Love this idea, but here's the problem. How do we get our host (Inno) to embrace it, other than almost everyone voting for it? That's the goal we all have.
There are 2 things at work here:
1) Autobattle is very fast, but is (can be) tailored by INNO via it's AI to not represent the best way to fight for the player's army. Let's call this: FAST, but DUMB.
2) Manual battle is very slow on even the fastest speed setting, but for skilled players, yields minimal loss. Let's call this; SLOW but SMART.
It doesn't have to be that way. Manual battle speed is built around ANIMATION SPEED. What if you blend the concepts together. Here's what I mean:
Let's say you're fighting in LMA, you have 8 Great Sword Warriors, and the defense is 8 Heavy Knights (horses). Here's the problem. Even on speed 3, ALL THOSE HORSES have to romp across the battlefield as an animation, until 6 of them do that, and you get a chance to play.
What if you could remove the animation, and just get to the turn's final disposition of action?
In other words, you press "complete turn" and the horses are all magically just where they should be, vs animating them running across the field. We don't care about how they get there, we just want to know their final place, so we can take a turn.
This would SOLVE our problem. Turn off the animation speed tied to a button control. Instead...
Create a COMPLETE TURN button with no animation, just the defensive army's final placement for the turn.
Where's the middle ground that keeps Inno happy? I don't know how to get to FAST and SMART (the best for players) and what's best for INNO is slow and dumb (which really isn't an option, but might generate more money for them).
Here's a radical thought. I prefer manual battle because it's actually fun, but I don't want to take 5-8 minutes to do a single battle (1 or even 2 waves of fights). Autobattle gets mindless and in my opinion, goes against having fun doing battles. So in conjuction with your request, let's drop autobattle in some venues.
Now I expect lots of howls at that. So instead of being RADICAL, we could:
Re-normalize the game a bit to de-emphasize autobattle opportunities (or allow autobattle only after 3 manual moves, for example...), and make manual battling more robust (along with your suggestion, or IN TUNE with your suggestion) by re-calibrating quantities of fights required to make a goal (for example, in GBG diamond, you wouldn't do 160 to take a sector, you'd do some much lower amount...).
I like what you're thinking though. I just hope Inno has some ideas here because FoE needs to become more than just mindlessly clicking autobattle all day long.
The game doesn't deserve that fate at all.
