This post is both an issue report and and argument to try to support a certain feature. It's based on my observations playing Long War 2 1.0 and 1.1 on PC.
Auto Resolve is a polarizing feature to be certain. Used indiscriminately it has the potential to ruin the game by entirely eliminating one of the deepest and most engaging aspects of the game, namely the tactical combat. Used selectively, however, it has the potential to eliminate the excessive tedium of being forced to micromanage dozens of almost identical missions over the course of a campaign - especially a LW2 one, due to the sheer number of missions required.
While AR can be enabled in LW2, it suffers from several issues that severely limits its useability. The most severe one is an interface problem: ideally, the choice to auto-resolve should be presented to the player in the dialog to launch the mission once infiltration is completed, not in the squad selection screen. Only at this point does the player really have all the information on which to base the decision whether to play through the mission manually or auto-resolve. Moving the button to this dialog would also immediately solve numerous glitches with the feature, which seem related to the auto-resolve flag for a mission being erroneously cleared for missions during the infiltration.
Currently the button is located in the squad selection screen. It appears clicking this button instead of the normal "Start infiltration" button begins the infiltration process as normal, but also sets an AR flag on the mission, signaling that this mission should be autoresolved instead of played through normally once the player tries to launch it. The main problem with the AR feature seems to be that these flags tend to get arbitrarily unset under certain conditions. For example, if multiple squads with the AR flag set are sent out in parallel, it seems most of the time only the squad that was sent out first will actually autoresolve, even if you used the AR button to dispatch all of the squads. Another thing that seems to clear the AR flags on all missions currently in the infiltration phase is saving and reloading the game.
Like I argued before, if it were possible to improve the UI by moving the AR button to the mission launch dialog, it would solve all these problems in one fell swoop, since if the flag is set only by the player right before the mission is actually auto-resolved, there is obviously no risk of it being accidentally cleared by anything that could occur between the flag being set and the mission being launched. I would urge the LW team to at least look into whether this simple improvement can actually be implemented without a prohibitive level of effort. While I commend players who not only are able to motivate themselves to grind through dozens of near-identical missions, and even find enjoyment in doing so, not all of us have the patience or time to actually sit through a LW2 campaign if this is actually required. Dedicating a little effort towards fixing AR would allow all players regardless of preference to fully enjoy a LW2 campaign and see it through to its conclusion.
In defense of Auto Resolve
Re: In defense of Auto Resolve
in fairness, the maps being procedurally generated, and map pack mods makes missions not really all that "identical"