Armies Too "Fragile?"

[NimitsTexan]

Well it comes down to this: Destroying an enemies main army should be a major undertaking; even if we allow that in the end the limitations of the AI mean the player will be successful in the end, it should take some effort to accomplish. Older TW campaigns, by making the armies more survivable made it harder to eredicate an enemy's field army, and in that sense made the game more challenging, "deeper" even. Even if you blitzed from siege to seige, there was a good chance the AI had some forces availabe to try and lift a seige and/or interfere with a castle assault. Now, you simply march a decent sized army into the enemies homeland, find and annihilate their main army, then march on their captiol (or whereever else you want to go) unopposed.

And, if a battle is going badly, I always try and disengage and retreat as many troops as I can. It just seems E:TW makes this harder to do than the previous games.

Armies usually have 5-10% surviving troops after losing a battle. Reading battle reports from the time period the amount of survivors would be much much higher. Maybe not directly accessably to the commander but in ETW time lapses, after one season of recuperating they should be once more ready.

The "survivors" (in the sense of combat effectives) from a major European battle where generally 60%-80%. It was extremely difficult, and in many cases, borderline impossible, to destroy a 18th century army.