There has been a lot of discussion about whether we should let you know how the AR works or not. It looks like the Marquis spilled the beans on the main issue (that of personal combat history). Trust me,
the auto resolver never looks at your personal win/loss history.
This rumor came from the way that we designed the AR in Skyrates 1 before Thradius joined the project. In old Skyrates, the AR would look at your win/loss %age for a specific combat level and roll a die based on that. This was messy for a lot of reasons:
1. It was horrible for the server, which had to do a query on every combat a Skyrate had ever fought and then filtered by combat level. Trying to make this only the more recent combats still wouldn't make the query any better.
2. It didn't make sense a lot of the time. Because it was based on player history, it didn't take into account anything about recent upgrades, plane purchases, etc.
3. Every time you reached a new combat level, it would have no data on the level, so you'd still have a 50% chance of losing regardless of your previous record.
4. Because there was no knowledge of planes, a player could build up a great combat record and then buy a really big cargo plane (which should be terrible at combat) yet still win AR combat.
It was very exploitable and really did a bad job of actually resolving combats at all correctly once anything changed about your Skyrate or her plane.
Thrad's system is much, much better. It takes into account your Skyrate's plane, your Skyrate's plane upgrades, and your Skyrate's combat skills. Also, rather than just going off of a simple combat level number, it actually generates planes to fight against you and does several volleys back and forth. It's a much, much better system that is actually less of a hit on the server than the old one.
As an aside: I say above that all of these things are your Skyrate's because in our design, you and your Skyrate are not the same (which is why he/she calls you "boss" all the time). When you're in a manual combat, you're taking over the controls from your Skyrate and teaching her how to fight, which is why she earns CP from the fight which can be spent on combat skills.
One of the things that I feel could be improved is the decision of when to flee. Right now, the system waits until your Skyrate's armor is down to 1 point before fleeing regardless of which plane you have. The system includes the ability to modify this, which would change the outcome of the AR considerably.
As is mentioned above, once you lose one combat now, it's followed by a string of losses with a few flees (because each combat starts with only 1 armor). We're considering changing this from 1 armor to 50% of your armor. That way, once your Skyrate's plane got to 50% armor, your Skyrate would start trying to run from combat. I believe that this would result in a change from a combat log that looked like:
Win, Win, Win, Loss, Loss, Loss, Flee, Loss, Loss, Flee
to one that was more like:
Win, Win, Flee, Flee, Flee, Flee, Flee, Loss, Flee, Loss
Armor would still be depleted when fleeing, but the higher amount of armor to begin with would make fleeing more likely.
Another thing that we would really like to do given the time would be to allow players to set how chicken (or prudent, if you prefer) their Skyrate is by setting a %age of armor that will trigger fleeing in AR combat. This would take changes to the interface, client, DB, and server, so it may not happen any time soon, but it is something that was originally planned, and it's still an idea that we like a lot.
-- Archon