Quote Originally Posted by Pode
So drone, you're bascially saying there's no real fighting on the strategic map because there's no real fighting on the tactical map, which I have to agree with.
With Medieval, you had to take pauses to replace casualties. You would begin to get worried about whether your stacks could handle another assualt, and you couldn't just bee-line your way through the enemy territories.

As a trial, start a campaign on easy or medium, and auto-resolve every battle (it hurts just to write that...). Since I never auto-resolve, I'm not sure what difficulty level would be better for this test, but you'd want something that you can win, but lose a fair amount of troops with. From a campaign standpoint, this should give you a much more difficult game. Since the combat losses aren't as lopsided, it should take you more turns to defeat a faction. This should be a quick test, all you need to do is manage cities and stacks. For all I know, this is how the campaign map was tested by CA/Activision.

If we can get to the point where the player attrition is higher on the combat map, it will make the game a lot more interesting. Right now, the economics of the game are skewed, because every unit you create is worth ~5 units (or more) of the AIs. The player gets an advantage with population, tax income, building levels, recruiting costs, etc. because of this. Couple this with the general advantage a human has over any game AI, and the game becomes too easy.