why is it so hard to get battle stars for my generals?

[Michaelis]

Because the designers made it so. All game designers, both amateur and professional, compensate for AI deficiencies by making things more difficult for the human player - and often get a little carried away in the process.

Here's a quick workaround: go to the traits file, search for "command", and lower the thresholds needed for successive star levels, so to speak. Don't feel guilty, either -right now, the system is out of whack. You'd have to fight two battles per turn with the same guy for a hundred game turns to have a chance of getting the maximum number of stars possible (10). To say nothing of AI generals that spend their entire career sitting on their asses in a city and have a bunch of stars, while your guys fighting battle after battle have none. It's irritating.

Stars are important, because they let you win battles on autoresolve without cheating. The way the system operates right now cheats the AI, too - an AI army is far more likely to attack your army if your general has no stars or maybe just a couple. The fact that your general has ten units while the AI general has three doesn't seem to matter much. As a result, it's very easy to provoke the AI into making kamikaze attacks.