Exploring Why Automation Is Satisfying—or Unsettling
There’s a strange tension at the heart of the auto-battler genre. You build your team. You choose your units. You craft your formation. Then… you watch.
No commands. No inputs. No clutch last-second plays.
Instead, your carefully planned lineup does what it’s been told—flawlessly or catastrophically—and you’re left to analyze what went wrong (or right) after the fact. In auto-battlers, the thrill isn’t in pressing the button—it’s in deciding when not to.
This blog dives into the curious satisfaction—and subtle discomfort—of tactical delegation in auto-battlers. We’ll examine how games like Teamfight Tactics, Auto Chess, and Loop Hero turn passive observation into high-stakes decision-making, and why sometimes the best strategy is to let go of control.
I. What Is an Auto-Battler?
An auto-battler, or “auto chess” game, is a strategy subgenre where players assemble a team of units and position them on a grid or battlefield. Once combat starts, the units fight automatically according to predefined AI rules.
Your job, as the player, is to:
- Choose and upgrade units
- Synergize classes and abilities
- Position units for optimal engagement
- Manage economy and resource flow
But the actual battle? That plays out without direct input.
The result is a game that combines the planning of chess with the unpredictability of dice rolls—where strategic success is determined not in the moment, but in the decisions leading up to it.
II. The Pleasure of Letting Go
There’s a unique satisfaction that comes from watching a system you built perform without you.
Auto-battlers scratch a similar itch to:
- Programming logic puzzles
- Building theme parks in sim games
- Crafting decks in card battlers
It’s the joy of preparation—of testing your hypothesis and seeing how it holds up under stress.
Because you can’t intervene mid-fight, your focus shifts from twitch reflexes to:
- Reading enemy compositions
- Adapting your board state between rounds
- Investing in long-term economic growth
Winning feels like proof that you thought better, not faster.
III. The Unsettling Loss of Control
But there’s a flip side.
For players used to tight mechanical control—especially in traditional tactics games—auto-battlers can feel detached, even alienating. You see a mistake, and you can’t fix it. You anticipate a synergy that doesn’t quite pay off. A random crit shatters your strategy.
And you can’t do anything about it.
This introduces a layer of emotional discomfort:
- “Why didn’t they target that unit?”
- “Why did my tank move away from the healer?”
- “If I could just control this one ability…”
This lack of agency isn’t a flaw—it’s the point. But it requires a different mindset, one focused on iterative learning over moment-to-moment mastery.
IV. Delegation as a Strategic Act
The core mechanic of an auto-battler isn’t combat—it’s delegation.
When you build your board, you’re essentially:
- Defining behaviors through unit selection
- Crafting rulesets through synergies
- Creating priorities via formation
The moment the fight begins, you’ve handed over control to a system you’ve designed—one that must be both robust and adaptive.
It’s a paradox: the less you do during the fight, the more important your pre-fight decisions become. Games like Teamfight Tactics force you to optimize across:
- Board space
- Itemization
- Unit rarity and tier upgrades
- Enemy scouting
You’re managing probability as much as performance. And the best players aren’t lucky—they’re anticipating chaos, and building systems that survive it.
V. When Unpredictability Feels Fair
One of the most crucial challenges for auto-battler design is balancing randomness and readability.
Players are more willing to accept a bad beat if:
- They saw it coming (but chose to risk it)
- The cause is traceable (not arbitrary)
- The loss reveals something they can learn from
Games that succeed in this space:
- Show hit rates, ranges, or target logic clearly
- Let players review battle outcomes
- Offer tools to simulate or test builds
This turns randomness from frustration into meta-strategy. It becomes another variable to plan around—not a force of chaos, but a test of resilience.
VI. Auto-Battlers vs. Traditional Tactics Games
It’s worth comparing auto-battlers to traditional grid-based tactics games like Fire Emblem, XCOM, or Final Fantasy Tactics.
| Feature | Traditional Tactics | Auto-Battlers |
|---|---|---|
| Player Control | High | Low (in combat) |
| Engagement | Moment-to-moment | Round-to-round |
| Focus | Positioning, skill use, reactions | Composition, synergy, planning |
| Pace | Slower, deliberate turns | Fast, fluid rounds |
| Frustration | Misses, AI unpredictability | Random targeting, poor behavior |
Each appeals to different types of strategy players. But increasingly, hybrid games are exploring middle grounds—letting players pre-program behavior (Wargroove, Darkest Dungeon), or setting macro-level goals instead of direct commands.
Auto-battlers show that control is a spectrum, and relinquishing some of it can make the decisions you do have more meaningful.
VII. Examples of Delegation-Based Strategy Done Right
Loop Hero
You place tiles, gear up your hero, and set macro-level conditions—but the hero fights on their own. Your role is environmental designer, not commander.
This recontextualizes what “combat strategy” even means.
Hearthstone Battlegrounds
While not purely automatic, it uses the auto-battler core: choose minions, upgrade economy, position board. Then watch it all unfold. The satisfaction comes from long-term economic decisions and predictive metagame knowledge.
Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS)
You arrange ragdoll soldiers, watch absurd physics unfold, and gradually learn what unit combinations work. It’s comedy, but it teaches a core design lesson: even chaos has patterns.
VIII. Narrative Framing of Delegation
Many auto-battlers sidestep narrative entirely—but those that embrace it often use the automation as storytelling texture.
You’re not the fighter. You’re the tactician, the summoner, the architect behind the scenes. Your role is elevated from “hero” to “strategist”—a framing that supports the mechanical core.
When done well, this makes you feel powerful through planning, not execution.
Games that embrace this idea can explore:
- Themes of leadership
- Consequences of preparation
- The illusion (or burden) of control
In this way, auto-battlers challenge the idea that power must come from interaction, offering instead the power of orchestration.
IX. Why the Genre Resonates Today
Auto-battlers have found resonance in a gaming culture increasingly drawn to:
- Minimalism and abstraction
- Short play sessions with high depth
- Low mechanical stress, high cognitive reward
They’re games of systems thinking—perfect for players who love optimization, theorycrafting, and adaptation.
They also reflect a cultural shift in how we think about control. Sometimes, being the one who pulls the trigger is less satisfying than being the one who built the machine that fires.
Conclusion: Designing for Controlled Chaos
Auto-battlers are not passive games. They are deliberate exercises in letting go, in building strategies that can survive without your hand on the wheel. They ask: how much do you trust your decisions?
And when the pieces fall into place, when your units sweep the field in perfect formation, when your gambit pays off—it feels earned in a different way. Not because you controlled everything…
…but because you let go at the right time.
That’s the paradox at the heart of auto-battlers. Losing control doesn’t mean losing strategy. It means redefining it.