The latter's closer to how I'm imagining essence the moment--essence as a sort of stat that determines how much mana you can channel at once and maybe also affects your physical combat stats.

Wasn't it always described as basically you can use your essense to get lots of populated cities and things of that nature at the cost of your personal power, or keep it all and have a weaker overall empire but remain a strong individual channeler?

So yeah, that seems to fit.

This is why auto-resolve is gay.

In a game with tactical combat, people whine about how auto-resolve will suck.  To make it not suck, you make it complicated.  Then the people, that don't want tactical combat to begin, with complain about how it's too complicated to use the auto resolve.  Then you make it simple by taking all the complicated stuff out, and they bitch about how it uses a spell, or doesn't use a spell, or loses too many troops.  Basically, everyone whines regardless and you can't win.

Meanwhile, someone else makes a game with no tactical combat that does horribly gay shit, like killing high level units off at 99% odds, and everything is right with the world.

Think about it.

woah, you ok psychoak?    I'm not used to hearing such harsh words from you.

gay as in happy?

Tactical designed for those who will use it and autoresolve designed for those who will use it. No crossing ideas except when real improvements can be done.

Wow, this post is so full of fail. Starting with the use of gay like a drunk 19 year old douchey frat boy, continuing with the rant about how doomed tactical combat is, then saying at least it's not gay shit like auto-resolve. Then backs up his stellar arguments with "think about it", which is again the drunk frat boy equivalent of "Am I right? Am I right? Yea, damn right I'm right."

Yes, your post is full of fail. To start with, about half about what you bitch about psychoak saying he didn't even say.

Yeah, although I think psychoak's word choice and temperament in that post is rather poor (ckessel's description in that respect is pretty good ), I actually agree with his actual point completely.

All he's saying is this. You put in Tactical Combat - people complain about not liking tactical combat. So you add auto-resolve. Then people complain about auto-resolve sucking - it overvalues/devalues units and doesn't use spells intelligently. So they make auto-resolve more complicated and give you some indirect control over it via scripting or constraints - then they say it's too complicated, it takes too much time and they don't want to spend time on battles.

Then someone comes along with a game without tactical combat, but with the exact same simple auto-resolve and they love it.

There is no way around it, and to me it's even worse than the normal "you can't please everyone" problem. In this case, there are just some people you can't please at all, no matter what you do. And the problem isn't with the game mechanics or features, it's in people's heads.

About the autoresolve, can there be a middle ground between useless and so horribly convulated that you're better off fighting every battle manually?
A 'stance' setting (defensive/aggressive) and a 'use magic' switch is more than enough for autoresolve. Most people are perfectly fine with TW autoresolve, which does not provide any kind of control at all after all. Well just my 2c.

Denryu wins.  My response is thus; Moo.

Seriously, learn to read, even a frat brat can do that.

After you do that, read back through the recent posts regarding how auto-resolve is handled versus tactical combat.  If you can't figure it out then, go find a 19 year old frat brat to tutor you.

Huh?  That was... sarcasm?  Please?

My reputation is in shards, I'll never recover from this terrible slander.

This is the Internet.

You could rape a dog, and they'll have forgot it by tuesday.

Being the internet, I could provide video evidence and the claim still wouldn't be taken as serious.  Thus the incident to forget would be someone bullshitting, I'd hope something everyone is assuming occurs with regularity.

Especially if the perpretator posted the video himself. Then everybody will assume it's just a publicity stunt for self-promotion.

It's still true, however. If you add tactical combat, people that don't like it will complain. If you add auto-resolve on top of that, it will invariably suck in comparison, forcing the usage of tactical combat regardless. Make it horribly convoluted and you're actually just digging a deeper pit to be heckled in. Remove tactical combat and those who dislike it will be happy, because the issue of auto-resolve as the lesser option is moot as everything settles into a unison equilibrium.

While it is an intermingling of both, it's merits to those that enjoy it are greater than the sum of it's two parts. It's not a compromise between two systems - it's it's own system that pulls on the merits of the two other ones. A third positionist approach, if you will.

Thanks, ckessel can probably figure it out with such a clearly displayed example to work with.

That has indeed been the natural progression of this thread.  Automated resolve.  If you do not have reactive powers during combat, it is automated.  A more complicated form of auto-resolve is still auto-resolve.

I consider the Dominions 3 system to be an excellent substitution for a one button click implementation of auto-resolve.  Something so simple would never be used by me on account of stupid ai decisions, like blowing all of my mana to make a pointless kill, or killing my best units by turning them into hamburger instead of using my grunts to brunt an attack.  I doubt I'd use the auto-resolve anyway, but then I like tactical combat.  You don't, and wont be happy no matter how easy or how well it works.