Any way I can slow down the pace of battles?

I've been playing EB for RTW for a while now and just a week or so ago finally got M2TW and started playing that. I'm pretty much loving the game except for one thing: the battles. Charging is WAY overpowered. Charging a spear unit head on and inflicting about 33% casualties is pretty ridiculous IMO. Even infantry charges have yielded some crazy results. Some chivalric knights charged into some of my spearmen or other infantry unit and I could watch my numbers go down and my morale failing. This makes battles way too easy as the attacker and very frustrating as the defender, I'm finding it almost useless to train melee infantry as the only thing they're accomplishing is receiving charges and getting destroyed by them. Not counting the march towards the enemy and cavalry skirmishes to take out siege units the actual battle ends up being two minutes of charging and 2 minutes of chasing down routers.

Coming from EB where it would require repeated and well timed charges to break even average units, I'm finding the battles on M2 to be a big joke. I want to have long epic infantry battles with heroic cavalry charges to attempt to break the enemy, if I wanted to play bowling I would go to the bowling alley not turn on M2TW (cavalry=bowling ball and heavy infantry=bowling pins)

Is there anything relatively simple I can edit to achieve this or perhaps there are some good mods that address this issue and in which case I'm open to recommendations.. but it's kind of sad to barely play the game one week before having to move on to mods:laugh4:

Unmodded is quite easy to beat due to the power of cavalry. There's a wealth of mods out there that do some sort of balancing for units and/or have their own units instead.

Depends on what you are looking for really - close to normal with balancing or total conversion.

As a first mod I think it would be good to go with mostly some balancing, especially since I haven't even played the unmodded game for too long yet. I looked on the hosted mods for m2.. but it seems every mod is dead or inactive.. what's going on ?

Try mine. Its pretty much done except for the map which I never find time to populate, so you'll be playing almost like unmodded but without the majority of bugs around.

Thumbs up to Vanilla Mod. Cavalry still powerful but don't seem to be as overpowered as in the basic game. Long-standing alliances, overall more sensible and challenging games.

I must be a complete idiot because I can't get the vanillamod to work, and I'm not even sure how to install it as I've seen at least 3 conflicting instructions. One says to put it in the M2 folder. Another says to create a VanillaMod folder inside the M2 folder and put it there. Another goes with the VanillaMod folder but then talks about the batch file being in the M2 folder.. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing here:juggle2:

Just listen to this thread:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=103698

Funny, my own experience is that I found the cavalry to be quite underwhelming - unless you micromanage every single charge-retreat-charge, which quickly becomes impossible for me once there is more than fifteen units in each side of the battle.
The charge is painful to manage, and outside of the "artificial" charge, cav tends to die very quickly.

Now, if you want to slow down the pace of battles, there is an easy fix : just open the export_descr_unit.txt file, and halve the first number in all the stat_pri and stat_sec lines. It will drastically diminish the killing power of all units, and make the battle much longer (I would recommand to double or triple the amount of ammunition to make up for their reduced effectiveness if you don't want to have completely useless archery units though).