Auto-Battling your Way to Victory is not a Good Design
Auto-Battle has been a mainstay of many RPG and Strategy Mobile F2P Games for over half a decade. It was a Quality of Life boon to Players who enjoyed the game but didn’t want to spend time manually grinding for Exp, Items, Currency, and more. But what happens when a game takes Auto-Battle and bakes it into its core design so that Players essentially are able to Auto-Battle their way to victory? Enter Battle Legion, a new PvP “Mass Battler” that hit the App Stores a few weeks ago.
Battle Legion allows Players to Auto-Battle their way to success, whether its completing the Season Pass or advancing through the Arena Tiers. And while this formula succeeds in simplifying the Player experience, it leaves players with precious little to focus on or care about outside of its Auto-Battle Game Play.
In this Article, we’ll cover:
- How other games have used Auto-Battle in the past and how Battle Legion implemented it;
- How Battle Legion’s implementation of Auto-Battle made winning and losing much less significant than other Strategy Games
- How few Strategic Choices and little Loss-aversion killed the Strategy part of Battle Legion.
A Brief Auto-Battle Explainer
Auto-Battle became popular in RPGs such as Summoners War and derivative RPGs like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, Marvel Strike Force, etc.
All of these RPGs gate content behind a pretty steep grind, requiring players to replay PvE Stages they already completed an insufferable amount of times in order to get the inputs they need to optimize their Heroes.
Since Players have already completed the PvE Content, there is no game reason to require players to manually play through the content again. Thus, Players are given an option to turn Auto-Battle “on” and have the battle play out to its conclusion. All the Player needs to do is initiate the battle. Auto-Battle is often a toggleable button, so Players can turn it off and on as they wish.
Note that this form of Auto-Battle is used when grinding requires no strategic choice, but rather is just a side-product of requiring energy. The real grind in RPGs like Summoners War/SWGOH is that energy = inputs.
The game is primarily concerned that Players spend energy to get the inputs they need. The higher stage a Player is able to complete, the more efficient the input/energy ratio is. Having players play through the actual PvE Stage is just a byproduct of sinking energy. This is why many RPGs later upgraded Auto-Battle to Auto-Complete, making the grind experience for players even easier.
With Auto-Battle making the RPG grind tolerable, Players can then focus on Gameplay that requires attention and strategy, including:
- PvP
- PvE Stages they have not completed
- Events
- Other forms of Gameplay that require strategy and stats to succeed.
While many forms of gameplay may still be automated (such as combat in AFK Arena), Players still have strategic choice in choosing which Heroes to use and where they are placed in the formation.
Battle Legion’s Auto-Spin kills the Strategy of the Game
Battle Legion’s biggest issue is that grinding and core gameplay content are more or less the same, and that allowing Players to make progress on both fronts with the Auto-Battle system waters down the core gameplay a ton.
Battle Legion’s Auto-Spin Function
Battle Legion’s version of Auto-Battle is the Auto-Spin option found in the lower right corner. Tapping on it allows players to play multiple matches in a row without the Player needing to initiate a match.
Battle Legion requires Auto-Spin tokens to do matches automatically one right after another. These tokens accumulate over time, with a cap of 50 tokens that can be generated and 200 that can be held by the player at any given time.
When the toggle is highlighted, the Player will go into another match immediately, regardless of whether they win or lose.
This all seems very harmless, right? The problem is not with how the Auto-Spin operates itself, but rather how it interacts with other parts of the game.
There are no Limitations on Gameplay in Battle Legion
The Games that use Auto-Battle to ease the burden of grinds all have energy requirements. AFK Arena, which has Auto-Battle but doesn’t have an energy requirement, doesn’t require grind activity (choosing instead to wrap it up in an idle mechanic). A Limiting Mechanic (like Energy) is necessary to ensure that Auto-Battle doesn’t let players earn too much too quickly. Otherwise Players will consume content too quickly and the Game’s monetization will suffer.
Battle Legion doesn’t have any sort of Limiting Mechanic. Even if a Player runs out of Auto-Spin Tokens, they can still manually begin a match. Instead of a Limiting Mechanic, Battle Legion attempts to use Match Inefficiency as a means of curbing the Player session. This is similar to Clash Royale:
Winning a match in Clash Royale gives Players progress along a couple different vectors: A New Timed Chest, Advancement in Arena Trophies, progress to the Season Pass and the Crown Chest.
Likewise, in Battle Legion, a Match win goes towards progress in 3 systems:
Wagons are the equivalent of Clash Royale’s Timed Chests. Rank Progress is similar to Arena Progress (though more lenient), and the Season Pass is similar as well.
It is absolutely true that using Match Inefficiency to curb the Player session works in Clash Royale.
Given that winning a match requires a lot of concentration and effort, and that losing not only will set a Player back Arena Trophies, but might be considered a waste of time, not earning a Chest sharply curbs my incentive to continue playing. Yes, Crown Chests and the Pass Royale could push me to still grind for Crowns when my Chest Slots are full. But a good player will generally try to overlap filling all the chest slots with completing the Crown Chests and Pass Royale Tiers as much as possible.
But Match Inefficiency becomes compelling only when the risk of losing is great enough to deter the Player from playing a match with reduced incentives. And unfortunately, losing a match in Battle Legion doesn’t really matter…
Losing doesn’t matter in Battle Legion
There are two “costs” for losing in Battle Legion: Rank Points and Auto-Spin Tokens. I use quotation marks for costs since I believe them to be almost nominal in nature. Given the high capacity of Auto-Spin Tokens the Player can hold, it is quite difficult to use all your Auto-Spin Tokens as it is.
Add to that the low cost of purchasing new spin tokens and it is hard to imagine that “wasting” an Auto-Spin Token will deter players at all.
As for Rank Score, losing is significant only in that it gets you farther away from your Rank Tier Rewards.
Unlike Clash Royale, you cannot backtrack to a lower tier. So once you hit a Tier, you are guaranteed to continue receiving those Tier Wagons. And whereas a match in Clash Royale takes 1–3 Minutes of active concentration and interaction, a match in Battle Legion takes less than 30 seconds and you don’t have to do anything. So does it really matter if I lose a few times in a row? I can just keep playing and use my 30%, 40%, 50% win rates to still get through the Season Pass and make slow and steady progress up the Rank Tiers.
And that is the crux of the problem with Battle Legion…how often I win or lose is almost irrelevant.
Where is the Strategy?
Battle Legion gives the Player no strategic choice of how a specific match is going to turn out. The opponent is completely random aside from general Trophy proximity (as far as we can see).
The player has no option as to which opponent they play, and the player has no way to configure their army to battle the opponent once they are matched. There is no way for a Player to affect the Battle outcome during the battle. Clash Royale’s matching is completely random as well, but the Player has so much room to affect the battle during the match.
So where is the strategy? Yes there will be army formats and compositions that are superior to others. But if there is no opposing factor to change up those formats and compositions, is that really strategic? Would 15 minutes of reading Battle Legion Guides make me a good enough player to get my win rate up to 70%+? Does that even matter?
And what is the point of spending in the game? Does having a 60% or 70% win rate make that much difference over so many matches compared with a 50% win rate?
Arguably the Season Pass is a good deal because its so easy to complete! It is the first Battle Pass I’ve been able to complete 100% through Auto-Battle (an Industry First!?). But if I stop caring about getting stronger, am I going to continue investing in future Season Passes?
The Battle Legion gameplay on its own is fine. Unfortunately efforts to simplify strategy gameplay for Players seem to have accomplished killing the strategy of the game. Hopefully the Game Developers add more engaging systems to the Game so I can finally take the game off Auto-Battle and play for real.
