TBH though I don't really care as much about the battles as I do the campaign map.

The battles don't need to be exceedingly tough or super realistic--I mean I can barely survive on Medium/Medium on Rome Total War and generally get annihilated on M/M in M2TW, so just as long as they LOOK cool and have that "wow factor" VISUALLY, with a great open-ended campaign, that'd be great, haha! :P