[Squirrelloid]

Its perfectly plausible to rationalize an autokill at some fixed time - ie, units eventually are too fatigued to fight, undead units need to replenish their dark energy or whatever, etc... So after some number of rounds they simply collapse or shut down and the defenders can do what they will (since they control the land).

The game has rules. Autokill is one of them. Its a perfectly balanced rule, especially since the rules are designed to give the attacker a fair shake at leaving before it happens by auto-routing. The *only* issue is that the game won't let the attackers route if the defenders have already routed. To avoid this, there are two alternatives: (1) let both sides route, (2) instead of auto-killing the attacker, auto-kill the side that routed (keeping auto-route for the attacker at turn 50 - presumption for the defender).

As a game rule issue, that's the end of the discussion.

Once we start talking about removing autokill because its 'unrealistic', we start playing with game balance (autokill is often the only way to kill a pimped-out SC), which means we have to try and make lots of other changes and that leads nowhere good (and probably means we have to do things like remove enc. 0 from the game and/or make SCs a lot weaker - possibly eliminating the role entirely). We have to start rebalancing some spells and abilities (berzerk becomes stupidly powerful without autokill). Removing autokill is not a fix, it forces a total game redesign.