Honestly I see myself agreeing with Lord here. With all due respect to RC, IOT has been marching away from Thor's Cult of the Offensive, and from the race towards the stat crunch bottom. Even Sone's latest game is less about the mechanics and more about that sweet near-futuristic cyberpunk setting.
I'm not against the automation of combat in itself, but canning an interesting, never before done project because you felt you didn't have enough players to do it justice (which is fair enough, if you think that's the case, so be it), only to launch a new project solely to advertise a combat calculator just feels.... disappointing. And it looks like, since its tagged as an Iron and Blood spiritual successor, that war won't even necessarily (and shouldn't) be the main focus of the game anyways, making the reliance of the combat calculator for advertisement misplaced. For if you make war your central defining mechanic, you're just making a war game that players will try to win, instead of a collaborative story.