I just don't think taking past player performance into account is going to work out well. It's hard to measure (what if you're good at specific things, such as fights vs fighter-heavy fleets? what if you're bad at piloting, but your strategic decisions make you do well in large battles?).
You're also creating an environment which punishes experimentation. Say you want to try out a new loadout - but you know that if it doesn't work well, you'll be punished for it in auto-resolve from here on out, until you erase that somehow (presumably, by "grinding" some wins to level it back up). That's powerful disincentive. Never mind that you'd need to have some visibility into the inner workings of that - i.e., what the system thinks of you.
It seems very complicated, and rife with potential problems. To be honest, I don't see much of an upside - if it's done well, congratulations, we've got a game that can play itself very well!
Besides, lore-wise, you're delegating - so it wouldn't make sense for it to - and it
does make sense for your subordinates to get bonus experience from it. That should help offset any potential minor losses you might avoid if you were being really careful and played it through yourself.
On the flip side to the player using auto-resolve for every battle, if there's a chance that the player will lose a ship to auto-resolve in a fight that they can clearly win without loss or harm
...
Above all, your system still poses the threat that a carrier or a battleship goes down to forces that shouldn't be able to accomplish such an act
A major goal of this system is that, in fact, this does not happen. As an example, a Wasp wing vs a Talon wing results in a 100% win rate for the Wasps. Against two Talon wings, it's a 99.99% win rate (i.e., 1 in 10,000 wins for the Talons).
A battleship is significantly more difficult to take down where large amounts of strike weapons, other large ships, or simply massive amounts of ships aren't involved.
If you let the player handle some aspect of auto-resolve in which they can look towards the more valuable assets of their fleet, I can see auto-resolve being much less of a programming nightmare.
That's an interesting idea. I'm thinking about something similar - potentially letting you designate "priority" cargo that doesn't get destroyed when you lose ships. Still, I'd rather handle it by doing auto-resolve right, instead of slapping on a band-aid. I think what we've got now is a respectable start, and I'm fully prepared to keep tweaking it
Hmm. Auto-resolve could actually figure out when you have such overwhelming superiority that you don't *need* to use more vulnerable ships, and are still assured of victory. For example, if you've got an Onslaught and 3 Talon wings, there's not much point to deploying the fighters if you're up against a lone destroyer - it just exposes them to needless harm.
Actually, let me run that scenario right now, and see what happens! <runs scenario - Onslaught +3x Talon wings vs Hammerhead>
Needless to say, 100% win rate for the Onslaught side - but a few wings of Talons tend to get taken out. That's quite reasonable assuming they got deployed, but it's not so reasonable to deploy them. Then again, that's not a very realistic setup to begin with - that battle should never happen, unless it's the player's Hammerhead that's set up to deliver a rude surprise to the Onslaught. Under other circumstances, the Hammerhead should hightail it at the earliest opportunity.