I promised a second release today, but I was a little overly optimistic. ;) One of the top features that people have been requesting is an auto-resolve feature for battles, and that's something I've been working on today. I'd thought I'd have it ready in time for a release tonight, but alas not; it will definitely be ready tomorrow, though (and better-tested for the extra time, too).
Why is auto-resolve important?
You can read about that on this post on our forums, since these announcements have character limits. ;)
How, precisely, are we implementing it? Well, I'll get into a lot of the details tomorrow, but the coolest bits are:
1. Once you are in a combat battle, there is a little "Auto Resolve" button in the bottom left corner. You can click that at any time during the battle (unless you have perma-death turned on, in which case you can't use it at all) and it will auto-resolve the rest of the battle for you. To repeat: you can do that at any time during combat.
2. Auto-resolution uses a formula based on the number of abilities you have unlocked, your tech upgrades, and so forth, to get your space power (as seen on the racial power grid, although the formula there will be updated some to account for things better for you -- the races are already represented fine, but your number is not quite right yet).
3. Auto-resolution also uses a value based on your combat difficulty level, so the different difficulty levels there have meaning even if you are auto-resolving everything. The combat an the strategic difficulties both kind of feed into one another, so this makes a fair amount of intuitive sense -- when the combat difficulty is higher, you need to worry about personal ship tech upgrades more, for instance, regardless of whether you are auto-resolving or not.
4. Depending on the objectives of the scenario, the outcome of the auto-resolve will come out a couple of different ways. However, you will never be killed as a result of auto-resolve (again, note that this is only usable at all when permadeath is turned off).
4.a. If you are trying to just "kill all the enemies or flagships or whatever," then it will do auto-resolve combat until you are basically redlined, and then will withdraw you. If you win before that, then great, you won. If withdrawing was a loss condition, then you'll lose that battle. If withdrawing was not a loss condition (by far the most common case), then it's an "indeterminate" result, but of course your results feed back into the main solar map just like always.
4.b. If you are supposed to be doing something specific, like capturing a science outpost to get a tech or whatever, then you will always succeed in this. However, based on your relative power and some other factors of the actual ships and turrets and whatnot that get seeded, you may either "succeed well" or "succeed poorly." The poorer you succeed, the more solar map months it costs you to do the auto-resolve. This is significant in terms of in-game resource costs, since solar map months are a major resource. But again, by making sure that you have a ship that is outfitted well, you reduce the risk of incurring such costs in any substantial way.
5. You'll still get Credits for ship kills, and pick up pilots and so forth, as part of auto-resolve. So that avenue of things is not shut off to you, which is really nice.
6. Any optional or side objectives -- civilian or military buildings to destroy, etc -- will be completely ignored during auto-resolve. At first glance you might think this a major handicap, but actually not. If you want to destroy some of those things, usually it doesn't take many turns to do so. You can easily play a few turns manually, destroy the thing in question, and then auto-resolve the rest of the battle and have done with it. Easy peasy. This is a big part of the reason for the "you can auto-resolve at any point in a battle."
7. The other part of the "you can auto-resolve at any time" bit is if a battle is dragging on and you are clearly going to win, and you don't feel like going through the motions of mopping up properly. Generally the design of the battles avoids putting you in that position in general, and in any cases where this happens too frequently we're going to be updating the battle definitions to begin with. But there's always edge cases, and this lets you deal with them gracefully even if you love the combat.
So. This thing needs a TLDR, because boy was that long. If you read the whole thing, thanks for taking the time! The TLDR is that some of you guys asked for an auto-resolve feature, I was opposed to it for a while on really fallacious grounds after initially being all for it, and now I've come to my senses and the feature is coming tomorrow. I'm glad that you guys that wanted it pushed the issue, because it's definitely a great thing for the game to have.
You'll be able to check it out sometime tomorrow!