Yeah I'm guessing the auto-battle slider (option) isn't working right now?

Or even die if they start low enough. Especially against a ranged enemy.

Make sure you have sufficient healing potions, fireball- and blizzard scrolls in your inventory. The auto battle will use them, thereby preventing any loss of units.

And when you still have loss of hit points on a hero/unit, you do have researched the healing spell, do you? So you can simply top the units off in the strategic map by using either the healing spell or a healing potion. No need to ever lose an unit/hero.

I too don't like it when my units loose hit points in those battles.

I agree.  NO battles should be auto-resolved if you have auto-resolve limit set to 0 or 1.  That's the way it was in LH, and with the great increase in damage/HP ratio, it is even more imperative that we should not have the option to fight manually taken away from us.  After all, is this not a single player game when no-one else is waiting?

Dunno, I kind of like the automatic autoresolve.

Losing a few units unpredictably does reflect the attrition of battle: isn't any battle where you KNOW the outcome by definition not interesting?

I actually like the feature as is. Though so far I seem to be the minority.

I concur. It always seems to be the last unit that takes the damage. The truly illogical thing is when the unit is say a magic user that is positioned in the rear of your units. So, supposedly, the enemy charges through your lines (even though they wouldn't have the movement points to do so) and hacks the magic user up a bit before getting dispatched. Something is not quite right.

Yes, if you know the outcome of a battle then it's not very interesting to play it out. But auto-fighting the battle and not knowing the outcome is exactly as uninteresting. Both scenarios play themselves out without any player agency, it's hard to see an advantage in either one.

So instead of perfecting the slider that chooses between these options, I would look at why these severely mismatched fights are happening in the first place. Maybe battles can introduce a "retreat" mechanism that will destroy the defending army but refund a portion of it's cost to the player. Or maybe there can be a mechanism in the tactical battle that allows a faction to bring their army up to some minimum threat level. For example, a global summon ability could serve this purpose nicely (summoning units into a battle even when the caster is not in that army). Or another example: Introducing some concept of supply lines could impose a cost for repeated attacks by the same stack and discourage players from mopping up the map with their super-army.

I would agree though that auto-resolve should be predictable if it's going to be enforced. There's nothing worse than Death by RNG.

Just a thought. My suggestion for the DM-controlled autoresolve is this:

Have the enemy run-away.

It's almost identical in practice but the benefits are:

No loss in control,
no loss of items,
no loss of units,
no loss of time on a trivial fight.

Indeed I meant the latter. But I can see other possibilities too.

e.g.

Autoresolve when you overwhelm the enemy (current)
Enemy automagically dissolves when you attack them (as above, you see them fleeing and fading away to nothing)
or,
When you massively overwhelm the enemy you aren't prompted to battle instead you're prompted to either:
Allow the enemy to flee with their lives - gain '1 honour' and experience (they disappear... perhaps joining a nearby stack)
Slaughter fleeing enemy units - gain '1 ruthlessness' and loot
Offer them a chance to join you - gain '1 pragmatism' and a unit

Definitely is a good idea!

Quoting XWerewolfX,

reply 23

Franknfurter has a very good idea reminiscent of Age of Wonders 3 

I'm always looking back to old games. So I'm thinking Heroes of might and magic (I've played 3/4/5/6) where you're given several options with fleeing enemies. But SK has the option of fully integrating the new mechanics into such a system. Intangible resources like 'ruthlessness' could be the 'fun' in having the DM decide a battle is trivial. Anyway, each time I'm a little annoyed with SK I also think - it wouldn't take a massive change for me to love this instead of hating it.

HOMM6 has the blood/tears split in killing/sparing fleeing enemies. But I'd love for it to be a more difficult decision. Having positives *and* negatives of each choice is the most important part of it. Also, making things *feel* less annoying is important to me too. (Even if you don't change the mechanics too much)