As I said before, only after pondering it for a while I recalled that with the death of the character the whole unit vanishes, while as long as the character lives the unit gets replenished automatically. My initial idea was to bring back the feature of MTW that each unit is lead by a character, because I like that feature, it´s simple as that, and the use of the general_unit attribute is the only possible way to get that back that I can think of.
And I´m not discussing whether or not it´s a good idea, but whether it´s possible in the first place - which, as it seems, it is.