Quote Originally Posted by tombom
If they provided a save in battle feature, I'd love to have long battles. But in the end I can't spend hours on battles because I don't have the time.
Which is not really different than the situation we have in MTW now. We can easily have battles that can take hours, but complaints are rare, if anything I've heard more of the opposite, with players cheerfully describing the epic battle they've just fought. We have time advance controls, so it wouldn't be difficult for the player to speed up the game while their army and the enemy approach each other, dropping to real time speeds when close or combat begins, or even leaving it running at high speed if that's what they desire. In MTW we had the choice, in effect that choice has been taken from us in the unmodded game.

In any case, a big map doesn't mean that battles will always take longer, it all depends upon where the combatants set up in relation to each other, just like in MTW you could end up toe to toe from the very start.