your solutions seem very specific.  Obviously number 1 is only for the cons of the tactical battles.   I'm sure the tactical battles will be interesting, so I have little input to give.

for 2:  I haven't played Dominions 3, so could you explain it?

3.  I don't think there should be a stat for auto-resolve.  Because then nobody would use the stat, and nobody would use the auto-resolve.   Or they would maximize the auto-resolve stat and always use it.  (it would depend on how broken the auto-resolve tactical stat was)

Looks ok, except for the stat: it just doesn't seem like it fits within a game.

Having an AI that doesn't suck monkey nuts, thus doesn't lose spectacularly with 2-1 odds and then cream you in the auto resolve, is the solution to auto versus tactical.

Auto resolve should only be implemented on MP games if you don´t have the option to replay the battle yourself. That would take too much of precious MP time by waiting the PC to finish it´s calculations and then replay again if u r not satisfied. 

The idea of keeping record of previous combats is good, altough it would be hard to determine whether a battle is or is not the same as a previous one. 

I have no clue how the AI is goin to handle user´s made spells, abilities or even creatures. Since the dev team is goin to filter what community content is goin to be on the game, they might "teach" the AI to use these new features. What do you guys think?

Yes, there´s a HoMM5 add on that shows you how hard a fight will be. And there´s scouting too. IIRC,  Heroes without scouting can see only what types of monsters are wandering somewhere. Their number appear as an "?" . With basic scouting u can see a range like 1-4 and with high level u can see the exact number of monsters and even know what troops are inside an enemy building. Pretty good system!

Because a lot of people think tactical battles are fun. It all comes down to my balance of complexity:

The problem is, one player's headache is another player's Pong, so devs need to be careful: hence, my new idea:

Four "positions" for the tactical combat setting at the beginning of the game: Tactical is for the TC junkies: all battles are tactical. Auto is for the lazy/impatient people: all battles are auto-resolved. Choice is a balance between them: you can selecty tactical or auto-resolve before the beginning of each battle. Replay is something a little different: all battles are auto-resolved, but at the end you can choose to re-fight the battle tactically if you think you can do better. Obviously, this last one probably wouldn't work in multi-player.

The biggest problem I have with solution 1 is what the computer decides are "similar conditions". At best, I think if you choose autoresolve, then it looks at your win/loss record and gives you a SLIGHT edge (or disadvantage) based on your win/loss. All this traccking of previous fights, determining what is a roughly equivalent fight, seems like a lot of overhead. To me autoresolve is you are turning your fate over to the AI and are relying on a superior force for victory.

I like option 2, I have played the Dominions demo and I like the simple method you can script unit behavior.

I like 3 as well, it is kind of what I was referring to by giving an edge based on your win/los to that point. I prefer 3b, I don't really like 3a much although it could work if done right.

You might like how Age of Wonders SM handles it. When a fight starts, you get the option of auto or tactical. If you choose auto, stuff happens and you get a result.

If you choose tactical, you go into tactical combat and make all the decision. Once you don't want to do that anymore, there's an "auto" button you can press that turns control over to the computer again. So you can play the first couple of turns, win the hard stuff, then let the computer automate the mop-up.

I think that's the best way of handling it. Sometimes I want to control fights myself (big, important fights). If it's an Elder Dragon vs a guy with a pitchfork, I probably want to just let auto-resolve do its thing so I can get on with playing the game.

Not a fan of an option 2 style of combat, though. I want to control things, not script them before the fight.

I would also like the ability to re-fight an auto battle in tactical mode - even if you win. So many times I have pressed auto-combat when I outnumber my opponent 5:1 and have better quality troops to boot - and then I get the results screen and the AI lost as many of my own troops as my opponent's. Those are actually one of the reasons why I often fight even the most trivial battles, because I don't trust the AI to be competent. With a feature to fight tactically anyways after seeing the auto-combat results, I could at least give the AI a shot and only have to take over when it really screws up.

I also really like the idea to be able to watch the auto-combat and issue orders if it looks like the AI is about to do something dumb. And also the idea to start out the battle yourself, and then let auto-combat take over.

Actually, I did not include refight-if-you-win becuase I thought nobody would want it. With this response, it seems like it would be a good idea.

Any kind of replay or do-over option to take auto-resolve results and then do the same combat again in tactical would be a nice touch, for single player. That would need to be turned off in multiplayer I think.

Yeah, a lot of this stuff would not work well in multi-player, especially online: you would have to vote or whatever on which option you wanted, which would be a big headache: LAN and other systems where you could actually talk to the others face-to-face woudln't be as bad, but..... if the battle do-over option is implimented, how should that work?

My initial thought is that you get a re-match only if both fighters agree. However, I suppose some argument could be made for it happening if only one agrees............... or not.

Far and a way the best way to deal with it. Although I would also venture that there should be an option (in multi- and single-player) for all combat to be auto-resolved, no tactical combat whatsoever.