I think I understand what the OP is getting at.  In the vast majority of computer games, the player has god-like control over every move of every unit in his army...which is unrealistic to say the least (yes, I realize this is a fantasy game, but 'fantasy' is just another word for 'medieval'...just with monsters/magic added).  I think it would be a nice change of pace where the commander did not have total control over every unit, but had to issue orders to sub-commanders who would do their best to implement those orders.  The trick here is developing a smart enough AI that won't cost the player a battle due to stupidity when left to its own devices, but not so smart that the player would be tempted to just let the AI fight it out on its own.  If EWoM goes with a WE-GO system, such a hierarchical command structure would be possible.  However, as a purely TB game, I don't think it would work accept in some sort of highly abstracted way, such as command points or what have you. 

I did not read all the post.

If you want to make combat management easier and assisted by the AI, you do not want to limit the number of units you control, you want to raise your level of command. Which mean that you want a battle system that is going to ask you to manage the high level aspect of the battle rather then every action done  by your units.

I have not seen this in a lot of games but for example, R3K6 does that. You give to each of your officers orders like: attack the north gate, play safely. Or Attack the easter gate, taunt the ennemy, try to engage in duels. etc.

WHen you give your orders, the units does all the move and action commands that you would have normally done in a classic tactical battle resolution. Then after some time. The battle pause and you have a chance to change your order according to how the battle was resolved.

Using a system like this have many advantages.

- it reduce the skill gap between the player and the AI

- It makes battle beign resolved faster.

- It allow to show more action in the battle since the game does not stop to get input from the player for each command.

- It is actually more realistic to how a real battle would normally be managed since you cannot give orders to each of your unit at 15 minutes intervals.

I don't mind having an high level combat management as long as I have a lot of strategic options. And I insist on a LOT of option (See the art of war book for inspiration). Else, it's just a boring "attack that unit" strategy and it is actually hard to make strategic decision that are going to influence the battle. If there are no important decision to make then they should resolve the battle automatically without having tactical battles.

Instead of requiring you to pick some units up-front and letting the AI control the rest, how about this variation?

• On the first turn, you assign orders to each of your units, as usual.
• On each subsequent turn, you pick a fixed number of units.  You can modify the orders of these units.  Units that you don't pick continue to enact the orders you gave them on previous turns.

This gives you some of the benefits of the original plan, but with more control and more ability to adapt to changing circumstances.  I think it would be fun to try.  A squad-based system like in ROT3K would also be good, but would require much better AI to be non-annoying (IMO).

For this to work well, you need to be able to issue high-level, RTS-style command queues (like "circle to the north side of the city, break down the gates, then head for the barracks and burn them").  You also need to be able to control in broad terms how units behave when they run out of orders (e.g., do they behave defensively or offensively).

To tie this into the rest of the game, the number of units you get to command each turn could be modified by things like tech levels ("military logistics" research), the attributes of the heroes that are commanding your army, and maybe even spellcasting (say, a "battlefield communications" spell).

"circle to the north side of the city, break down the gates, then heat for the barracks and burn them"

This leaves an interesting question of if we can actually "burn down" or separately destroy individual buildings during the actual battle and if this could have a negative effect on the Defensive player's bonuses (city bonuses).

For instance, set any one military building on fire, defenders lose 10% max bonus

set all military buildings on fire, defenders lose 50% max bonus

set city square on fire, defenders lose 25% max bonus

set over half the houses on fire, defenders lose 25% max bonus

also, sharing a tile with a burning building might cause you to take some damage. After a certain amount of turns a flaming building would turn to rubble (hot charcoal rubble), and after the battle would turn into harmless yet useless rubble tiles that have to be rebuilt upon.

Perhaps flaming arrows, flaming catapults ... and also perhaps infiltration units that are equipped with firebombs ... probably a near suicide mission, but with a chance to escape to the outside. Some "more expensive" buildings could be made fire resistant ... for instance if they were made with almost no wood, or rather made of Stone or Granite (I heard marble burns? is this true?) maybe buildings made of wet clay could also be resistant to burning ... but they would be more likely to be simply squashed flat.

Again, normal catapults (or flaming ones) might, if landing on a building, squash it flat. This would hurt the defender's bonus just as much as setting it on fire (however fire tends to also harm defenders' Morale). Only buildings could be resistant to being crushed, and easily flammable, or immune to flames but easily crushed.

In any case, actually interacting with the city (and potentially destroying individual buildings) would be cool, and if fires have a chance to spread it would be even cooler (in the city-> morale and HP penalties to the defenders)

I think reply 26-28 best captured my intent while offering some alternatives that seem well thought out.  However, despite my belief such a system would help address the issues identified, for all intents and purposes the true intent of my post boils down to this:  for me a more challenging and realistic (there's that word again in a fantasy realm) tactical battle would be more "fun."  From what I am reading from the majority of posters herein they think it more fun to control all one's units and continually hand the AI its 010010-ass given that precise level of control.  Show me a computer game where you consistently win a tactical battle only 60%/40% of the time and I would say COPY that AI.  I would submit the majority of posters on this board probably have a win rate of 85%+ in most tactical battles unless they play uber-hard AI cheat settings.  Is that fun??  To each his own

Well said. I agree I wouldn't mind being able to set a particular unit (or even a couple) on "Auto" so I can concentrate on using my specialty units. I think it should be an "Option" though. That's just my opinion as I prefer to have more direct control. I have played other games though which use a system similar to Dragon Age that lets you program in a set of "tactics" to use in certain situations.

I also think this idea should be considered for multi-player perhaps. We know the single-play and multi-player tactical battles will differ somehow or that at least the single-player aspect won't be compromised for the sake of multi-player. This leads me to think that in a later patch (if not by launch its-self) they'll have a innovative way for multi-player battles to go by without making everyone else die of boredom nor taking away depth from the single-player game.

How about, the defender (or weakest) chooses how many units he manually controlls, and the Attacker is limited to controlling a max # of those units. However, you can't choose fewer than 5 units, unless you have less than 10 soldiers or less than 5 units.