To make it simple, some races are stronger and some are weaker in auto resolve. AFAIK autoresolve strongly favors armor, so dwarfs for example have really good auto resolve. Dark elves would be somewhere in the mid range, depending on the units they field.
Yeah playing Slaanesh the AR is like "YOU WILL DIE!!!!" and constantly predicting Close Defeat or the like when I easily get a Decisive Victory, because I:
A) Have no archers or artillery and thus no ammo which seems to count big on AR.
B) Have no armour to speak of (phys resist and the like doesn't seem to count as much)
It doesn't seem to be able to assign any advantage to mobility or shock. Nor does it, for example, consider that half the maps in many climates are completely covered in trees, making arrows and artillery far less useful than they were in WH1/2, where trees were the exception not the norm.
Since you are playing Slaanesh, auto resolve also hates chariots, and their Seeker ones are much less armored than the mortal Chaos Chariots and tend to do terrible in AR.
Yes that too! And I was also running a 16 stack instead of a 20 stack of a lot of battles, which the AR also seems to frown at pretty strongly (even though it was getting the trick done).
Slaanesh in AR is absolute punishment, it constantly kills off more of your units than you would ever lose in battle. The toughest part is that troop replenishment is just outright horrible and any loses you take due to AR will take forever to replenish. Fighting He in the beginning is a curse and a blessing due to this. You can easily kill their ranged armies but you will need to fight EVERY battle or else you will die pretty quickly.
Slaanesh Rounds are fun but very tedious due to this. Nothing more fun than to outflank them and rip them apart but you have to do this without AR nearly all game long cause those daemonettes are squishy.
Nkari with the sword of khaine really helped me so much. Mostly for the ward save.
Eventually as slaanesh you can subjugate a lot of factions which earns you a lot of money and allies and disciple armies to help balance the need to fight so many battles
The big thing is the AR assumes ranged units fire all their ammo. That's why the early game Slaanesh vs HE AR values are so crazy where it will routinely predict, like, Close or even Decisive Defeat and then you get a trivial victory manually. The idea that any HE archer unit will get to fire even a third of its ammo against the player's Slaanesh is laughable.
It's a small wonder N'Kari does as well as he does in the hands of the AI given that AR matchup.
It favors armor so much that the Khorne's starting garrissons for minor settlements (2 chaos warriors, 2 marauders and a dog if I'm not mistaken) can beat 20 stacks of savage orcs in autoresolve
Yeah, I'm currently playing a Grimgor campaign and autoresolve routinely tells me the Dwarfs are going to beat me in a close/valiant defeat or I'll get a phyrric victory and then I handily win.
I feel like dwarfs are an even more special case when facing them as a player. Since they pretty much have only infantry, if you have any kind of AP AOE spells, they will get completely trashed.
Dwarves were my endgame crisis as slaanesh, which was like the most anti slannesh faction crisis to happen.
Needless to say, Nkari, Sword of Khaine, and blobbing the dwarves to cast slicing shards carries me through many battles.
Most AR predictions were probably right. Even manually fighting if I didn't have Nkari it took a lot of micro and a lot of AoE spells. Pit of shades was ok but I really found myself impressed with slicing shards, which isn't really the best aoe spell but here it did its worth
Doesnt always stop the AI from expanding. I've had a couple recent campaigns where I see Pestilence with over 30+ settlements and in control of nearly all of Lustria. Maybe its just me but more recently they seem to be one of the dominating AI factions with the largest empire.
Same with units, some units are incredibly over/under-estimated by the auto resolve.
Recently did Vampire coast campaign, and quickly saw that nocrofex are monsters in Auto resolve (tbf they also kick ass in Manual battle). Meanwhile I've had many battles where the game would auto resolve to stuff like decisive defeat, when I was using Mortars, even though said mortars would often absolutely obliterate the enemy army.
Tyrion has canonically cucked the Phoenix King (though to be fair the marriage is mostly just to produce and heir and then they just go about their lives)
edit: not sure why teclis came to mind...
Malus is probably the most powerful legendary lord in the game and the Dark Elves in no way suck balls on the campaign map, they are one of the strongest races.
yeah no, malus can easily get up to his ward save max and has two health bars. Pair that with a regen item... he has been tested numerous times by that youtuber that makes video's about 1 man army lords
They have two health pools, magic, good melee stats, the ability to fly or become a small entity. Their ward save gets pretty nutty too. They’re much more well-rounded than Malus. I mean just watch Legend’s video on Miao from last year.
While I love letting him go nuts as solo army in campaign, he just lacks options to kill infantry fast before transforming or without Sword of Khaine, which makes it really boring to watch him slaying infantry for 30 minutes each battle.
Also all his power is always on the cost of weakening your whole faction, making it often not worth the opportunity cost. (confederated his wardsave is now nerfed to 20%, so this is no foolproof option anymore)
Yeah, he's more fragile than you'd think. I had him maxed out and sent him and two heroes plowing ahead, with the intention they'd cannon ball into the enemy center, with my front line able to smash into the rear of the clumped up enemies.
It worked, but I just hadn't fought as many high tier missile armies. Skarbrand and one of the heroes came out in rough enough shape that I waited a turn to recover.
What he is amazing at, though, is annihilating ranged back lines. He's fast, has disrupting animations and is great at mauling units of infantry. If I can get him around the flank, he'll neutralize backlines quickly, minimizing damage to the rest of the army. Which means they can keep fighting.
The only time I manually fight Malus is if I have an LL who is just such a complete bastard in melee, that he can chunk Malus **twice** before Malus can do significant damage. Usually that means also using spells and/or items to also debuff Malus, and it requires a lord with good melee animations. Be'lakor, for example, earlier in the game, I'll fly in kick the shit out of Malus, he'll usually transform, I fly out, wait for cooldowns to come back, fly back in, finish him off. You also want to clear everyone else out to prevent him regen'ing off melee or the like.
He can now restock on nukes, but as an one-use per battle only ability it almost looks pitiful compared to Chaos Dwarf multi-use almost-nuke-like bombardment spam.
>One of my units was sent to the Deep Purple realm though, since it was 100-0'd by some ability of theirs
That'll be Dark Conduit:
[https://totalwarwarhammer.fandom.com/wiki/Dark\_Conduit](https://totalwarwarhammer.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Conduit)
They get it from doing the Sacrifice to Khaine rite. It basically makes one of their units 100% Exhausted, vigour-wise, but does an extremely powerful explosion which can wipe out a unit that's already down a bit of health. It's extremely annoying and if used carefully can absolutely win a battle - fortunately the AI doesn't use it at all carefully, but it does get quite irritating when it randomly detonates one of your units!
Bombardments are only a problem if within range of an ark and most of them are slow, so if you're willing to pause and/or use slow-mo you can walk out of most of them before they go off - the AI will do this to you if it's not distracted when you use them on it.
Dark Conduit is so god damn annoying. You can use it on a unit that's already exhausted! Hell, I've seen it bug out and not even exhaust the target before!
>You can use it on a unit that's already exhausted!
Yeah that's how I use it lol, or on a unit that's about to be wiped out. Just run it straight into the middle of as many troops as possible and KABOOM!
Yeah they are really tough. Especially Malus. Easily one of the best LLs in the game in battle. Those bombardments from black arks are no joke either. Can wreck units
> Had to have been no less than 4 bombardments went off almost immediately on my backlines
I'm pretty sure the reason is because those Black Ark abilities that wrecked you don't actually factor into auto-resolve (or if it does, it's tiny).
I just tried auto-resolving with and without black ark and it made no difference. When I manually fought the battle, it was more than half my kills.
Malus, much like Sigvald or Louen (and Belekor and-…) are really fucking strong and their lords alone can tank so many armies.
I’ve fought Malus and he would be the last one standing despite his entire army being dead around him, because he just kept killing my army and I couldn’t out run him.
Malus specifically is a pain to fight against. He is probably the hardest lord to go up against on the battlefield because of his transformation. You will most likely fair better in auto resolve against him.
Hmm. I feel like DE are top tier. Their economy is bonkers and I personally love how they have something good in every role.
But yea, LL tend to skew things massively in battle. Malus is one of those assholes. So is Tyrion.
Tyrion soloed my necrotic colussos stack once.
DE don't suck in campaign, lol what.
Generally the game undervalues some army abilities and stuff like unkillable foot lords in AR. An army with Malus and a bunch of upgraded Black Ark abilities is probably one where you'll get a better result out of AR unless you have a Cav/Monster based army rather than infantry.
Dark Elves suck on the campaign map? AI or player? Or both? Why do they suck on campaign? They're literally more broken than ever, MINUS the Assassin stacking exploit
Ah, apologies. I meant in the AI autoresolve. Fighting against them the AR doesn't seem to favour them at all (except Lokhir who is routinely strength rank 1 in most of my games)
I feel like this is especially apparent when fighting enemies that have alot of battle map abilities like Dark Arks, demon factions summon spam, skaven, and what not, while simultaneously having severe ADHD.
Yep, I hear that. Micro is not my strongest of suits. Once the enemy AI clumps into a big blob rushing back and forth like a kicked up anthill I have no idea what's going on anymore lmao
Had some really great WH2 campaigns where the DE factions turned into the late game bosses on the vortex or mortal empires. Facing 2-3 fully buffed up DE armies backed up by black arks are some of the hardest fights you will come across in the game. Especially when they have the warp bomb type ability which needs to be bated out. Also when they have shitloads of territory, all the LL’s and fuckloads of slaves, they really shit out alot of armies.
They always do well on my campaigns, I am playing Luthor and they own their entire island opposite the donut so after I deal with the lizards I either face dark elves or high elves.
I am honestly considering just sending Malekith loads of cash to be his friend.
Yeah honestly though, it's kinda ridiculous. I don't think the game factors into account the fact that I can't physically stop 5 war mammoths from simply walking clean through my front line and wasting all my expensive ranged units
I beat the AR in every single TW game from medieval 2 all the way to TW Troy and for some reason Warhammer 3 is the only TW game where the autoresolve is always massively in my favour. So much so I can rarely beat it making the game far too easy.
Never had this problem in Warhammer 2 either.
AR tends to be significantly worse than manually fighting, especially on higher difficulties or maybe if you have an army specifically favored by autoresolve, like Dwarves or a necrofex doomstack.
The computer only cheats in one specific way re: magic, AFAIK, which is that it keeps casting even when it has lost control of the caster, which stops spells for a player.
For example, if your caster routs or is knocked down, they will 100% stop casting whatever they were casting and cannot be made to cast anything more. This is not reliably true for the computer. This is most obvious against Skaven - they often just keep casting spells whilst routing. If they actually shatter they usually stop, at least. My suspicion is that the computer only checks "IsAbleToCast" (or whatever, I'm making that variable up lol) like every 2 or 3 seconds, so any spell that can cast faster than that, it can keep casting it.
Also the computer can cast spells perfectly as they come off cooldown, and is always aware of all the cooldowns on all their casters, and can always target for maximum casualties (though it doesn't always do this). This means that with cheap, fast-casting, spells like Warp Lighting, the computer is an absolute menace, because it wills spam it faster even than if a human was just micro'ing that caster and ignoring the rest of their army entirely.
WoM-wise, I think the computer follows the rules - you can see how much WoM the computer has before battle if you can see their army on the campaign map, and my experience in WH3 is that they won't typically exceed that. However they do seem to strongly favour cheaper, spammier spells. I can't remember the last time I had some kind nasty vortex cast on me, put low-cost damage spells? Constantly.
EDIT - Re: bombardments the AI does seem to cheat in that it can set them off simultaneously, whereas players can only fire them sequentially - i.e. if one takes 7 seconds to cast, we have to wait 7 seconds, but the AI seems to be able to fire them all off at once (which honestly we should be able to as well, I think it's just a UI limitation).
In the late game your superior range will win out completely again them, just make sure you use shielded units for your frontline if they are archer heavy. Hellfire rocket battery go brrrr
I'm fairly certain auto resolve pretty much ignores things like army abilities and does a shit job accounting for magic on top of loving armor. There's army abilities that will absolutely delete just about any mid to high count unit they hit but if you autoresolve there is no sign of it
Auto resolve favors some types of units, and it changes all the time.
Used to be ranged units always won, then it switched to heavy infantry, not sure what it is on now.
To make it simple, some races are stronger and some are weaker in auto resolve. AFAIK autoresolve strongly favors armor, so dwarfs for example have really good auto resolve. Dark elves would be somewhere in the mid range, depending on the units they field.
Yeah playing Slaanesh the AR is like "YOU WILL DIE!!!!" and constantly predicting Close Defeat or the like when I easily get a Decisive Victory, because I: A) Have no archers or artillery and thus no ammo which seems to count big on AR. B) Have no armour to speak of (phys resist and the like doesn't seem to count as much) It doesn't seem to be able to assign any advantage to mobility or shock. Nor does it, for example, consider that half the maps in many climates are completely covered in trees, making arrows and artillery far less useful than they were in WH1/2, where trees were the exception not the norm.
Since you are playing Slaanesh, auto resolve also hates chariots, and their Seeker ones are much less armored than the mortal Chaos Chariots and tend to do terrible in AR.
Yes that too! And I was also running a 16 stack instead of a 20 stack of a lot of battles, which the AR also seems to frown at pretty strongly (even though it was getting the trick done).
When has auto resolve ever liked chariots? Even Rome 1 they were generally undervalue
Slaanesh in AR is absolute punishment, it constantly kills off more of your units than you would ever lose in battle. The toughest part is that troop replenishment is just outright horrible and any loses you take due to AR will take forever to replenish. Fighting He in the beginning is a curse and a blessing due to this. You can easily kill their ranged armies but you will need to fight EVERY battle or else you will die pretty quickly. Slaanesh Rounds are fun but very tedious due to this. Nothing more fun than to outflank them and rip them apart but you have to do this without AR nearly all game long cause those daemonettes are squishy.
Nkari with the sword of khaine really helped me so much. Mostly for the ward save. Eventually as slaanesh you can subjugate a lot of factions which earns you a lot of money and allies and disciple armies to help balance the need to fight so many battles
The big thing is the AR assumes ranged units fire all their ammo. That's why the early game Slaanesh vs HE AR values are so crazy where it will routinely predict, like, Close or even Decisive Defeat and then you get a trivial victory manually. The idea that any HE archer unit will get to fire even a third of its ammo against the player's Slaanesh is laughable. It's a small wonder N'Kari does as well as he does in the hands of the AI given that AR matchup.
I’m perfectly fine with that. Kick that overgrown sex demon off my pristine doughnut!
It favors armor so much that the Khorne's starting garrissons for minor settlements (2 chaos warriors, 2 marauders and a dog if I'm not mistaken) can beat 20 stacks of savage orcs in autoresolve
Yeah, I'm currently playing a Grimgor campaign and autoresolve routinely tells me the Dwarfs are going to beat me in a close/valiant defeat or I'll get a phyrric victory and then I handily win.
I feel like dwarfs are an even more special case when facing them as a player. Since they pretty much have only infantry, if you have any kind of AP AOE spells, they will get completely trashed.
Dwarves were my endgame crisis as slaanesh, which was like the most anti slannesh faction crisis to happen. Needless to say, Nkari, Sword of Khaine, and blobbing the dwarves to cast slicing shards carries me through many battles. Most AR predictions were probably right. Even manually fighting if I didn't have Nkari it took a lot of micro and a lot of AoE spells. Pit of shades was ok but I really found myself impressed with slicing shards, which isn't really the best aoe spell but here it did its worth
Had that red bearded fuck get 55% spell resist on his entire army cause he kill momma stank and kimmler.
AR HATES Skaven
I mean everyone hates Skaven and underestimates them so...
Doesnt always stop the AI from expanding. I've had a couple recent campaigns where I see Pestilence with over 30+ settlements and in control of nearly all of Lustria. Maybe its just me but more recently they seem to be one of the dominating AI factions with the largest empire.
Same with units, some units are incredibly over/under-estimated by the auto resolve. Recently did Vampire coast campaign, and quickly saw that nocrofex are monsters in Auto resolve (tbf they also kick ass in Manual battle). Meanwhile I've had many battles where the game would auto resolve to stuff like decisive defeat, when I was using Mortars, even though said mortars would often absolutely obliterate the enemy army.
Yea lot of the time auto resolve for some races, like undead, just suck.
The druuchi don't fuck around my brother in Christ. That's why I'm a high Elf player >:) I do fuck around.
I'm pretty sure the average Druchii fucks around even MORE than a High Elf, to be fair....
I can confirm that High Elves do get fucked around.
Tyrion has canonically cucked the Phoenix King (though to be fair the marriage is mostly just to produce and heir and then they just go about their lives) edit: not sure why teclis came to mind...
Tyrion did that.
Sorry, twins and all
Malus is probably the most powerful legendary lord in the game and the Dark Elves in no way suck balls on the campaign map, they are one of the strongest races.
I miss the old slave mechanics though. I'm still positively miffed how they stripped those away and made it a paid DLC for another race.
Skarbrand
I still think the smaller single entities would do better since when skarbrand is in melee he can be easily shot
It depends. Skarbrand can be shot easier, due to his size, but he also thrashes Infantry formations and smaller entities in melee because he's bigger.
yeah no, malus can easily get up to his ward save max and has two health bars. Pair that with a regen item... he has been tested numerous times by that youtuber that makes video's about 1 man army lords
Still not as good as the dragon siblings https://youtu.be/_dahqWLuEnk?feature=shared Malus isn’t doing this as easy lmao
I mean objectively no, he is much more powerful in combat than them
They have two health pools, magic, good melee stats, the ability to fly or become a small entity. Their ward save gets pretty nutty too. They’re much more well-rounded than Malus. I mean just watch Legend’s video on Miao from last year.
While I love letting him go nuts as solo army in campaign, he just lacks options to kill infantry fast before transforming or without Sword of Khaine, which makes it really boring to watch him slaying infantry for 30 minutes each battle. Also all his power is always on the cost of weakening your whole faction, making it often not worth the opportunity cost. (confederated his wardsave is now nerfed to 20%, so this is no foolproof option anymore)
skarbrand has low armor and is huge. you just need a net of amyntok and a bunch of archers to kill him.
He can still fly and focus on those pesky archers first
skarbrand? fly?
damn me, i confused him for the demon prince... i completed the khorne campaign by spamming khorne's choosen and won every autoresolve.
darkshards, tier 1 crossbows of dark elves MELT chosen.
Never got a problem
maybe maybe maybe cuz the DE you are fighting against are brainless AI.
Yes, I don't care about the MP part
Skarbrand cannot fly.
Yeah, I really, really love Skarbrand and he is quite powerful, that's for sure, but people like Malus and the Dragons are in a league of their own...
Not a chance, Miao, Zhao, Malus, Sigvald, all much stronger.
Yeah, he's more fragile than you'd think. I had him maxed out and sent him and two heroes plowing ahead, with the intention they'd cannon ball into the enemy center, with my front line able to smash into the rear of the clumped up enemies. It worked, but I just hadn't fought as many high tier missile armies. Skarbrand and one of the heroes came out in rough enough shape that I waited a turn to recover. What he is amazing at, though, is annihilating ranged back lines. He's fast, has disrupting animations and is great at mauling units of infantry. If I can get him around the flank, he'll neutralize backlines quickly, minimizing damage to the rest of the army. Which means they can keep fighting.
I never manually fight a battle against Vlad, Ikit or Malus.
The only time I manually fight Malus is if I have an LL who is just such a complete bastard in melee, that he can chunk Malus **twice** before Malus can do significant damage. Usually that means also using spells and/or items to also debuff Malus, and it requires a lord with good melee animations. Be'lakor, for example, earlier in the game, I'll fly in kick the shit out of Malus, he'll usually transform, I fly out, wait for cooldowns to come back, fly back in, finish him off. You also want to clear everyone else out to prevent him regen'ing off melee or the like.
Why not ikit? Outside of the nuke on the first battle which can be baited he isn't particularly difficult.
He can now restock on nukes, but as an one-use per battle only ability it almost looks pitiful compared to Chaos Dwarf multi-use almost-nuke-like bombardment spam.
>One of my units was sent to the Deep Purple realm though, since it was 100-0'd by some ability of theirs That'll be Dark Conduit: [https://totalwarwarhammer.fandom.com/wiki/Dark\_Conduit](https://totalwarwarhammer.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Conduit) They get it from doing the Sacrifice to Khaine rite. It basically makes one of their units 100% Exhausted, vigour-wise, but does an extremely powerful explosion which can wipe out a unit that's already down a bit of health. It's extremely annoying and if used carefully can absolutely win a battle - fortunately the AI doesn't use it at all carefully, but it does get quite irritating when it randomly detonates one of your units! Bombardments are only a problem if within range of an ark and most of them are slow, so if you're willing to pause and/or use slow-mo you can walk out of most of them before they go off - the AI will do this to you if it's not distracted when you use them on it.
Also the bombardments are weaker, slower and smaller AoE than the factionwide Chaos Dwarf ones.
Dark Conduit is so god damn annoying. You can use it on a unit that's already exhausted! Hell, I've seen it bug out and not even exhaust the target before!
>You can use it on a unit that's already exhausted! Yeah that's how I use it lol, or on a unit that's about to be wiped out. Just run it straight into the middle of as many troops as possible and KABOOM!
Yeah they are really tough. Especially Malus. Easily one of the best LLs in the game in battle. Those bombardments from black arks are no joke either. Can wreck units
> Had to have been no less than 4 bombardments went off almost immediately on my backlines I'm pretty sure the reason is because those Black Ark abilities that wrecked you don't actually factor into auto-resolve (or if it does, it's tiny). I just tried auto-resolving with and without black ark and it made no difference. When I manually fought the battle, it was more than half my kills.
Lore accurate.
Malus, much like Sigvald or Louen (and Belekor and-…) are really fucking strong and their lords alone can tank so many armies. I’ve fought Malus and he would be the last one standing despite his entire army being dead around him, because he just kept killing my army and I couldn’t out run him.
Malus specifically is a pain to fight against. He is probably the hardest lord to go up against on the battlefield because of his transformation. You will most likely fair better in auto resolve against him.
Hmm. I feel like DE are top tier. Their economy is bonkers and I personally love how they have something good in every role. But yea, LL tend to skew things massively in battle. Malus is one of those assholes. So is Tyrion. Tyrion soloed my necrotic colussos stack once.
DE don't suck in campaign, lol what. Generally the game undervalues some army abilities and stuff like unkillable foot lords in AR. An army with Malus and a bunch of upgraded Black Ark abilities is probably one where you'll get a better result out of AR unless you have a Cav/Monster based army rather than infantry.
Theyre saying the AR treats them as being terrible.
Dark Elves suck on the campaign map? AI or player? Or both? Why do they suck on campaign? They're literally more broken than ever, MINUS the Assassin stacking exploit
Ah, apologies. I meant in the AI autoresolve. Fighting against them the AR doesn't seem to favour them at all (except Lokhir who is routinely strength rank 1 in most of my games)
Shades, war hydras, dread knights and har ganeth executioners with appropirate Name of Power shreds AR thou
I feel like this is especially apparent when fighting enemies that have alot of battle map abilities like Dark Arks, demon factions summon spam, skaven, and what not, while simultaneously having severe ADHD.
Yep, I hear that. Micro is not my strongest of suits. Once the enemy AI clumps into a big blob rushing back and forth like a kicked up anthill I have no idea what's going on anymore lmao
Had some really great WH2 campaigns where the DE factions turned into the late game bosses on the vortex or mortal empires. Facing 2-3 fully buffed up DE armies backed up by black arks are some of the hardest fights you will come across in the game. Especially when they have the warp bomb type ability which needs to be bated out. Also when they have shitloads of territory, all the LL’s and fuckloads of slaves, they really shit out alot of armies.
They always do well on my campaigns, I am playing Luthor and they own their entire island opposite the donut so after I deal with the lizards I either face dark elves or high elves. I am honestly considering just sending Malekith loads of cash to be his friend.
It's always a mistake to not autoresolve in wh3. It's always massively in your favour, no other TW is this easy
Yeah honestly though, it's kinda ridiculous. I don't think the game factors into account the fact that I can't physically stop 5 war mammoths from simply walking clean through my front line and wasting all my expensive ranged units
Only if you're bad? I can always beat the AR.
I beat the AR in every single TW game from medieval 2 all the way to TW Troy and for some reason Warhammer 3 is the only TW game where the autoresolve is always massively in my favour. So much so I can rarely beat it making the game far too easy. Never had this problem in Warhammer 2 either.
AR tends to be significantly worse than manually fighting, especially on higher difficulties or maybe if you have an army specifically favored by autoresolve, like Dwarves or a necrofex doomstack.
Does the computer cheat with spell cooldowns and winds of magic? I feel like they can spam spells like mad.
The computer only cheats in one specific way re: magic, AFAIK, which is that it keeps casting even when it has lost control of the caster, which stops spells for a player. For example, if your caster routs or is knocked down, they will 100% stop casting whatever they were casting and cannot be made to cast anything more. This is not reliably true for the computer. This is most obvious against Skaven - they often just keep casting spells whilst routing. If they actually shatter they usually stop, at least. My suspicion is that the computer only checks "IsAbleToCast" (or whatever, I'm making that variable up lol) like every 2 or 3 seconds, so any spell that can cast faster than that, it can keep casting it. Also the computer can cast spells perfectly as they come off cooldown, and is always aware of all the cooldowns on all their casters, and can always target for maximum casualties (though it doesn't always do this). This means that with cheap, fast-casting, spells like Warp Lighting, the computer is an absolute menace, because it wills spam it faster even than if a human was just micro'ing that caster and ignoring the rest of their army entirely. WoM-wise, I think the computer follows the rules - you can see how much WoM the computer has before battle if you can see their army on the campaign map, and my experience in WH3 is that they won't typically exceed that. However they do seem to strongly favour cheaper, spammier spells. I can't remember the last time I had some kind nasty vortex cast on me, put low-cost damage spells? Constantly. EDIT - Re: bombardments the AI does seem to cheat in that it can set them off simultaneously, whereas players can only fire them sequentially - i.e. if one takes 7 seconds to cast, we have to wait 7 seconds, but the AI seems to be able to fire them all off at once (which honestly we should be able to as well, I think it's just a UI limitation).
Not cooldown but they cheat with spell cost. So they fire more spells. But they do run out just like the player.
In the late game your superior range will win out completely again them, just make sure you use shielded units for your frontline if they are archer heavy. Hellfire rocket battery go brrrr
I find that army abilities don’t seem to count for auto resolve.
I'm fairly certain auto resolve pretty much ignores things like army abilities and does a shit job accounting for magic on top of loving armor. There's army abilities that will absolutely delete just about any mid to high count unit they hit but if you autoresolve there is no sign of it
Auto resolve favors some types of units, and it changes all the time. Used to be ranged units always won, then it switched to heavy infantry, not sure what it is on now.
DE isnt weak, but their entire powerhouse is limited to tier 1 units that overperform