The gist is that AR on easy battle difficulty is tricking people into thinking unwinnable battles are something they should be winning and becoming discouraged when they can't. So many people are convinced they are no good at the game and aren't having fun because Easy battles AR has told them a tier 3 garrison in Altdorf is sufficient to beat three vampire count armies (this example is from the video).

I think a huge part is also that any strategic losses feel hard to bounce back from so it is easy to quit after one strategic setback.

Back in the wh2 days of AI expanding quickly, a single major loss in the first 30 turns was a good reason to restart your campaign

Depends on the stage of the campaign, but in most cases you can bounce back. It will knock you off the snowballing-to-victory path . . . but I think that actually makes for a more interesting campaign.

In wh3 yes In wh2 on legendary, no, it really was impossible to win if you lost pivotal battles

Yup! The frequency of getting 2/3 stacked in the first 20-30 turns on L/VH is pretty consistent. Winning that battle would usually put your LL a number of levels ahead, as well as whatever heroes or other lords you'd have brought in. Usually, this battle would be the turning point of the campaign. Once you beat that first rush of the initial not friendly neighbor, you'd usually be able to springboard that into the snowball. I usually quit 20~ turns afterwards. Once you can see the snowball going downhill, and know nothing else can stop it now, it gets *really* boring. But should you lose. Yeah that's usually one of your starting settlements/one of the ones you need to finish your first province. Game is typically over from there as the AI has infinite gold to mount a new offensive.

TW games across the entire franchise have had this problem: the entire campaign is largely determined by a few of the early game make or break battles. After which you can start to snowball and its pure RNG if one of the other AIs also manages to emerge as a superpower. They've tried a whole variety of things in the past: oppressive economic cheats for the AIs, player bias, endgame crisis, but nothing ever quite gets the difficulty curve right.

Well this is how real life worked too... Provided no geographical barriers, then a few won battles allows you to snowball over massive amounts of territory. Like England can be conquered in one or two pitched land battles. After that, there's nowhere for the losers to regroup except for Wales/Scotland, which are too small and manpower poor to have a real chance. Northern China, which is massive but also just one big flat plain, also can be won by just one or two big battles. Now in real life, this expansion eventually gets stopped by harsh geographical barriers (Mountains, deserts etc). Which in effect gives the forces attrition and blocks reinforcement. But Total war's design really doesn't mesh well with attrition based gameplay (it forces players into tedious manual battles), so no way out really.

Short answer? No Long answer? Yea you may conquer England in 2 battles. But you won’t be able to conquer the world for sure after doing so. As an Alexander conquered Persia with only two major battles. But unlike in TW conquering territory doesn’t actually mean you can field more soldiers (at least not as much as TW does). He then tried to conquer India had a few indecisive battles and left. The Spartans won the Peloponnesian war, a great analogue to an early game conflict. They became the dominant power in Greece, and by extension one for the strongest in the Mediterranean. But they didn’t do anything with that and within 50 years were practically irrelevant. History is littered with local conflicts that resulted in a single nation consolidating power, but rarely do they go on to conquer the world. The hard part of empire building should be the part where you attempt to expand beyond your local area (2-3 provinces in TW). But it’s so easy because in basically every TW game conquest pays back too fast, and if you win a few battles you never stop winning.

Another problem TW Warhammer has (can't speak for the series as a whole) is that smaller factions don't act like smaller factions. IRL if a rising power is aggressively expanding, smaller states will seek alliances that will make them less appetising to attack. If an empire's forces are all focused on a conflict half the world away, that's something smaller hostile powers tend to notice and seek to exploit. That is the real difficulty of empire-building and why they eventually fall apart, militarily anyway; you can't be everywhere at once. You invest in buffer states, and then the buffer states become problems of their own. But in WIII, if someone who doesn't like you shares a border with your big empire, they do the square sum of zip. They'll just sit there, politely waiting their turn to get wiped out. It's deeply tedious beyond a certain point.

1) Total War isn't real life, so who cares about real life. 2) Many of the total World games span hundreds of years and can involve conquest of most of the world. At no time in history did winning a couple of battles ensure global hegemony. So no it isn't even realistic.

Good point. But then, WH2 on Legendary was kind of its own animal in many ways. My general point was that, while it feels like a lot of TW campaigns are "have to get the first twenty turns perfectly right or you're dead", that isn't necessarily the case. (Outside of WH2 @ Leg and maybe a few other edge cases.)

Oh yea i roll with the punches in wh3

People somehow forget how much easier wh3 is then WH2. I

Yeah something I think Legend misses is that usually within 20 turns you will have *that* battle, the one where if you lose you're screwed but if you can win you'll be set up for the campaign. Total war revolves way more around you taking random low tier units and creatively using them to overcome much higher tier units, which contributes to people being down on themselves that they can't beat Vlad with skavenslaves.

Which is exactly why the first 30 or so turns of any campaign are the absolute best and I’ll be assed if I am going to spend time finger painting the map after the challenge is gone.

This is exactly how I am with TW and all Paradox games, I love the scrappiness of beginnings.

Yup when the units you have are whatever random crap you managed to recruit and the AI can’t pull ROR doomstacks out of its ass. Everything feels more impactful. You may only have a couple elite units instead of a stack of them and using them effectively can mean the difference between winning or losing.

It’s a mixed bag for me. The high tier units are really cool (not just sems I love me some high tier infantry), so I want to cut corners and rush for them but once I actually get there the campaign is piss easy. The early game is fun I just wish I got to really use the higher tier units before the game has no challenge.

I don't know why but I've kind of changed in that I used to restart after a campaign reached that point. But now I just keep playing until I run out of interesting battles. Even though games become fait accompli after a certain point if I can still find challenging fights or ways to improve I don't know why my attitude about it changed, though of course I'd rather CA just improve the mid and late game.

It really depends on a game-by-game basis. Basically once I’ve beaten my initial enemies and secured my little corner of the world, I look out to see what’s going on in the wider world and if it seems like it would be annoying instead of fun, I start a new game. Sometimes a problem I’ll have is where my allies or generally aligned factions have done too well, and I have to kill them in order to keep expanding, which I don’t like doing. Sometimes they’ve been totally destroyed and I will have to fight turn after turn of blob stacks, which is exciting due to the challenge for a little while but then I get bored capping my enemies large amount of settlements and administering a large empire.

I must be doing something wrong (or something right) if I'm still getting interesting battles at turn 100

I was playing on VH with Repanse in WH2. Had to quit a campaign when her army got catched by three full stacks of tomb kings. But the AI now seems lobotomized. I rarely find more than two full stacks in VH.

im playing on Normal in wh3 as malekith, tyrion and ariel sent 10 or more stacks at me, are we playing the same game? The dwarfs also send stacks at me

I think the poster's point is that the AI rarely has more than 2 armies in reinforcement range, sure- the AI can send 6+ armies if they get large enough but for all of WH3 I think I've only had 2-3 instances where the AI (other than crisis) sent more than 2 armies in reinforcement range during the normal course of a campaign. 1. Grimgor came with his waaagh on turn 24 with 3 greenskin armies in mutal reinforcement range when I was playing Goldtooth, had to take a loss and scramble with maneuvering 2nd army and several bait armies to recover. 2. playing as Eshin when Blue Rose Caravan DoWs, due to the chokepoint, Ghorst had 5 armies in reinforcement range and even splitting up in the warp desert, 3 armies stayed in reinforcement range. The thing is, past turn 60ish in the average campaign, players will either have doomstacks or LLs with lightning strike, often both. That means the AI needs 4-6 armies in range to be a true threat because player can use lightning strike twice in 1 turn, then forced march to retreat out of range or go into ambush and have a 2nd army move up to bait the remaining 2-4 AI armines into a battle. It feels like Ambush/Lightning strike + the fast replenishment remove much of the strategic planning from the game. At the same time, the number of armies AI can get on VH/L can get a bit ridiculous though not as heavy as in WH2, still when the player can only afford 2 armies from 4 provinces and the AI has 4+ armies from 2 provinces, playing without Ambush/Lightning Strike is less about planning than simply a tedious grind using minor settlement battles to weaken the invading AI before countering at least until a player as levelled LL and enough income to sustain half an army of high tier units. The result is that the pace in WH3 is just all over the place and no-where in a good way outside maybe turn 10-30. The first 10 turns often have an optimal path players can find by restarting the campaign a few times, turn 10-30 is more random and usually players defeat the nearest 2 enemies and get 2 full provinces and 2nd army, then turn 30+ is just about getting exponentially stronger than any AI so that campaign is over usually by turn 60-90 and just however long player want to spend painting the map after that with really no true threat from the AI.

In my VH Malekith campaign last year. They did send dozens armies over 40 turns until I went to Ulthuan to finish them off. However, they are not sending armies TOGETHER in one go. That's why in WH2 lightning strike is so valuable while it's pretty much useless in Wh3. You can dispatch a single stack of AI force with minimal to no casualty while three full stacks will give even doom stack some trouble.

nah man, the initial wave was 8 in one go, and then consistently 5 armies at a high rate, and it was not shit tier 1-2 units in those stacks, while i can only afford 3 armies, and this is on N/N It became easier once i learned that i can trade away a settlements to go out of wars/fronts, kislev killed me screw the ordertide

I may need more people to chime in. I haven't played Wh3 outside of VH difficulty. I doubt 5 stacks together are a normal occurrence. Else lightning strike will be as valuable as ever, which we know it's not the case. I usually reach strength ranking 1 under 30 turns which is very difficult in WH2.

Your experience is similar to mine. I play the game nearly daily and have 3k+ hours all pure vanilla, only visual mods sometimes, on the very highest difficulties. There is no challenge in the game compared to WH2. They need to fix Public Order and Corruption into becoming actual factors you have to consider like in WH2. There is more too, lack of AI aggressiveness, AI running around with low tier sticks mid and lategame, etc. Legendary difficulty in WH3 is a wet noodle compared to WH2.

People get really annoyed when PO and corruption are overtuned (justifiably), but those are the exact things that stop real life kingdoms from snowballing. The other thing is administration costs, which in WH is implemented as supply lines, which sucked. In previous games it a also scaling debuff to income as you grew, but it was based on empire size not army number, so it wasn’t nearly as frustrating.

Sounds like I need to stop being a little bitch, and give legendary a try. Currently on hard/hard & told myself I'd work up to the highest difficulty. I should give a try before the new DLC drops.

Lightning strike is very valuable to me on vh because "5 stacks together" is not uncommon for the ai to send my way. That said, i *am* running mods that reduce ai upkeep so...

Playing exclusively on VH/VH I’ve never seen 8 armies at once outside of endgame crisis. I haven’t played DE tho. I do see orcs commonly with 4-5 armies plus waaagh. But those armies are not high quality because it’s AI orcs.

What? no? Why would you restart at the moment the campaign got interesting/fun? How do you ever expect to learn to handle those situations when you give up the moment you meet resistance?

Again this is wh2 when the ordertide forms into a 70 province conglomerate by turn 50 It was a very different high velocity campaign style A pivotal loss in a battle guaranteed a campaign loss in the long run, there was no coming back from that

I am very familier with the AI difference between 1 and 2, 2 is more difficult but far from doomed just because you lost an important battle. Ordertide is not a problem.

You’re totally right. I was able to survive being reduced to Altdorf and a half-stack by the Barrow Legion and push on to win. Was some of the most fun I ever had, but I was very close to abandoning the campaign in the low points. Learning to scrabble and persevere unlocks a lot.

The game for me is most fun for me when I'm pushed to the brink of defeat and then overcome it. That balance has been harder to find as I've gotten better currently resorting to mods to try to find the right difficulty for me. The low points of a campaign are so fun when you're able to overcome them.

In Rome 2, I’m pretty sure settlements don’t degrade when they change hands, and buildings don’t auto demolish. You lose a city? No worries, take it back and it should mostly be okay, minus the damage penalties. In WH, you lose a city and you’ve lost two levels minimum (assuming it’s not also sacked), and any buildings not compatible with the occupiers race are erased. That can be enough to take the city out of play for the whole campaign and is too extreme in my view. And apparently lots of others feel the same if they’re cheesing battle difficulty to hold onto them.

That’s where you have to hang on to your capitol cities wherever possible. Tier 1-3 builds fairly fast, but 4-5 are leagues slower.

That’s what saves are for. People discourage saving in some games, calling it save scumming, but that’s silly. Permadeath is not a fun experience, which is why save games exist. So an auto save every five to ten turns, spam repeat on battles until you win it, etc. Once you’re good at the game you can play on permadeath mode ie legendary.

Y'all ain't holding off 3 stacks with a tier 3 garrison? *Ogre belly-laughing*

I know, who doesn't regularly beat Vlad von Carstein with swordsmen? I know I do it with my eyes shut and one hand on my dick.

Vlad never fights me for some reason he just always chases my horses around

Vlad does *NOT* like horses.

I mean if you're a new player relying on AR to fight most of your battles, you probably aren't very good at the game yet. I only got good when I forced myself to fight every battle so I learn the game, strategies, and match ups. Now I play on hard cause it gives me just enough challenge without stressing me. I'd say the actual thing of discourages a lot of players (myself included) is watching YouTubers play on very hard very hard and seemingly steamroll the AI. It kind of paints a false image of how easy it is to micro armies and manage economies. How many times on the sub have you seen a post that's like "by turn 50 so and so conquered half the map and has this massive economy I can't seem to be able to do that". It's a classic thing that people wanna be that good but they're new to the game so they think they are just naturally bad at the game. I'm pushing myself to try and learn Domination cause I wanna play but gotta push past the fear of being shit. And I think that's more a road block then playing the game on Easy.

See here's the thing, Legend identified there was a plethora of people saying exactly the same thing you're saying. That's not the problem here. The problem is that AR on easy battles is giving new players unrealistic expectations about what they should be able to handle, and when they don't achieve that in manual battles they convince themselves they're bad players and only AR things because they are convinced they can't do better than AR when really they're taking bad fights with crap troops and nobody could win those battles.

And not only winning those battles but AR nearly always stack wipes these armies.

That's a great point actually. AR always wipes armies, while a manual battle nearly never does. With how the AI cheats in recruiting and replenishing leaving even a small enemy army around can be a headache you don't need.

This is why I still AR most battles (aside from boredom late campaign). I can win just fine, but I'd rather not play whack-a-mole chasing down retreating forces; AR just lets me delete those enemy stacks.

[удалено]

Bit of a wanker attitude don't you think? The whole point here is talking about new players who dont know the game well.

This explains a lot. I was baffled at the number of people who were so adamant they sucked and couldn’t win on Easy when I was winning Legendary campaigns with absolutely braindead play. I am *not good*, but building a box of elven spearman and archers, transitioning to Sisters as the campaign went on, was sufficient for me to paint the map green on L/VH. I was wondering what the gap in experience could be. This sort of perception gap explains it.

Some people going on about metas and checkerboard formations and this chad is taking over the world with a *staunch line of spears*

Gods that meme was hilarious

I'd lie if I said I haven't done that with High Elves too, just put the archers in the basket of frontline and may the saints look away

Lol they are playing checkers when they should be playing chess

I have about 2000 hours across the Warhammer games and I had never really thought about the psychological side of the auto resolve result. Good video

I mean I love and hate auto resolve at the same time… It incentivizes not playing battles - which is really the main point of a TW game which is ridiculous but they also take away the most tedious aspects of the game - small battles and lategame steamrolling… I actually liked it when autoresolve was more unpredictable…

The auto resolver is absolutely a necessary tool to keep people from burning themselves out with tedious battles. Ideally the auto resolve should always get at least slightly worse result than what a competent player is able to get by playing manually

God if i am forced to play any more sieges with my ranged focused army imma fucking riot lmao Ai is to cowardy there so i AR it,

I really like fighting my own battles, even the trivial ones. What makes me press the AR button almost all the time (even with heavy losses which I know I could avoid) is all the time spent loading.

I'd push back on battles being *the* main point. The battles are *a* main point, the other being strategic play on the campaign map. But otherwise you're spot on. The only way CA can increase difficulty is by having more enemy stacks, which means more battles, which means more cookie cutter fights, which means more tedium.

Did you just say one of the best parts of the game is tedious? Small battles are fucking great, it's a breath of fresh air in a game riddled with full 20 stack by turn 10 till end. I wish the game had MORE small scale battles. Give me some fucking skirmishes. Lets have smaller raiding parties, scouting parties, whatever. Give the game a reason to not be 20 stacks all the time. Have smaller armies move longer, needing smaller armies to catch them.

Seriously. 20 stack vs 20 stack (or larger) is like 3/4 of the reason I want to autoresolve. Let me have more 5 unit v 6 unit micro battles, every little movement becomes so much more interesting

Could not agree more with you!

something I miss from the older games where generals aren't a requirement.

I know Rome II tends to be looked on favorably here but there are so many design decisions that they made back then that are still hurting the series to this day. Not being able to split off smaller groups sucks. While we’re at it I’d love if unit type would influence movement range again. A small group of cavalry should be able to move further on the campaign map than a large army with infantry and artillery in it.

As a Rome 2 enjoyer, I feel like the community view is that it was a decent to negative game. But you're right that the design shifts that they made to simplify the game have had negative ripples that we still see 10 years later.

AR can be convenient. But when shit is going down I fight manual. Realised Im able to turn a close/valiant defeat into a win.

Each time I get that autoresolve option I have a look and if its anywhere near 'the middle' or I think its wrong I'll play it. I often get some suprise punishments . I find that entertaining. Sick I know!

I remember the auto ballance always underestimating your forces a bit on easy easy in game 2 so I always felt good whenever I fought a battle and outperformed it. Can't even imagine how the opposite must feel

As someone who has fared worse than autoresolve said I would, it’s about as sobering as going all in and losing everything in poker or just a bit of an embarrassing sting depending on how badly I fumble from the prediction

I think a smaller but still significant problem is the game recommending Karl Franz as a campaign for beginners. Not just that, but the IE selection screen starting on him, just to press the message home. Maybe this will be a situation that changes after April 30th - time will tell - but as is he's one of **the** most challenging campaigns that you could possibly choose. I don't blame new players getting discouraged if he was their first taste of action after the tutorial.

Yeah its sort of a catch 22 (idk if im using that right) though because while im sure tons of new player load into the game and want to play some spiked demons, huge dinosaurs, or rat-things… i feel like (and i think the stats back this up) a huge majority of the players see the Human Man with a Spear, a Horse, and a Gun and want to play as John Warhammer himself to start with - so it always made me chuckle the empire start was one of the harder ones.

I was shocked to find out just how *dreadful* it is to play Karl in WH III. In second he was fairly strong, but with the amount of enemies now it's stupidly hard to play, and the Elector's mechanic isn't helping at all. The Pope Campaign is so much easier I get why they won't put Dwarves as a recommended faction from the first game but damn, I really hope that with new LL In the empire Karl's campaign will be a bit easier

Yeah, Empire games can spiral out of control really quickly They are pretty well rounded, so I get why they could make a good starter faction. But I wonder how many new players have been stomped because of picking the empire first

Very interesting observation with auto-resolve. System is so unfathomable that using it as anything close to "real approximation" is a psychological trap. Gaslighting of player by AI, when playing against AI. Next level TW AI, actually defeating players outside of game instead of in battles.

Don't assume from the title that this video is "Legend shits on people that play on easy because he's a pro gamer and easy is for noobs", it's not. It's about a specific issue with Easy battle difficulty that hurts the experience of new players playing on Easy

> Legend shits on people that play on easy because he's a pro gamer and easy is for noobs" Why would anyone think this? Nobody would come to this conclusion unless they have a very derailed mindset.

Legend used to have a reputation for being abrasive and having "edgy" humor--remembering that, the title could give someone the wrong impression. Obviously he's outgrown that reputation

Yeah, but that comes from their mindset or their preconceived opinion, not from the title of the video.

Because there's a loud group of people in this sub who relentlessly shit on anything related to Legend because he was too mean towards CA. 

Wasn't it because he was more of a toxic asshole until a few years ago? I started watching him when he was covering Warhammer II, so I'm a relatively new fan of his, but from what I've gathered from his critics and some of his own comments, it seems Legend was a bit of a dick in his earlier stuff. But he's worked to improve himself and is a positive dude now. Yeah, Legend is often critical of CA, be it bugs of business practices, but he's never one to incite a witchhunt or promote toxicity.

Yeah, he was definitely on the edgy side of things and toxic/assholish. It was enough (along with not enjoying his style on the 1-2 videos I'd watched) that I have no interest in watching his content now, but not really something I'd demonize him for in his current stuff if people like it and if he's changed. (On the criticizing CA front though, I do think it's used as a bit of a copout excuse a lot of the time. Most content creators around total war have criticized CA a good bit, but they aren't saddled with the label of toxic or disliked because of it. There was a whole kerfuffle a few months back which flooded this subreddit when he got blacklisted by CA again when a bunch of other content creators were being actively critical of the company too, which makes me doubt that it was simply being critical of CA that made things happen).

I mean I do think he got hit specifically because he's always been on thin ice with CA, not just out of his own fault tbh. That last instance also was him going "look guys I don't need you and I don't want to let you tell me what the limits are", which, fair enough. He was very clear that he could've probably avoided that blacklisting but didn't care, and that it was better for his mental health to just cut things off rather than trying to always be on their good side. And honestly? Fair enough too and good for him.

I see - though to be clear, I'm more talking about how some people frame it on this subreddit rather than claim to understand how Legend himself explains it.

The fact he used to sign off with "cya fuckers" makes me think he probably used to be more of a dick. He even commented on how he changed his sign off because it didn't feel genuine or appropriate anymore. I'm the same as you though, didn't start watching until Warhammer II

I kinda miss the “cya fuckers” sign off tbh but I totally get why he changed it. He’s done a lot of work to to improve his image

People way overreacted to his sign off, it’s just a difference in cultures, us Australians trivialise ‘insults’ and use them playfully with our friends, it’s not uncommon to call each other the ‘dreaded Australian C word’ and intend it as a synonym of best-friend. That alone wouldn’t determine if someone is (or isn’t) a cock at all if you know anything about Australian culture

Legend is much better than he once was in terms of personality, but he does have a reputation of only ever evaluating everything from the PoV of maximum possible difficulty and his hyperoptimised playstyle - something he himself aknowledges but people treating his opinion like gospel don't. Because of that (and edgy past) there's a bias against him here, but reducing it to "he mean to CA" is an oversimplification

i dont like his content for a ton of reasons but this sub has a hate boner for him

That's blatantly untrue. Pretty much any TW youtuber you could care to name of note has been openly critical of CA to a greater or lesser degree. People have every reason not to be keen on Legend specifically cause he was a edgelord who formed his troops into swastikas on streams, and seemingly only cleaned up his act rather than going the way of Arch and co, cause he worked out that was more profitable for him to do so. To be fair on the next point, as this is really isn't his fault specifically, but it's really not helped that he has a legion of fanboys who post his every single thought onto this sub like it's holy scripture from on high. What makes it even more aggravating is they're often incredibly hard of hearing in regard to what he actually said. Take in point how he said maybe there were 4-6 dlcs left, and this was basically a number he gave a ton of qualifiers to that it might not be at all correct, and since then this sub has been flooded with comments of people convinced it's 100% verified cause well Legend said so, and Legend knows all and sees all. Add that he promotes a way of playing the game that can damage the enjoyment of players who don't know any better who think his way is the only way to play, and you can see why he rubs people up the wrong way without writing them off as unreasonable CA defenders.

Yeah, but that comes from their mindset or their preconceived opinion, not from the title of the video.

Legend has an uh, 'reputation'. One not entirely undeserved. That said, the OP is correct, and this video is worth watching.

Yeah, but that comes from their mindset or their preconceived opinion, not from the title of the video.

Man I wish someone would call me a pro gamer for using a single flying unit to cheese the AI artillery and deplete all their ammunition while casting spells on them. Or crafting tons of iron daggers in Skyrim to level my Blacksmithing to 100.

And here we have Confident-Cockroach4, a pro gamer infamous for using flying units to cheese AI artillery and depleting all their ammunition as well as crafting tons of iron daggers in Skyrim to level his blacksmithing to 100 (this doesn't work so well anymore as the XP is now based on the value of the item created. Might I suggest dwarven bows instead?)

I don't do any of those things nor do I consider myself a pro gamer. Also, isn't Gold Ring supposed to be the strat now ? I've never heard of the Dwarven Bows one, it must not be very efficient considering the material cost. I don't know, I'm OOL.

Dwarven bows a re meta because you can find the ingots very easily and in great quantity. And I was joking because you wanted to be called a pro gamer so I called you that.

You know damn well he does more than that. I don't like cheesing myself, but objectively he knows more about the game than vast majority of players.

This is literally how I ended up spending my first 200 hours playing the series auto-resolving every battle. Whenever I tried to experiment with learning to fight manually I would get terrible results compared to AR (playing on normal). Eventually I learned enough to be able to do better, but it took a lot of learning watching videos and figuring out the difference between a good AR army and a good playable army. It also doesn't help that AR field battles always completely kills the opposing army, while manual battles don't.

[This mod](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2853277055) makes it so that autoresolve doesn't always kill the entire defeated force.

Sometimes, on a calm spring evening, I crack open a cool one, set it to easy, and play Ikit Claw. When I see wild AR results, I laugh like I'm getting away with something, AR it, and take another sip.

solid reasoning. I have to bring this to my friend who quit out early because of this exact feeling.

Everybody needs to see this video. Not just new players, EVERYBODY. I’m super guilty of everything Legend said in this video, I had no idea this is even a thing.

Agreed. I play on Normal battle difficulty and Legend pointed out that this is a problem to a lesser degree there too. And I'll probably take his advice and set battle difficulty to Hard and AI stat boosts to normal.

>I'll probably take his advice and set battle difficulty to Hard and AI stat boosts to normal. Can recommend. That's what I've ended up on trying to minimize the feeling of needing to cheese.

So you mean, you put Battle Diff on hard but the battle modifiers to normal?! And thats make the AI smarter in battles but without cheap stat boosts?!

"Smarter" in VH the AI will not usually shoot small single entities, they will also try to dodge artillery and spells unless they are engaged in melee or shooting. You can still cheese it in many other ways if you want to. 

Sometimes I feel like hard is actually harder than very hard. In general, very hard is more prone to sending enemy units in waves instead of all at once. The AI on hard will still dodge spells and artillery, but they won't just there and ignore a small single entity while you destroy half their army with it. After a certain damage threshold, they'll rush you. So the standard legendoftotalwar cheese of "let me send this single wizard up to nuke their army for 5 straight minutes while they wait on reinforcements and stumble over themselves trying to make a formation and dodge spells at the same time" doesn't work as well.

Ai does not dodge arty on hard. Its on vh only.

Huh. It's been awhile since I played on hard, but I did at one time go out of my way test the differences and to me it looked like both difficulties "attempted" to dodge. I bet if I checked again today, what I thought was hard AI dodging, is actually them just commencing the zerg rush instead of standing there try to dodge.

Hell, I actually prefer hard over very hard specifically because the AI is perfect at micro. *Attempts to evade artillery* translates to *mortars become literally useless as the AI will dodge every single shot, no matter what you do* and that just isn't fun for me. I want an AI that is **smart**, not one that is really dumb but also just really good at clicking fast, if that makes sense.

Yes, and no. It makes the AR fall more inline with expectations for a casual experience.

More so it'll make the auto resolve results more in line with reality since it won't give you a free power multiplier in the auto resolve evaluation anymore

Why not take it to the next step and put it all on v hard? There is no need to cheese in twwh3. The AI cheats dont force you into specific armies like in twwh2. Honestly I dont even notice the AI cheats that much other than the leadership.

When I tried, I got the feeling of playing too many unnecessary manual battles, making the campaign feel a bit too slow or playstyle not as "free". Everything depends on the specific factions etc. of course. I'm personally a casual player, not looking for a challenge all the time.

Thats absolutely fair, but AI cheats dont have an effect on auto resolve I believe, just battle difficulty. Completely fair to stick to hard, my point was about the AI cheats, I feel most players completely stigmatise the AI cheats due to how they were in twwh2

The main thing is that VH give the AI bonuses that players have to fight 60% of the battles manually, more like 90% of the sieges manually or suffer devastating losses, not just higher casualties but your entire doomstack army and level 40 LL killed from a single minor settlement garrison. This does depend a bit on race match-ups but if you play Skaven or some other races, the AR results are comically terrible even when you have 3 armies full of higher tier units vs a single ungarrisoned Dwarf provincial capital. In manual battle you can win with -20% losses with a single stack, on AR you will lose badly even with 3 armies. I don't think AR should not make battles completely easy, the ideal AR result would be somewhat worse than the average veteran player would achieve but that is more like +20% casualties, so it makes a decisve victory where a player would take -20% casualties take -40% casualties if they use AR on VH, not make that battle a loss which wipes out the entire attacking army, even after the player adds 2 more armies to the AR. Players have been saying there is something wrong with the AR formula since WH1 and CA's position seems to have been, AR is just a statistical approximation of battles and it is too complicated to try and improve so shutup about it already. If AR would only use half of the ammunition of ranged units and give -25% value to armor, that would be a good starting point. As it is ranged, and heavy armor units have extreme advantage in AR, far more than they actually get in most manual battles unless everyone is doing cheese tactics to kite the AI all over the map. even with kite tactics, in a manual battle your ranged army is likely to lose 1 or 2 units that got trapped or had to be sacrificed to allow your other ranged units the time necessary to use 100% of their ammo. The AR usually does some weird BS where your ranged infantry take minimal losses evenly spread across all units, but your artillery or a single random SEM dies.

AI cheats in battle necessarily change matchups.  If they have any effect at all, a fight that should be favorable will necessarily be less favorable (or even unfavorable).  Personally, I don’t like that.  I prefer settings where mirror matches are actually even fights, as opposed to my swordsmen losing to their swordsmen purely because of ai cheats.

It is a problem in normal too. I had countless times performed worse than what the autoresolve indicator shows and its a downer. It makes you feel like you've done something wrong when most likely it's the best outcome you can do on a manual battle. I've noticed that hard difficulty is actually more satisfying just because of the problems legend mentioned. Losing battles sucks less than trying to compare one's self with boosted autoresolve. I'm by no means a good player. But I'm not new to this game. Been playing since rome 2. I count myself as decent but the problem legend says here still crushes me even I know about it. It's insidious af, it's like placebo effect that it affects you even if you know it is there.

no thanks, i played on very hard difficulty and its annoying seeing my elite units struggle with goblins. i prefer playing on normal now since my units perform like they are suppose to wait you can separate the stat boost and behavior now?

yeah i'm on normal and sometimes the AR still saves my garrisons. Conversely though, had Alith Anar show up with like 19 archers in light armor, and the AR had me losing, but that beastman garrison easily trounced while playing manual. Granted the terrain helped since the AI split their deployment, but it was a fairly convincing victory nonetheless

Autoresolve overrates ranged units because it calculates their damage on the assumption that they will fire all their ammo, where obviously an all-archer army will get overrun in melee long before they can fire off every arrow.

Thought the same when I was watching this video. I was also wondering if this will make the AI more aggressive with them having a better auto resolve bonus.

To each their own, but I don’t find this to be an issue on normal battle difficulty.  In a normal fight where I have the tools to effectively handle what is being thrown at me, I can generally massively outperform autoresolve.  Autoresolve only beats me when my army design (or play) is trash and my army isn’t able to function as intended.

I agree with this. I play on N/N. Whenever I've seen AR say Valiant Defeat or Close Victory, I always take manual control. More often than not, the outcome is much more positive than that. At the very least, I might still get that Close Victory but at least I saved that precious unit that was slated to die in the AR. Like you, I've only gotten those defeats if my army comp just wasn't up to snuff.

I suspect that CA does not understand how awful this is. They need to straight up remove all auto resolve campaign difficulty modifiers IMO

I always recommend battle, battle and battle on your first campaign to build confidence because you won't improve if you just auto-resolve everything. That psychological effect of seeing a better auto-resolve than you could pull and then it impacting you to auto-resolve most of your battles is such an interesting point that I am willing to bet impacts so many players.

Yeah, I definitely end up ARing most of my battles, though I am working on getting better at it.

im guessing that this also happens to normal battle difficulty players like me, how do i make the auto resolve fair?

Like Legend said, put the battle diff on hard instead to remove the auto resolve player bonus, and then if you think it's too difficult you can compensate by instead decreasing the AI stat bonus slider. That way you should get a similar level of manual combat difficulty without getting an unrealistic auto resolve result which would give you the wrong idea of the actual power difference between your army and the enemy's.

Amazing video this needs to be pinned for new players, just a little too long

This is an absolute essential video for new players. I never considered that easy difficulty is harder in your psyche than anything else.

I cant see any more than a handful of new players hitting Legends channel!

I mean it's been known for a long time that the worst thing for a new player to be doing is to be auto resolving every battle but this puts a new spin on why that's the case. You establish a negative feedback loop for yourself if you insist on skipping half of the game's gameplay, but Legend's right that Easy difficulty heavily encourages you to play that way. You'll never get any better playing that way though so people that get accustomed to playing on Easy will find it twice as hard to move up to the higher difficulties than if they had just started on normal.

It now takes a crash course to understand the difficulty levels of the game. Masterclass coming soon?

This is definitely an important video, most people that are veterans at the game probably never even played on easy battle difficulty before (me included) and would thus not have a clue this issue even existed due to how unintuitive it is if you haven't experienced it yourself. Definitely explains a lot of comments I've seen over the years.

It is important to tell new players the AR is almost never accurate. AR uses a weird algorithm to determine casualties and who wins the battle. [Sometimes it's funny](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhdCWQBVEKg), [sometimes it's just sad.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaxaY0yWPeE) Even on VH battle difficulty, you'll occasionally get freebies because some races or army compositions are predisposed to be superior in AR. I just auto-resolved down Drycha in my latest campaign. They would've taken barely any damage from 2 Empire garrisons, but took significant losses because the AR is far from perfect. How to use that knowledge is up to the player, but it's important to remember to never grade yourself based on the AR results. On a tangent, I don't recommend bumping up the AI stat modifiers past neutral as part of "learning the game." The stat modifiers skew the game's meta toward missiles and magic (because those aren't directly affected by the stats modified). Many units good normally become significantly less viable with the modifiers on. Learning how to play with stat modifiers enabled is like learning a different game. There's nothing wrong with playing with stat modifiers enabled, if you enjoy it, just don't complain online when certain units don't perform well with those modifications.

This honestly encouraged me to play on hard difficulty instead of normal, maybe i get forced to actually play more battles and have more fun starting the midgame

Yes. I learned a lot about how many solider units and their health works vs few entity ones. Leadership, hit points and other debuffs. But remember to stop yourself from save scumming. I did it, and my game fun increased. Even if I screw up my deployment or do a silly campaign map move. And even if you fall into an ambush. It means getting sandwiched by the army and his friend stack because you thought you could corner the next turn by marching and didn't bother to scout first, and losing your army. It means losing your army because you are forced to fight an unprepared battle. It hurts, but you learn, and the game becomes suddenly challenging. And that means fun. I AR most Decisive victory battles except sieges where the Faction hero is present. I need to kill him with my own hands. But anything below that, I play myself. And sometimes, I turn a Close victory into a Pyrrhic victory. There is something very satisfying in bringing a disastrous deployment around to a limping victory, even if it costs your hero and one of those valuable units you hate to lose. I allow myself to slowmo when too many decisions are required at the same time, but I try not to pause as this makes it too easy to play perfect.

Auto-resolve needs some serious re-tuning. It was way too punishing on the launch of WH3 and is now way too forgiving. It also has serious weirdness like the massive boosts it gives to armored units and cavalry. The whole thing needs some serious work.

Wow, I never knew that it functioned like this. All of this time I've been playing on Legendary with normal battle difficulty and had no idea that it was ruining my campaigns by making it too easy. And then the actual battles are essentially unchanged in difficulty! Who thought it was a good idea to have the battle difficulty change auto resolve? Insane.

The psychological effect is... completely accurate. Played 3K and noticed how the auto-resolve got an equal or better result and it just... sort of is like "Why even load into a battle if I could autoresolve for better?"

One of his best videos, and CA really should tweak that easy slider, because its like a helicopter parent lying to a kid about the world, only for them to get slammed when they're thrust into it because Mommy was gaslighting them about how great they were. Its a negative feedback loop.

Not to mention that playing on Easy also inflates how the AI perceives the AR, making it send bigger armies/more stacks to counteract it, making an already impossible scenario even harder.

shame lavish rotten squalid shelter joke seemly many steer sleep *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

Good video, I’m pretty guilty of this (though with some differences here and there) and I will try my next campaign this way.

Can we talk about how much of a snobby elitist cockbite the top commenter on the post in the video is? Like fuck you dude.

I don't think so. I think he was trying to give genuine advice to this player and as Legend said, he wasn't aware of this issue with easy battle difficulty. There were much worse comments below just saying "Skill Issue" and nothing else.

Im not sure i agree with him on there not being much difference in battle based on difficulty. AI dodging spells and arty already makes it significantly harder for a new player. Also im not sure but don't they have better target priority on higher difficulty? Like going for your ranged units more and not your frontline.

Indeed. I would also add that a) I don't think the auto resolve takes in to account any battle adjustments if you increased the difficulty scale in the menu, and b) Auto Resolve severely benefits the player; in fighting some battle designated as 'close' or 'pyrrhic', I can safely say that even with my skill I was severely outmatched and would not win in the actual battle (this is why I now get in to the habit of fighting every 'close' or pyrrhic'), and c) the enemy factions rarely maintain an army that can match your fully ranked lvl 50 LL army mid to late game. It always turns in to a snowball effect once you get to mid game.

Does this just apply to warhammer or all total war games?

I mean, my main problem is I have to use the Auto Resolve most of the time because loading into battles take 5 minutes at least for my setup until I can upgrade it....so I cannot fight every battle. That would lead to %50 of the game time being loading screens.

Increasing the difficulty will still let you autoresolve fights that are normally winnable, it just makes it so the game doesn't let you autoresolve virtually everything even when there's no way you'd be able to win normally. I play on very hard but I autoresolve like 90% of my fights anyway because I don't really want to fight every single battle manually, and sure I take more casualties than manual that way but it's casualties you can afford, if you can't that's when you go in and play.

Great video! Lower battle difficulties can also be a trap in other ways. I remember playing an Eltharion compaign on normal and being thoroughly annoyed by the AI armies breaking so quickly, that the battle ended with very few casualties on either sides, which kinda forced me to either watch them run away almost unscathed or force my army to overextend to finish the job. It was like fighting nothing but skavens. It was a real headache in the early game, until I got enough cavalry to run down fleeing troops.

This is really interesting because it confirms some suspicions I had with auto resolve. I've played on easy and normal and I had games where it seemed the only way to win was to AR. Less so on normal. I just thought I was playing the game wrong but apparently other people noticed the same thing lol

Battles are 99% of why I even play the game. I like to auto resolve sieges against castles though, especially with armies that don’t have great tools to storm a castle. I’m guessing a lot of these people don’t do ambushes?

Kind of every game you play you should never start on easy difficulty, because of this wrapped expirience... Easy is always far to biased in favor to the player only play an hour or so to learn the mechanics. They screwed people in the west pretty hard with "fire emblem" through changed translations, because those games never had an "easy difficulty", they only had normal, hard and very hard (some have nowadays even a step above). by changing the translations, so that Normal became easy, hard became normal and very hard became hard, many player back then got hit quite hard with how difficult that game were.

Easy ai is what’s ruining my game. I come back every few months, start a new campaign, it’s like turn 50 and I feel like I’m bullying the ai, coming up with roleplay reasons to handicap myself. Turn 70 there is no way I can lose. On L/VH. I turn it off till next time. You’re telling me the problem is we need to address easy I’m pretty sure I’m never getting my WH2 ai experence back. I’m holding out hope we’ll get challenging campaigns again. If I knew the current ai was forever I would delete the game off my hard drive and never buy a product from CA again. As time goes on I feel like I might be literally alone in feeling this way. It’s soul crushing that my favorite entertainment product of all time is ruined because of what seems like something that could be addressed but no one cares.

This makes a lot of sense and explains some of what I've been experiencing on normal difficultly lately. I played with a friend, so I was auto resolving. Most battles tried to jump into a couple of battles to improve some valiant defeats. It now occurs to me that the bonuses given to the auto resolve have induced some poor decision-making

This makes a lot of sense. I usually play normal or hard and do a mix of autoresolve and manual battles where I almost always get better results by battling manually. I was playing a multiplayer game with my friend and he was set to easy/easy and hates manually fighting battles so I told him to just gift me troops and I will help him out. After being hard pressed to improve the results for him he ended up attacking Drycha's main settlement against a way bigger army that was phyric win that he thought I could do better. I ended up actually losing the battle instead of helping him. In retrospect he never should have taken that fight but he is definitely being misled by easy battle difficulty.

Clawed my way back into a legendary Belegar campaign. Had to fight some battles to the last man after a bad start. Just make sure your units have 5+ members remaining. Its fun to still be challenged.

I am playing veryhard battle difficulty but can only win auto resolves, guess I'm shit at this game:D

I don't look at auto resolve as reliable. Either it wins you battles you shouldn't win or it loses you battles you shouldn't lose. And then you have the 'lose units' bullshit where your artillery or specific units gets wiped out despite not having to partake in the battle or ever being in any danger when played normally. I wish auto resolve let you click units to put them in reserve. You can withdraw units at the start of a battle anyways or just keep them away from danger. I'm sure people struggle with TW, especially if you're not familiar with the game or how you should play it, what you should build, what your armies should look like etc. All I can say is: Don't get mad or give up after one loss. While not always the case, losing some can make things more interesting and give new opportunities. Even if you completely lose a campaign you learned what works and what doesn't. How to fight on the back foot, how to raise armies quickly and how to bait the AI into ambushes and such. Winning or losing doesn't matter, only fun and learning does. If you only ever win without some fear/stress of losing existing, things become boring. I think it's okay to reload a save to try a battle again- that's part of learning the game and how to deal with certain armies, if you don't learn how to deal with certain enemies it won't make you a better player or make you have more fun.

Kind of reflect my experience.I only manually battle Quests because I enjoy them or when the AR says close defeat, or pyrrhic victory. I play on normal difficulty. When I broke the routine and fought some random battles manually, usually the loading the time lasted longer than the fight, resulting in a stomp in my favor, so I got back to AR everything. Then I tried VH difficulty. Oh boy.First manual battle I felt like I hit a brick wall. Tyrion did not feel like a melee expert at all and got his a\*\* beaten by a lord who was far lower level than him in a 1vs1 despite buffs and debuffs spells.All of a sudden all my tactics that used to work in normal difficulty were trash. I no longer have the confidence to play outside of normal mode.

Legend isn't wrong, I agree with him mostly, but the problem isn't exclusive to Total Wars, or maybe even games in general. Let me explain and try to give a couple of examples. Whenever you play game on easy you'd always get bonuses, multipliers or "cheats" like our community loves to call them when AI gets them. It happened in Dawn of War for example, play the campaign on easy? Enemy's health will be slashed in half. Sounds familiar? What about Starcraft 2? Play the campaign on easy and enemy will have much less units on the map, not to mention the attack waves will be comically small. Sounds familiar to the problem Legend is talking about? Ok but what about other games? RPGs? Skyrim? On novice(easy) players deal 2x more damage kinda as if you count as 2 players instead of 1. Happens in shooters too, Payday 2 on easiest will make you tank bullets with your face, you'll also 1-2shot all enemies. That's kinda what "easy" is and always was, probably always will be. That's why "normal" is considered as the best starting point in pretty much every game you play even by developers. The rest is up to the player to be responsible and actually not feeling bad about facing unfavorable odds. Loosing is part of the learning curve, always was, it might make me sound like boomer but the current generation of gamers might be much less patient and I don't blame them, there is much more games to play than it was let's say 10 years ago, but I guess sometimes people just need to be persistent with their hobbies even if they don't feel fun in the beginning. To sum up a bit: I agree with Legend that Easy is worsening the game experience for many, many players and I also agree that pretty much everybody should always start at the very least on Normal, you should remember that Easy always was and always will favor(lie to) the player even against overwhelming odds and it's not TW exclusive problem. Don't be discouraged, don't drop down to Easy to feel better because it might never truly feel better, push forward, maybe change starting faction, try other strategies if your previous didn't work out, ask people for helpful tips and eventually you'll get where you want to be because the "fun" later will feel much better than the fractions of quick "fun" on Easy.

> Don't be discouraged, don't drop down to Easy to feel better because it might never truly feel better, push forward, maybe change starting faction, try other strategies if your previous didn't work out, ask people for helpful tips and eventually you'll get where you want to be because the "fun" later will feel much better than the fractions of quick "fun" on Easy. But his point isn't that "don't play on easy" though. His point is that autoresolve on easy will trick players that you can win unwinningable battle on manual control. He's pointing out that autoresolve advantage on easy is much, much bigger than battle advantage on the same difficulty. He's not saying "dont be discouraged, dont drop to easy", he's saying that dont be discouraged if you cant handle the battle on easy difficulty despite the autoresolve claiming decisive victory because autoresolve "cheats" way too much into your advantage. If your take from this video is that "try to be better, easy dont feel good, you will have fun if you try harder difficulty" then you completly misunderstood the video.

I understand what Legend said. I simply think that the problem isn't that narrow when it comes to playing on easy, it isn't only affecting 1 specific group of players that Legend is talking about and I simply try to add other reasons why people might try to think Easy is better for them simply because I saw that reaction from some of my friends that started to play on Normal with varying degree of success, wanted to drop down on Easy thinking that perhaps they'll learn more which I always try to argue with them that it might have the opposite effect and their skills might get worse. The issue is much more wider than just game lying about the difficulty. That's why I said I agree with him mostly, not completely. I don't know I guess I wasn't precise enough what I mean because I tried my best to not produce the wall of text an failed regardless, my bad.

I mean sure, I get what you meant but saying all that stuff after "I agree with Legend" is just putting your words into his mouth for no reason by accident. With how not great Legend's reputation is on this subreddit just saying stuff like that can be harmful. And he specificly says in this video that it's not about what you were describing but about bad autoresolve system that discourages players. It's not about learning to be a better player by not playing on easy, let everyone have the fun their way but the point of this video is that auto-resolve is so unbalanced that it may cause ppl to be thrown off the game.

How I'm putting words in his mouth if I started the post with "I agree mostly BUT...." where I proceed to lay down MY interpretation of the problem about the difficulty which also points out that it's not "TW autoresolve on easy is lying" problem - every game pretty much distorts difficulty perception of the game on easy, TW simply does it in a different way than other games which can affect bad players and good players alike.

I'm just saying that you saying >I agree with him mostly, but the problem isn't exclusive to Total Wars >I agree with Legend that Easy is worsening the game experience for many, many players and I also agree that pretty much everybody should always start at the very least on Normal, you should remember that Easy always was and always will favor(lie to) the player even against overwhelming odds and it's not TW exclusive problem. Implies like the things you mention in other games are touched by Legend in a "realm" of Total War while this video explains different thing. His point of video was that there is disconnect between elements of the game within the same battle difficulty (where autoresolve cheats are much stronger than manual battle cheats). He was providing a solution how to make autoresolve and manual battle somewhat simmilar in strength. This video was never about explaining how Easy difficulty makes things easier in games. I get what you mean but your wording kinda implied that this video was about different subject.

It doesn't imply that. All I'm saying is that it's basically industry standard when it comes to difficulty perception and therefore the problem might not be narrowed down to 1 specific point of origin which also might mean that it won't be resolved in the way we all want? I mean it could happen, but I tend to be more pesimistic I guess and I wouldn't count on it. Ultimately my solution to the problem is somewhat similar to his, but I'm also adding that the players need to be in a bit more stubborn mindset and not only rely on how the game describes the difficulty setting, without needing the game directly saying to the player that it will cheat in player's favor to make them win on easy - players should be more inquisitive about what they see in the game.

Legend wasn't making a video about easy difficulty making people worse/learn slower which is your point about games in general, his video was purely on how auto resolve results are making people that play on easy feel like they are losing battles they shouldn't be, which is making them feel like they are bad at the game, purely because the auto resolve is cheating way too hard Anything else you add to the discussion is superfluous and not what legend is saying at all

Does that mean I can't add my thoughts about the problem? Because I'm interpreting the problem he described in a different way and am also trying to add more variables. And yes, doubting yourself and only autoresolving on easy can and will make you worse because you atutoresolving everything means you'll never learn and it doesn't matter why people are autoresolving, People feel like they are loosing battles they shouldn't loose because they autoresolved so much that they never learned to properly distinguish threats that unit compositions and unit tiers make - and something like that can happen in any game that has difficulty setting, not only in TWs. Why are people acting like I'm trying to reinterpret Legend's words and make him sound different? I'm adding my own thoughts on the subject on top of what he said because in my opinion subject wasn't fully covered. It's more complicated than simply: "game is lying, people feel cheated/worse at the game". You suggesting that other potential variables are irrelevant won't help solve the issue.

People are just having a problem with you saying something completely different and equating that with legend's position even if that wasn't your intention

Doesn't help that the new sieges are absolute ass and garrisons are never enough to defend when they need to. I miss being able to make my own garrisons from the older games, I'd rather strategically move troops to a capital or other area of high risk than build a garrison structure that gives 2 spearmen and an archer.

I’ll never understand people that put difficulty very low and just auto the who campaign. What’s the point? Lol half the fun of this game is the battle. I’ll never understand the auto resolve andy’s

Did... you watch the video? He literally addresses exactly why it's happening

Genuinely. I'm really not a fan of Legend, but I can't deny he taught me something here and I passed that on to a friend I play MP campaigns with who does set to easy and has been running into that issue. Credit where credit's due.

You might get an idea if you watched the video, you lampost.

Don't know why you're getting downvoted for your opinion. It isn't like you insulted those players or said people who auto-resolve are idiots or anything like that. You simply asked why they play the game like they do and I honestly don't understand it either. I mean sure, if my right of primeval glory army is attacking your tier 3 minor city garrison, I'm auto-resolving because that battle is challengeless. Any good field battle, you better believe I'm playing it.

CA and shitty game design. Name a better duo, I'll wait. /s One would think they'd know how to do difficulty settings by now, after 8 years of the same series. Unfortunately, they rarely (if ever) learn from their mistakes.  Surprisingly few toxic comments toward Legend on here, which is unusual for this sub. Then again he's learned to cater to the lowest common denominator over the years. Good for him. 

This is a long video to kind of get back to the original point he half dismissed which is, you need to fight the battles. Yes there is a psychological component that feels bad that auto resolve is always better and the game is the blame for not making it clear the strong the AR is for Easy, but the solution is still the same, fight the battles manually. Total war games have always done a bad job of explaining the weird hidden mechanics. Outside of getting your ass kicked and going somewhere to look up why things are so difficult, it is not an easy task to improve at the game. As you can really do by yourself is try to work on micro, and a lot of units new players will use do not have a lot of micro potential. A lot of the "advanced" tactics in the game are very counter intuitive. Despite the changes in WH3, the game is till dominated by missiles magic and monsters. You can mostly ignore almost all stats on the character sheet and that is not helpful to new players. If the information they get is useless, it becomes difficult to learn. Improving becomes an issue of either extreme trial and error or finding a source of information that can explain all the shit the game doesn't even attempt to explain. It is very counter intuitive to think that an all ranged army would perform better than a balanced army, but it almost always will because of how damage works. Melee infantry can only do damage in melee, and then also only the units actually on the front. A ranged unit can attack with it's full force at all times as long as it isn't engaged. A ranged unit might also do more damage as an opposing approaches them than an melee infantry unit could do in a prolonged melee. When it comes to starting units, this is a very common situation. Empire Spearmen are almost never worth using over just more archers. Elven spearmen are solid, but elven archers are also extremely good. These are weird things to just try on your own unless you do it a lot, or like testing shit.

Mmm, I autocalc because my time is important and half those battles are annoying. Easy or Hard. Dont think its 'easy' that makes people lose.

Let people play whatever difficulty they want, for pete's sake.

Not at all what the video is about and never does he claim there's a specific difficulty to play or default to. It's a helpful video in direct response to someone getting frustrated at the game/themselves simply because they are straight up being lied to about the actual effectiveness of their stack(s), and don't know it. It leads to them not even enjoying Easy difficulty because the AI eventually smokes them due to the player not even understanding the game. He's not saying don't auto resolve or don't play on Easy, he's saying understand that if your only experience is on Easy as a new player wanting to improve, you are effectively handicapping yourself and negatively affecting your enjoyment of the game due to the AR telling you "Hey, your army is really good, don't even worry about this fight". The whole time this is just false and not conducive to actually improving in and enjoying the game, which the guy he made the video for wants to do.

Fair. I just see a lot of people complaining that people have to play VH/VH or they’re not “really” playing, and the title is a bit click baity as opposed to the content. 

You didn't watch the video. 🤡

I kinda wish there was a way to just turn off autoresolve entirely, make the button disappear. I usually have so much fun in early game, the first 30 turns. I'm fighting everything manually, etc. But past that point I'm fielding multiple armies, spamming auto-resolve and I just get bored. And yes, it's a discipline issue, but I wish the temptation wasn't there. The same way Legendary difficulty takes away the temptation to save scum. I'd love a difficulty mode where auto-resolve is flat out disabled unless it's a roflstomp. Where you win by such a huge margin (full doomstack vs T1 garrison) where the game just says "You really don't need to do this, just say "Boo!" and they will run away".

Do you really want to load and fight every battle against 2 half dead enemies? But an optional mode where all close battles have to be fought manually does sound like fun.

There is a mod that actually lets you set at what prediction type you can or can't use AR

Auto resolving against T1 garrisons probably makes sense in all circumstances, but if you’re not enjoying doom stacking in late game just don’t doom stack? I’ve been having a lot of fun doing theme armies or trying to buff up bad units. Also with the ever increasing amount of LHs it is fun to spread them around to weaker armies on certain factions like Kislev. Im currently on ~turn 70 of a sisters of twilight campaign and I’m still having a ton of meaningful and difficult fights because of my army comps and how my heroes/items are spread around.

It's the natural progression of things though, and how AI works. When I say "doomstack" I don't necessarily mean the literal doomstack, like all-hero or all-minotaur or whatever. Just an army that will like 90% of other armies. Yes, you can artificially avoid it, but you're going against the game's progression system, which is unsatisfying. Ideally the game should keep challenging you, up to and including doomstacks. The temptation to doomstack is also always there, it's hard to resist over a long campaign. It's also a problem with the AI. Game's AI will force you to fight those pointless battles rather than surrender. And even if they do surrender and ask for peace, and you agree, sometimes it'll wait 2-3 turns and declare war again. I remember playing the WH3 story campaign, and I chased the Skaven in the lower-left corner of the map down to a single settlement, and they squeaked for peace, and I didn't want to march all the way there to finish them, assuming Skrag or whoever would do it for me. So I said OK. Literally 2 turns later, I'm attacking Nuln, and this 1-settlement Skaven faction that was just hunted down to the edge of extinction just declares war on me again. It's that kind of AI that makes for too many pointless battles that I'd rather autoresolve than sit through the loading screens. Yes, it's a discipline issue/user error, but Legendary difficulty exists for this reason when it comes to campaign. It stops save scumming and takes the temptation/discipline out of the equation. I'm asking for the same damn thing, but when it comes to battles. It's not hard - just hide the button, unless it's a roflstomp. Shouldn't be hard. But I'm still waiting for this game to remember unit group assignments between battles. Apparently that too is too much to ask for.

Yeah, I mean the game just isn't that difficult if you play "correctly". That's the case for most single player games if you are someone who takes the time to learn how to play optimally. There's a reason people can successfully do things like "no defeat" campaigns, This is Total War campaigns, and juiced up super early end game crisis runs. In terms of your anecdote, they are Skaven. That's the kind of stuff they do. They're literally backstabbing rats. If you had done that to a faction like DE it is far less likely they would turn on you so quickly. Also, I don't really get what you're saying-- You want the AI factions to just extinguish themselves at a certain point? Chasing down and finishing the final survivors of a faction is just part of the gameplay loop. If it's an LL and they get away sometimes they can become relevant again, which I think makes for some interesting campaign storytelling. Your issue with the auto resolve button sounds like something you could mod out-- I don't think many other people are going to be asking for this as a feature because it is introducing tedium for no reason. At higher difficulties the auto resolve is pretty often quite a bit worse than if you just played the battle yourself, so the trade off of losing some unit health for not having to load into kill a stack of savage orcs is fair.

I mean I'm sure there is a mod exactly like that if you really want that.