I would not recommend putting the crusade on auto. The super easy difficulty setting is quite fine, and you don't end up missing out on some important quests or having stupidly damaging crusade outcomes. Plus, crusade management in WotR is sooooooo much better than kingdom management in Km.
I hate pre-buffing as a concept. Period. In all cRPGs including the old IE games. Just absolutely hate it. So the way I choose to play these games is to never pre-buff (other than in very rare situations where a specific pre-buff is mandatory to get through the encounter) and to just dive right into the combat, but offset this by lowering the difficulty level (in WotR I play custom difficulty with "moderately easy" enemies). I also only very rarely use offensive spellcasting and limit myself in combat to melee and missile weapons and support spellcasting. This is my standard cRPG playstyle, and perhaps why I so strongly prefer RTwP and not TB.
Hell yes brother. Another reason the 5e system is better. Most buffs are either after long rest because they last until next long rest OR they are combat specific and tactical in nature.
Buffing 20 spells before every combat is bullshit. It's crazy that they even had a solution to this with the Sequencer spell - all they had to do was make it a UI feature instead of a spell so people could just slap a single button to get all those spells in place, but they never did this.
Yes, this is the ONE thing about 5e I absolutely LOVE over 3.5e. It is also the system in the PoE games, where the vast majority of spells cannot be cast outside of combat so pre-buffing is by definition not possible. It's a big part of why I love the PoE system as well.
