I definitely understand what you are saying. I have always loved the "just one more turn" rat-with-a-feeder-bar effect you get with a turn-based strategy game. On the downside, you get the "it's 4am and you have 3 hours before you have to get up for work" effect, but that is price for a great, addictive game.

With M:TW, when you started a war, you knew there would be a few key battles which would decide whether you won or lost. These battles might take an hour or more, but the stakes were high so you didn't care. The number of troops you lost in those battles meant a lot, and you knew you were going to lose some. Once you got going beating up on a particular faction, the feeder-bar effect kicks in, and the next thing you know it's 4am...

With R:TW, I just feel there are too many small battles, and not enough casualties on the winning side. So you can take one stack and leave a trail of crossed swords all over the map, and not really need to regroup for the next push. The battle speed and quick routing play their part, but I think the new strategic map is the biggest culprit. It gives the AI too many options for movement, so it spreads out the stacks. I love the idea of the map, but I don't think the AI handles it as well it it could. This eliminates the deciding battles, and just leaves you with a series of small pummelings that can be put off to the next day.

I also think that the city population's effect on the tech tree has something to do with this as well. One aspect of the "feeder-bar" mentality is that it is hard to remember the details of the build strategy across your empire the next day. You have a plan, and you don't want to forget it. Since you are limited by the city pop, in a lot of cities you just end up building most everything at a particular level while waiting for the poulation to rise. You end up building the same stuff everywhere, which takes away from the "one more turn" effect. Again, I love the idea of the city pop, but I think it takes away from the addiction.

Still playing, and I hope the patch fixes some of these issues. Combat can be fixed somewhat with modding. If the strategic AI is fixed (stacks, aggression, city maintenance, etc.), we will have one hell of a game.