Quote Originally Posted by screwtype
Even in the earlier games, STW and MTW, it could really hurt when you lost a battle, because it could take you quite a while to build up your strength again. In RTW you just whip your beaten army back to the nearest city, top up all the depleted units, and you're ready with another full stack.
This is a fair point, but you can avoid it even with the current RTW engine by the following means:

1.) Play with a no retraining house rule (ie only retrain full stacks if you want an armour bonus etc). That goes an awful long way. I believe the AI does not retrain, so it's only fair.

2) Have restrictions on recruitment, EB or RTR style. If you can only get decent troops, one per turn (or per two turns) from your faraway capital, losing an army hurts. For example, as Romans, only recruit legions etc in Rome.

3) Of course a tight economy also helps. Modders can do this well enough - e.g. EB is particularly cruel in this respect. But I guess you could give some money away to AI factions if you don't like mods.

I'm saying all this because the other night, I lost my WRE army of the Rhine to the Franks in Goth's All Factions BI mod. It hurt so much, I reloaded.

All the above is for the early to mid game only though. But then MTW had the "too big to be beat" problem in the late game too.