The difference between the two being the auto-resolve I was suggesting would give reasonable losses that a so-called "average" player would receive if they had done the air combat manually, where invincibility would result in no losses ever. I'm not advocating an outright cheat here.
By 'penalty', I'm referring to losses above and beyond what playing it through would give. I've seen games where auto-resolve results in fights having moderate to heavy losses that, if the player had told it to play out manually but didn't actually do anything but watch, would have resulted in no losses at all. At that point there's not much reason to even have auto-resolve.