Personallly I think the stupidest thing is how fast units die. I mean sure, units with no armour being taken on by some elite troops will get ground up pretty quickly, but armour makes it so that units will take longer to take down (seeing as that's the reason it was invented). I mean Cannae would've taken 15 minutes on this battle system.

Hopefully it's just a question of the units you command in the demo being buffed significantly to attract new customers.

But let's face it, good and pure out-of-the-box strategy games have gone the way of the dodo - why else would CA have made this one (theoretically) easier to mod? Seems to me they do things to attract the kiddies and then assume that a mod pack will appease the hardcore gamers.