Quoting 18Zulukiller, reply 20Total war games have an auto resolve button if do not want to fight a battle.
Auto resolve is *never* an option.
It basically falls into two categories: the auto resolve can fight a battle as well or better than the player, or the auto battle does worse than the player.
If the first is true, why would anyone play out a battle? The AI can do it as well as you can, you're just wasting time (and for multiplayer, wasting EVERYONE'S time). Sure, it might be fun the first few times as eye candy, but that's not enough to justify using the resources to make it. The majority of the player base won't use it, so why bother?
If the AI does worse than the player, the player is pretty much forced into playing out battles. Sure you can skip it, but when you lose half your fleet from being lazy you'll never skip one again. It's an illusion of choice, not a real option.
So which of those two cases do you want "optional" auto resolve to fall into? It's going to fall into one of them, regardless of anyone's intentions otherwise.
Well said. This is exactly what happened in Shogun 2. The Nanban Trade Ship, if played in manual combat, is among the strongest ships you can build in the game (and also a trade ship!) and can easily beat several of the non-Nanban ships. When you auto-resolve, it's undervalued and loses far more often than it should.
So you either wind up having to build and pay upkeep for more of them than you need in order to auto-resolve, or you have to do an awful lot of very boring naval combat (you don't actually need to do anything in combat to use them, most of the time they can win by sitting still and shooting things with cannons).
There's games where tactical combat fits pretty well, but it's the focus of the game. This is not one of those games.