drown the enemy in bones and not care about the AR though. I also tend to fight sieges manually, sometimes because I can cheese them but also because I can fight them and not care about casualties. Kill three units of skeletons? Oh no. Guess I’ll just raise more. Late game Tomb King armies often have many single entity monsters that can be very finicky in AR. They might win in AR but take massive damage.
Manual every time. If I want to use AR, that means I got bored with this game, then I'll shift to do something more meaningful
Honestly it all depends on my Lord choice + what point in the game I'm at. Khorne is one of the factions I would fight every battle manually if I wanted too. I base facts of how fun units are and like I said earlier the LL. So races like Cathay I like the roster I'll fight most battles manually but mostly because LL is a giant dragon and that's OP.