Speed is not the only problem. Rome's battle pace was pretty fast, but the problem was made worse by the crappy unit balancing. You should not be able to cost-effectively win battles by a series of frontal cavalry charges in under 3 minutes.

I like the EB mod for RTW, but in all honesty battles are sometimes too long, and because the overall kill-speed is so slow you have plenty of time to execute difficult moves. I'm currently considering wether to raise the lethality stats in my EB folder to make it a little more challenging.

In MTW original, killrates were faster than in EB (allthough still slower than RTW original). Hammer & anvil tacts were absolutely necessary, but it's not uncommon for your line to crumble before you can circle your cavalry around the flanks, whereas in EB you have plenty of time to do so. On the other hand; if I'm attacking with a slight disadvantage in troops in MTW, I carefully manage my missile units to cause as many casualties as possible, and opportunisticly pick off enemy units for easy kills. Those battles can last pretty long indeed.

It took some getting used to when I started playing MTW again, but I think that game pretty much nailed it.