Automagically
You have 2 Sternguard Veterans with Meltaguns and 8 Tactical Marines with a flamer. Your opponent has a Leman Russ Tank and a heavy weapon team with 2 Autocannons and 4 Guard models. All models are within easy movement range of each other. What do you do? It's very clear that you would rapidfire or assault the heavy weapon team and melta the tank. Anything else would be a waste of resources. The tacticals can do nothing to the tank and the meltas can't kill more than 2 of the guardsmen. This is the basis of 'playing on autopilot' or an army that 'plays itself.' Having the information or experience to quickly and easily make the right tactical choice, and doing it consistently over the whole army and the entire game. Solid army design gives you effective units that can make a decisive difference. Good tactics allows you to put them in the right place at the right time. However, from the perspective of an observer it will look like you aren't making decisions, just easily pushing models around with no thought. A less extreme example might be an IG army. The bulk of the army may be very static, leaving you almost no movement decisions. If your firepower is split between good antitank weapons such as Lascannons or mass Missiles and Multilasers and Heavy Bolters, you don't have to decide what each unit will concentrate on each turn, as they are generally only good against one kind of target. All you have to decide is which of your units will fire first, and what is highest on your target priority list.

Isn't Playing on Autopilot a Bad Thing?
Frankly, it doesn't look like much. You push around your models quickly and don't seem to take any time to consider your options. This leads people to say that it's the army, not you that wins the game. It also leads to people saying there aren't any tactics in 40k, or even blaming their dice. This also leads to people using net lists and losing.

Is Autopilot Bad?
If the bulk of your decisions are being made for you, it can seem like the army is playing itself. If that is due to solid army design and good tactical planning, that's fantastic. If that is because you don't have any options, that is not so fantastic. Not only does this get boring very quickly, but you'll also probably lose a lot. If you don't have the right tool for the job, you just have to try to make something fit and it won't generally work. Other times, due to unbalanced list design, you may not have any choice in your tactics for the game. This happened fairly frequently to my fast Tyranid army. I tipped the balance of the list so far in the direction of early assault that I really couldn't afford to do anything but run for the enemy lines as fast as I could. If I stopped to take advantage of cover, I would lose a precious turn of assault and have to endure another nasty shooting phase. If I slowed my advance to ensure I had an advantage in assault, it would cost me a good chunk of my army. I had razor-honed my list to specialize in very fast assault, and it worked. Perhaps too well. I spent a lot of points on Hormagaunts and even more points in upgrading them to be more effective. On the other hand, they were still T3 gaunts with one wound. They would die like flies to any enemy shooting, but their speed meant that they could only be fired on for two turns before they did their damage. Initially this was a lot of fun to play, since it was very different from most other armies that I had experience playing or playing against. The longer that I played it, however, the less fun it got to be. Eventually I realized that I wasn't really playing the army, the army was playing me. The optimal choice, the _only_ choice for this army was to sprint as fast as possible into close combat. Once I realized that, I had the answer to my boredom right in front of me: time for a different kind of army! If my army had been a little more balanced, perhaps featuring more regular Gaunts to give me more bodies to absorb casualties, I would have had far more options for tactics in my games.

Learning to Not Fly?
If you are interested in learning to play on autopilot, there are several ways to get there. The more of them you use, the faster and easier it will be. You can find ways to do it in list creation, in unit knowledge, and through tactics.

List Creation: Probably the easiest way to shorten the learning curve on playing on autopilot is to design your units to be specialists. If all the unit has is meltaguns, you won't waste their shooting on cheap troops unless it is necessary (they are sitting on an objective near the end of the game) or you have no other worthwhile targets in range or line of sight. You can take this a step farther by either making your army move as little as possible (static gunline) or as much as possible (DE airforce or even melta units in transports.) The more decisions that you determine before the game starts, the easier it will be to play on autopilot. Note that this isn't necessarily the most effective way to build an army, but it can be very effective if you know how to use it properly.

Unit Knowledge: When I played my DeathWing Water army, I frequently came up with situations where I wasn't sure which unit would have a better chance of damaging a particular target. Partly this was due to designing my army so that most of my armaments were similar (lots of Assault Cannons, for example) and could effect the widest variety of targets. Sometimes I would actually sit down later (or during a virtual battle against myself with a netlist or something) and calculate which unit would do more damage. Sometimes I realized that even the unit that would do less damage would do enough to take care of what I needed, freeing up the other unit to kill something else. This lead to major improvements in the effectiveness of my army. If you know your units well enough, you won't have to think much to find each one it's own best target. If you want to gain this sort of knowledge _before_ you play games, you'll have to sit down with a calculator and work it out. Start with common enemy units, such as Space Marines and determine how effective each of your units is at taking them down. Once you are done with that, take a look at other common enemy units such as Imperial Guardsmen or Chimeras. Once you have the general idea of what each unit is best at, you'll be able to keep their preferred targets in mind so that you'll have less decisions at game time. The more information you have here, the easier and quicker the decisions will be, so keep branching out and looking for other targets that you might face.

Tactics: Tactics involves the details of where your units move and how and who they fight. If you want your army to be effective, move your units so that they can affect one or more of their preferred targets every turn. Even better, this is where you want to follow all the usual tactical advice. You know the stuff I'm talking about: Shoot the assault units, assault the shooty units. Kill one target before you go on to the next (except for tanks, once you stun them, move on to another target unless you absolutely have to kill it.) If your units are always in position to damage a preferred target, you have simplified your decision down to target priority.

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