Gameplay Automation

The act of taking a video game's existing interactivity away from the player, or giving the option to relinquish it.

This may seem to run counter to the entire point of video games, but the medium is not just about poking at stuff - it's about poking at fresh and interesting stuff. The player who cheerfully clicks through a lot of controls to found a moonbase will be a lot less enthusiastic about clicking through the same controls 50 times over to resupply and expand it. Once he's progressed to forging the Great Galactic Empire of Really Big Laser Guns, optimizing planetary shuttle schedules will just be a nuisance.

Automation affects the very core of the experience, so it's remarkably easy to screw up. Take away the same player's shuttlecraft once his empire discovers warp travel: he may have appreciated the break from cutthroat scheming against the Star Federation With Lots of Missiles, he may want to savor the feeling of taking care of his little future people, or he may not have cared about the shuttles, yet dislike the feeling of being railroaded.

Worst of all, Artificial Stupidity is waiting for a chance to show its ugly face. The player might be winning glorious victories or building wonders to stand the best of time; it's just going to be frustrating if he has to do it by shepherding a computer that should know better. Still, automation is often important in keeping a game fun and challenging.

Isn't game design fun?

See also Anti-Frustration Features, where gameplay changes in response to the player's (lack of) skill. If the entire game is like this, it's a Programming Game.

Examples of Gameplay Automation include:

• Deuteros, an Amiga game, was praised for an almost supernatural sense of timing. The player would get to rediscover space travel. Just as he started to have enough of sending more and more stuff into space, the research teams would come up with an automated cargo transport system. Later on, fully automated orbital workshops, and after that, bulk matter transmitters.
• In the simulation game Afterlife, buildings have to be manually balanced every so often to stay efficient. It's either mindnumbing, since it means moving a single slider and there are lots of buildings, or the player may have the game do it at a serious cost. This is because the designers were dumb.
• World of Warcraft's scripting and macro system originally allowed "push this button to play your character" mods. Blizzard has gradually restricted functionality to avert this over the years. The game is also rife with illegal hacked clients that completely automate gathering crafting materials from nodes, but that's deliberate cheating.
• In UFO: Aftermath, the player has a squad of soldiers, an Earth full of aliens and mutants to conquer, and one helicopter to do it with. Expanding one's territory increases the number of trouble spots and sending the chopper careening back and forth becomes an exercise in futility, until the player wins the first major victory by capturing an alien teleporter. Then the chopper always launches from the closest base.
• Progress Quest takes this to its logical conclusion, eliminating the player from the equation entirely.
• Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula has a mineral probe, which can be deployed from a planetary lander to gather selected types of resources. It's a real timesaver since the player usually lands to look for trade centers and ruins, which are more lucrative, but needs stocks of metals on hand for repairs.
• In Warcraft3 and Starcraft2, worker units can be set to use their repair ability automatically. Very useful. The Real Time Strategy genre as a whole has been inching towards this. Construction orders became build queues, which have been getting repeat options (Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, Rise of Nations). Some games have units automatically find ways to make themselves useful (Rise of Nations, Original War).
• In Forza Motorsport, you can hire AI drivers to do the racing for you. The trade-off is that this cuts into the prize money.
• Gran Turismo 4 and 5 have B-Spec mode, which turns the games into playing a racing crew chief.
• Master of Orion 3 was a failed attempt to revolutionize the 4X genre through heavy automation. It was intended to make ruling feel like ruling by having the computer make low-level decisions, freeing the player to focus on the big picture.
• Kingdom of Loathing has a combat macro script language. It's quite limited, lacking such things as variables.
  • There is also a fan-made program called KolMafia which will automate damn near everything and has a comprehensive scripting language, among many other things. People have made scripts to play the entire game for you. The devs are fine with it.
• In Plants vs. Zombies you can buy a snail which auto-collects the coins dropped by plants in your Zen Garden. Though you need to manually awaken it for short intervals or feed it chocolate to keep it awake for an hour.
• Outpost 2, an RTS, has an optional observation satellite that will automatically survey all resource deposits (make them usable) for the rest of the game. It manages to feel great while accomplishing very little: robotic surveyors are cheap and expendable. Yet it eases the crushing multitasking a bit, and is the first concrete benefit of a plotline about escaping the planet.
• Most Real Time Strategy games (or strategy games in general) will automate workers for gathering resources once you've set them up, or if a worker is very specific, it will do its job once it's created. You can effectively ignore them until they are needed elsewhere. Likewise, your combat units will attack any enemy on sight. In some cases, they'll pursue them for some time. More recent game will also have units react automatically given a situation (supposedly). For example, in Company of Heroes, units that get attacked will find the nearest cover, but they won't move from their spot where you left them at.
• Godville follows in the footsteps of Progress Quest, describing itself as a "ZPG" - "zero-player game." The player's input is limited to the ability to issue simple commands that the hero may or may not actually follow, plus the ability to encourage or punish the hero (which likewise may or may not accomplish anything much).
• Many computer Mahjong games have several such features for the player's convenience:
  • Auto Win: When you complete a winning hand in Mahjong, you have to declare the win to end the hand and collect the points. (It is in fact allowed to pass up the opportunity, for example if you want to try for an even bigger win. However, 9 times out of 10, doing so would be very silly.) If Auto-Win is turned on, it automatically declares a winning hand at the first opportunity.
  • Auto Pass: Ignore all opportunities to call opponents' discards except to win the hand. This is particularly useful because computer games usually try to keep the game moving quickly and won't stall after a discard if none of the opponents can call it. Thus if the game stalls for a couple seconds, you know someone probably has the requisite tiles in their hand to give them the option of calling the most recent discard. If you know you're going to pass every time, this skips the stall so it doesn't tip off your opponents regarding the composition of your hand.
  • Auto Tsumokiri: When enabled, every time you draw a tile, it'll automatically discard the tile you just drew (known as tsumokiri in Japanese) unless you can use it to declare a kong or it completes a winning hand. Useful if you're one tile away from a winning hand and are absolutely sure you won't want to change the composition of your hand no matter what comes up.
• Jade Dynasty has a built-in bot that can perform a wide variety of actions for the player, though it may be stymied by unforeseen situations. Use is unlimited up to level 90, after which its energy must be refilled regularly.
• Granado Espada has an array of automation options to help players with the unique multi-character gameplay (each character having almost as wide a range of actions as a typical MMO's lone hero and synergies must be set up in real time). Players formerly used these functions as an ersatz botting system but the developers have taken steps to progressively limit their usefulness.
• Stars! got a lot done this way.
  • Planets have building queues (though only mass produced stuff like factories or mineral packets can be set to "produce 10 more if possible, forever"), mineral packet destination and routing destination (you eventually end up with big shipyards far from the front, thus you set routes: whenever planet X builds a ship, its destination will be set to planet Y, mission to "Route" and speed at safe maximum with its engine and fuel tank; there it will be automatically refuelled by starbase, but planet Y has its route set to planet Z, so incoming ships with "Route" task as well as built get re-routed to Z; also, "ship built" message tells you it was routed to Y).
  • Fleets have waypoint task system - each leg has customizable speed and mission for the waypoint at its end, and option to repeat the whole list indefinitely; the task with most most parameters is Transport [cargo] for freighter fleets, which is what gets used most often — it would be boring to manually control hauling minerals from miners to your prime shipyard, so you just set up 2 waypoints, sometimes 3. So you end up with e.g. "travel to: Mining Fleet #23 at: Warp 7, task: fuel - unload excessive for the next trip; Ironium - load all, Boranium - load in unused hold volume, Germanium - load all; travel to: planet Y at: Warp 9, task: unload all cargo; travel to: planet Z at: use stargate, task: none; [V] repeat". Or set a warfleet to Patrol [Within 100 ly, Warp factor: automatic], and then a freighter to shuttle between that fleet where it will Transport [Fuel: Load Optimal^[1], all minerals^[2]: Load All] and the nearby starbase planet where it will Transport[all: Unload All] while also auto-refueling.
  • The battle is automatic, but you can customize and name a Battle Plan, and assign it to some fleets. It sets target priorities — a low-priority target is attacked only if there's no high-priority target in range on your turn, general tactics ("disengage if challenged", "maximize damage to the target", "minimize damage to self", etc) and whom to attack (only designated enemies or also neutrals, if diplomacy is used). So e.g. your defending fleet is too weak, but you assign it a plan with primary target "Bombers" and tactic "Maximize Damage", since if they are taken out, the enemy fleet can't harm the planet beyond killing its starbase, giving you time to get some reinforcements before they brought new bombers all the way there, so what could be a major loss turns into a short-term setback.

Auto-battle

A common type of automation is turning the combat section of a larger game over to the computer. This is convenient when revisiting previous areas, Level Grinding, or when combat has the tactical depth of wet tissue paper. Must-have for Play By Post Games, such as Simultaneous Turn Resolution TBS. Good auto-battle systems have a visible and responsive "manual control" button, allowing the player to act as an overseer and intervene when necessary. Great auto-battles have a "WAIT WAIT WAIT TAKE THAT BACK" button. No great auto-battles are known to exist.

• Final Fantasy XII changed its combat system to make party members more autonomous. The player could create simple tactics by constructing "If - then" statements, and listing them in order of priority. Characters could then be controlled directly, or left to follow these orders on their own. It turned out too simple: for instance, the party thief cannot be told "IF the enemy can be stolen from AND has NOT already been stolen from, THEN steal, ELSE attack.", at best you can tell them to keep stealing from the enemy for as long as they have full HP in hopes of getting them to stop when another party member takes a whack at the said enemy, but until they do, they'll just keep wasting their turns after their first successful steal.
  • Final Fantasy XIII took this in a different direction, giving the player control of overall tactics such as each character's role in the party at specific times, in the form of Paradigms, while giving them a literal auto-battle button. This lines up a string of moves for your character, taking into account who has less health or needs which buffs (for medics and buffers), weaknesses and resistances that you are aware of on an enemy (for mages, commandos and debuffers), and other tactics depending on the situation. You still have the option to put in the commands yourself, but unless you have a very specific strategy you're implementing it generally gives you the best option.
• In the DS version of Final Fantasy IV you can toggle "Auto-battle" on and off at any time, where all characters will perform a specific action as their turns come up.
• In the Monster Rancher series, you generally have the option to give your monster orders during battle, or letting them fight as they will. If your monster has low Loyalty, letting it choose its own moves reduces the chances that it will become confused and stall. On the other hand...
• The Dragon Quest games have selectable AI for party members, (probably) starting from Dragon Quest IV. In the original version of Dragon Quest IV, there's no manual control in the final chapter of the game. The hero can never be put on AI. Not a perfect example because the AI can do things that the player cannot, such as healing another character on the same turn they got hurt, something the player wouldn't be able to know in advance due to not knowing which characters the enemy decides to attack that turn.
• In The World Ends With You, the battle system allows you to control two characters at once, one on each screen. However, if this gets confusing or if it's a particularly difficult battle, you can allow your partner to go into 'Auto' mode.Manual input can override the AI at any time, which is handy if things get hairy.
• Final Fantasy Tactics - you can even set what sort of behavior the auto-controlled characters have. Set Auto Battle on someone who has Math Skill and let The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard work in your favor!
• Megatraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients. If you turned on "React" your PCs would automatically fire back at any enemy shooting at them. Since they could react much faster than you could and move around while doing so, it was usually best to let them fight it out with enemy forces.
• SaGa 3 features an "Auto" option, which lets you toggle on/off AI controlling the characters.
• Phantasy Star IV has a macro system which sets commands for a turn using a single selection. Although the most common set tells all the characters to attack, new macros can be programmed in for using combination spells.
• In Master of Orion 2, you can turn this option on in the middle of combat. It does the job quickly and fairly well when you have the upper hand and you can't bother ordering massive numbers of small ships around, but in other scenarios you are better off doing the job yourself.
• Grandia II has several options for automation. You can automate all your characters but the main one or have no control over any characters and just watch the computer fight the computer.

Melee spam

Plenty of RPGs have an auto-battle option that consists of using the default attack until told otherwise. Try to group these here. Put examples above if their auto-battle features tactics or special abilities.

• The Mega Ten games (including Persona, excluding the Raidou games and Devil Survivor for their different combat systems) have the "Rush" command, which speeds the flow of battle by about 50% and forces all party members to stick with physical attacks, overriding their selected tactics.
• Suikoden.
• The Breath of Fire series.
• Alter AILA
• Status inflictions such as "Beserk" can cause this involuntarily. If all of the player's characters get it, the player may have no control at all.
• Radiant Historia. It bypasses the combo system, making it useful for finishing enemies off.
• Most MMORPGs will have the player character auto-attack (and use any skills tied to it) or use pre-selected skills over and over once ordered to hit something.

Auto-resolve

Auto-battle's big brother, this option skips straight to the aftermath. While auto-battle is still the same battle under computer control, auto-resolve is often something entirely different. Particularly in games that normally involve real-time physics, the result can be drastically different if the battle is instead resolved statistically.

• In Age of Wonders, when entering a battle you have the option of either directing your troops manually, or letting the computer instantly decide the outcome of the battle. The computer doesn't use your spells and doesn't take into account strategies and tactics you might have used, so it's best used when victory is all but certain anyway.
• Every game in the Total War series. It's useful for chasing stragglers.
• The Total War fantasy knock-off King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame. Auto-resolve deals damage in proportion to the strengths of the opposing armies. Graciously, the player can designate units as important, which keeps them alive unless the whole army falls but reduces total army strength.
• Sword of the Stars.
• Dawn of War: Dark Crusade for defending territories that the player has already captured. You can improve your odds by increasing the amount of troops you start with, and since you start the level with every structure you had built on the last playthrough. However, it is not failsafe, as the computer doesn't understand the concept of killing the HQ for instant victory.
• Star Wars: Rebellion, a Star Wars themed 4X game, gave you the option to take control of fleet battles yourselves in the form of a 3-D RTS, or let the computer handle it for you.
• Star Wars: Empire at War has auto-battle for both space and land battles. Space battles are far faster and more interesting. Fortunately land units are cheap, so the player can throw those at problems and focus on space!
• In Master of Orion 2, you have the option to turn off tactical (detailed) combat, after which the AI designs all ships and resolves all combats automatically.
• EarthBound, bless its heart, did this to generic RPG enemies. Preexisting Encounters that are too weak to pose a challenge will move away from the player characters, and touching one will trigger an automatic victory (with the spoils!)
• Similar to Earthbound, Paper Mario included a few badges that allowed the player to defeat weak enemies on the field, without having to enter battle mode.
• The Ancient Art of War and The Ancient Art of War at Sea. If one of your units and an enemy unit were adjacent to each other, the computer would run the combat between them unless you used "Zoom" to take control of your unit.
• The Ancient Art of War in the Air. The computer resolved dogfights and bombing runs unless you chose to get involved (which greatly increased the chance of your planes winning).
• In Space Battle for the Intellivision, when one of your patrols intercepted an incoming enemy squadron, the game would start "playing" the battle automatically, taking out approximately three enemy ships for each of your ships in the squadron. This was important as, when you engaged the combat mode yourself, the rest of the game was still progressing in the background.
• Slave Maker allows you to decide if you want to automatically win or lose battles. While winning is obviously the preferable option, auto-losing does allow for some different paths to explore without having to let yourself lose.
• The Mount & Blade series offers this option in some installments or some versions thereof. Not recommended unless you have an overwhelming advantage and even then you may somehow lose if you spam the Resolve button.

Autopilot

Turning controls over to the computer. This ranges from simple orientation aids to automatic travel that fast-forwards until something interesting comes up. Traveling without crossing the intervening space is an example of Warp Whistle, instead.

• In Uncharted Waters 2, if your Chief Navigator or First Mate has the Celestial Navigation skill, you can order him to auto-sail to any port you've already discovered. However, while it's slightly useful, navigating manually would usually get you there faster. Also, the auto-sail function did not take into account things like food/water supplies, storms, and pirates.
• Warhead has nine autopilots, which range from "Point the ship in the direction of motion" and "Keep going that-a-way while I sit here and rot" to "Take the Wheel! I'll man the guns!"
• A minor example in Ace Combat—you can activate the autopilot, which will immediately set you to straight and level flight on whatever heading your nose is currently pointed. The only real use for this is to level yourself out in a dark or cloudy level after you've been dogfighting like mad and are no longer sure which way is up.
• The two easiest difficulty options in Bayonetta offer an "Automatic" mode where the game essentially performs all movement for you, essentially turning the game into a series of Action Commands...meaning you can play the whole thing using just one hand.
• Dynamix's Red Baron. While on a Patrol mission you could activate an autopilot which would fly your plane along your patrol route until you encountered enemy units.
• In the Roguelike Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, holding the B button causes the player to "sprint", where the game fast-forwards their movement in a straight line until something interesting (fork in the road, hostile Pokemon, etc.) happens. Holding B A at the same time causes the game to fast-forward with the leader standing in place, primarily as a means for regenerating HP.
• In the Descent series, as a means of helping traditional FPS gamers adjust to its zero-gravity nature, had a control option to automatically align the player's ship at 90-degree angles to nearby floors/walls so that they could maneuver around it without slight tilts getting in the way.
• In Mario Kart Wii the player is allowed to select "Automatic" or "Manual" drifting around corners, with the former intended primarily for first-time players (as only manual drifting features mini-turbo boosts).
  • In fact, it was sometimes a lot easier to use a kart or bike with low drift stats if one uses the auto drift options.
• Jump Raven had various copilot characters of varying aptitudes you could recruit, and responsibilities for various things (hovering, countermeasures, bombs, missiles, guns) could be toggled on or off at will.
• Interplay's old Star Trek adventure games allowed you to hand over control of different shipboard systems during 3D battle sequences to the bridge officers.
• The Wipeout series have an Autopilot power-up that let the computer control your ship for 5 seconds, an useful item when used in tough sections of a track.
• The Mechwarrior titles: all mechs come fitted with an autopilot which will guide you through a sequence of pre-plotted navigation points and (fairly) intelligently avoid terrain problems on the way. On some missions this gives the player time for a quick sandwich or toilet break while their mech stomps its way to the first interesting bit.
• Most new MMORPGs have at least a rudimentary autopilot, where the player character can be directed to run to a distant point of interest without player intervention via the area map or minimap. Different games have different levels of comprehensiveness in their autopilot, to the level of traversing between maps without help or engaging the function from quest description windows.

Governor

First against the wall when the revolution comes.

• Master of Magic has the Grand Vizier function. Unfortunately it could only be toggled on and off for the whole empire, not configured or limited to the least interesting spots.
• Master of Orion II has a simple auto-build option. It simply builds according to a prearranged queue set up (in an order that most players don't want) and continues building until it has nothing more to build.
• The Civilization series allows town function automation by mayors (such as in Civ II), where you can pick an emphasis for their activities, or automatically selecting what tech to research to get to a specific technology (Civ IV).
  • Free Civ adds build lists that can be applied to new cities so that they automatically construct improvements and troops in the order desired by the player. Cities will also autobuild unless coinage is put in the build queue.
  • You can also tell workers to auto-improve tiles, and even tell soldiers and scouts to auto-explore the area, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has the Governor function, with five different modes (explore, discover, build, conquer, no priority) and eighteen settings ("governor may produce land combat units", "governor sets new units to 'fully automate', etc.).
• Galactic Civilizations II has planetary governors that will automatically decide what to do on particular planets for you.
• Europa 1400: The Guild and The Guild 2, games about medieval dynasties, offer supervisors for the player's shops and manufacturies at steep prices. The idea is that a player would make his own fortune, then find that it's become better to hand over the day-to-day operations to the CPU and concentrate on scheming.
• Fragile Allegiance has AI governors for hire with varying salaries and capabilities. One cheaper one, for instance, is described as good as long as she isn't given too much to deal with. Black market wares include the governors' background details, and those seem to have actual gameplay use, since the game has both a "fire" button and a "fire, imprison, and put under armed guard" button.
• Dungeon Keeper had a selection of different assistants that would help build your dungeon for you. You could choose it to be defensive or aggressive, set it to dig out the rock, or just lay the tiles out for rooms. Its usefulness was less than great.

1. ↑ leaves just enough to the next waypoint
2. ↑ salvage collected from enemies' and your losses