Timmins

I just thought I would mention this... do you think perhaps you find the battlefield uncontrollable simply because you have too many units on the screen at once? I played tabletop warhammer, and even in a turn based game, I remember thinking that I didn't want more than 10 units on the battlefield, simply because they were too tough to come up with proper planning. I have also heard (no idea if this is true), that people can't really deal well with more than 10 units at a time, so tend to just group them into a bunch of homogenous guys who do the same stuff (which warhammer is terrible at: if you just select 5 units and right click somewhere, it turns into a disaster). I am not aware of any tabletop game that has more than 10 maneuver elements as a matter of course. The multiplayer is balanced around most factions having well under 20 units. 15 is more normal, I would say. also, I watch turin (one of the highest skill youtubers for the game), and he charges his main infantry line... by individually clicking every infantry unit and giving them individual charge icons. And he's one of the best players with the tightest controls I have seen so far. Who has not figured out how to make a line of 6 guys charge into an enemy line of 6 guys without clicking at least 12 times. then you get thrown into campaign, which is really the introductory experience, and you get thrown into battles where the smallest viable army is 20 units and 40 man double stacks are not uncommon, especially on higher difficulties. Maybe your problems are not really that the formations are bad, or that it's too fast paced. Maybe the scale of the campaign battle is wrong. Individual units don't turn into a giant disaster. I constantly thought, while playing the campaign, that what I really wanted was a series of 10 units on 10 unit battles. I got a couple rebellions that were on that scale, and I felt like that was by far the best part of the campaign for me. And that would also prevent archer spam from ruling (much harder to protect them), which would in turn make elite infantry much better, because there wouldn't be the giant gun lines to rout them before they even reached melee. Also, a side note. for the dark elves, slaves are a huge deal and very viable, but you have to do the math in your head to realize it. Slave capacity of naggarond: 10,000, give or take. I think it's actually 12000+, once upgraded. Slave buildings possible: 3, for 35 income per 100 slaves. (10+10+15). 10,000 slaves is 100 groups of 100. 100*35= 3500. That's 3.5k gold, per turn, in one province alone, with no technology upgrades, no lord skills, and no black roads of Naggarond. And there are a LOT of slave techs and skills in the game. Not to mention morathi's starting province (who malekith can of course conquer), gives her something like +100% income from buildings. I hear that you can easily get that province kicking out 5 figures of income alone. What does the dark elf economy building produce? I don't even remember... 375? maybe 500? So slaves are double the income and change, easily? and you can build those in the same provinces as your slave provinces anyways? Slaves ARE the dark elf economy. Which is why I felt like the dark elf campaign mechanic was the best one: the dark elf mechanic is "you want to build up your own home and turtle, but you also want to fight, all the time, constantly, and you want to be surrounded by enemies". They love it when the chaos hordes (in the vortex campaign, didn't play mortal empires) come knocking... it revitalizes their economy. High elves are just annoyed. And given that it's a war game where 90% of your income is going into army upkeep, making your armies useful and rewarding is pretty good in a campaign.