I Had AI Play Thousands of Rounds of My Tactics Game, and Found Out Playing Manually Was Pointless

Auto-battle was too strong. If pressing one button and letting it fight wins just as much as me playing carefully, why would I ever play manually?

The game I'm making has grid-based combat, a.k.a. a tactics RPG (SRPG).

One day I had AI play a few thousand battles, looked at the numbers, and found a real headache: auto-battle was too strong. The mode where you press one button and it fights by itself had about the same win rate as me playing properly. In that case, there's no reason to play manually at all.

This post is about that, and about how I reworked the combat afterward. Almost all of the code was written by AI (Claude Opus 5.5 and Codex). My job was to set the spec, play, and say "this part is wrong."

# What the combat looks like

It's a dark fantasy game, and combat is turn-based on a 9×7 grid.

The biggest feature is that the enemy's next move is revealed in advance. The name and range of their next attack are shown, and the tiles about to get hit light up red. The player sees all that, then moves.

Enemies have parts like a head, arms, and legs that you can target and sever. Each part has its own affinities, and hitting a weak part knocks the enemy down and gives you another action. Knock down every enemy and you trigger an "All-Out Confession," where everyone attacks together. ...The more I write this out, the more it's just Persona.

# Letting AI play and reading the numbers

Balancing is done by having AI play the game. "AI" here means a program that plays the role of the player inside the game, which is a different thing from the AI that writes code for me, although this program was itself written by AI. There are three kinds of player:

• Expert AI: reads the enemy's telegraph and stands on safe tiles, swaps skills, and hits weaknesses to knock enemies down for an extra action
• Auto: the same as the auto-battle the player can turn on. Stands on safe tiles and hits weaknesses with basic attacks, no skills
• Beginner AI: ignores the telegraph and charges in

Each type runs the same battle 40–200 times, and I look at the win rate and how much HP is left on a win. In Chapter 3, for example, the beginner AI wins only 15% of regular battles. Reading the telegraph before you act is the whole point of this game, so up to here everything's working as intended.

There are two difficulty levels. On the easy "Story Mode," enemy HP and attack are halved, and the goal is for auto-battle to win 95% or more. Every chapter hit that target.

# Auto was too strong

The problem was Normal difficulty.

In regular battles from Chapters 3 to 8, auto won every single one. And the HP left at the end of a win was 78–88%, about the same as the expert AI that swaps skills (68–88%), and sometimes even higher. Even though it only uses basic attacks. The only difference was that it took more turns, but auto plays out those turns for you anyway.

The results screen only looks at kills and severed parts. Auto hits weaknesses on its own and triggers the all-out attack on its own too. Playing manually gave you no advantage whatsoever.

While I was at it, I took another look at the battlefields and noticed something else: every battlefield was the same. Battlefields are 9×7 grids cut out of the exploration map, and tiles are just "walkable / not walkable." The candelabras, pews, and water tanks are just set dressing. Nothing ever happens with them.

# The fix: don't nerf auto

What I decided here was: don't make auto weaker. If someone wants to breeze through with auto, let them. Instead, add reasons why playing manually pays off.

I added three things.

1. Terrain gimmicks on each floor

• Candelabra: shove an enemy into it and it topples, setting that tile and the tile under the enemy on fire
• Searchlight: the beam moves 1 tile per turn, and anyone standing in the light takes 1.25× damage
• Electric net: stepping in deals damage plus stun, and a stunned enemy's telegraphed attack is cancelled
• Culture fluid: enemies standing on it regenerate HP. A shoved enemy slides all the way until it hits something
• Bell: shove an enemy into it and it rings, cancelling the telegraphs of all nearby enemies (once per battle)

2. "Kick"

It looks like an ordinary kick, and it only does 40% of a basic attack's damage. But it's the only move that can kick an enemy into a candelabra or toss them into an electric net. Auto never uses Kick, and that's where playing manually finally starts to mean something.

3. Side requests and a three-star rating

Each battle comes with a request, like "deal damage to an enemy with a gimmick" or "knock an enemy down from behind." Three stars: 1 for completing the request, 1 for winning within "2 + number of enemies" turns, and 1 for taking damage of no more than 20% of your max HP. Each star adds 20% to the rewards.

On the flip side, when you ambush enemies that are clearly weaker than you from behind, the battle is skipped entirely. Auto runs once in the background first, and if it can win with almost no damage, the grid screen isn't shown at all; you just get a one-slash instant-kill animation. Like how P5 wipes out small fry in an instant. If a battle isn't worth playing manually, don't make the player play it at all.

# Things the AI found before I did

After adding the gimmicks, I ran another few thousand battles. This time the AI caught two things.

The first was the culture fluid from above. The rule that heals enemies standing on it also applied to bosses. In the Chapter 3 boss fight, auto's win rate dropped from 78% to 10%. After changing it so bosses don't heal, it went back up to 70%.

The second was a bug where battles never ended. There's a gimmick called the "drain grate," where hands reach out of the floor and grab your feet, and the original rule was "you stay grabbed for as long as you stand on it." In one Chapter 6 battle, the last enemy was standing on it and couldn't move, while our side's auto avoids enemy attack ranges, so neither side ever approached the other. It got stuck at turn 55.

I changed it to "grab for 1 turn, release on the next," reran the same battle, and it ended in 5 turns. After that I ran 4,800 battles across difficulty × player type × map shape × all 8 chapters × 25 random seeds × regular and boss battles. Battles that dragged on to 60 turns: 0.

# I'm the one who decides

If I were the only one playing, I probably wouldn't have found any of this until much later. Auto being too strong, the boss healing, the battle stuck at turn 55.

But I didn't take the AI's proposals wholesale either. One proposal was to give strong enemies special abilities; I passed on that and used terrain to widen the gap instead. Making "Kick" a basic move available with any equipment was also my call. Both times, I picked the side that adds reasons to play manually.

What I haven't tackled yet is the "too long" problem. Some battles auto can win, but they take so many turns that anyone watching gets bored. You can't see that in the win rate or the HP, and I'm still figuring out how to measure it. If you have a good idea, I'd love to hear it.