Just remember that you aren't flying blind because with an sct you can feel the backlash and loading of the mirror as you turn the knob. The backlash compensation is probably at least a half turn of the knob.
So an important thing to know is how many steps there are in a full turn of the primary focuser knob. That will be dependent on your setup - but it's easy to determine by watching the knob and telling the focuser to step perhaps 100 steps initially - and seeing how far it goes.
Once you know the number of steps in a full rotation, a good starting point would be to set backlash compensation at half that number, set number of focusing steps to be 9, and set the steps between focus positions to be the number of steps needed to turn it 5 degrees.
This would cause the autofocus routine to go through 45 degrees turn of the knob - which is more than what I show above, but should be a good starting point. If it is too flat, make it bigger; if it is too steep make it smaller.
So - you don't need clear skies to determine many of these numbers - and you do need to be physically at the scope and watching it to know the physical step size, in degrees, and to know which direction turns the knob clockwise vs. counter clockwise. It is important that as the focus numbers go down, the knob is turning CCW - so the mirror is being pushed up against gravity.
Frank