haha the autoresolve is one thing I haven't been able to figure out at all. Because different things happen than what it shows in this mod. But I can tell you dark elves were my first campaign victory ever and I did it with SFO.

The main thing to realize very quickly is that darkshards can't fire over your melee for ♥♥♥♥ which caused me to lose a ton of battles early on. They aren't like bows. They need height or they need to flank. Cavalry normally sucks a lot. But you probably want at least two fast moving units. Doesn't matter what they are really. Just need something to beat enemy archers or enemy cav.

Other than that your main goal should be to get shades as fast as humanly possible. at the beginning of every battle position your shades on the left and right flank in vanguard. don't move them early. Wait until the enemy army completely crashes into your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ spearmen and than move them into a position directly behind the enemy. There will be nowhere for them to go and its over every time.

Also you should get yourself a fire sorc. They are op as hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgXCKZniqJ8
That's a battle i won where I had overwhelming numbers against me. In a weird 3 way pincer attack. It shows the types of units I used. And that you can beat the most op HE units which is probably the hardest enemy.

yeah. Kept playing for some more time and when hitting tier 4 arcs/settlements the game became quite easy.
Its just a pity that in the earlier stages of the campaign you´re kinda over incentivised to autoresolve battles since the basic chaff is simply underpowered and growing arcs/settlements takes its time.
magic is fine and all but i quite dislike it if they´re the deciding factor in battles, I´m looking forward to it being nerfed in wh3...

Magic is a very hard factor to balance in that game. We always try to not make it mandatory but its hard as I said.

you did your best its a lot better compared to vanilla... while I enjoy Legends effective use of Magic to turn the tide in battles it kinda invalidates a lot of other game aspects on the harder difficulties. And "cheesing" battles gets boring fast, very fast. (man I hope you keep on modding until medieval 3 comes out ^^)

my main point here was to simply vent a litte since the performance of the lower-tier units kept me autoresolving a lot of battles that i actually wanted to win myself :D (where´s my staunch line of dreadspears!)

I hear you man. I think that's a problem in general with warhammer. And the main issue is the stupid moral routing system. As the player you generally are tactically superior and win the first wave. Which causes the enemy to retreat and than return behind you flanking you on all sides.Which is a sure loss on tier 1 trash units with no speed.

There is no counter to this or any changes you can make. Just a bad decision on warhammers part not to keep the older morale or the way it was changed to work in Three Kingdoms where everyone flees from terror and simply leaves and doesn't come back.