I exaggerated for the comedic effect.
The slow battles in EB have advantages however - the slow rate of exhaustion increases the time differential between two midrange units fighting vs two longer lasting units fighting, this opens room for a metagame where you choose which unit to send against which so that the first side whose hands become untied from its initial combat can use the freed units to help its still engaged ones, and thus create an avalanche effect. This allows for victories where you started with, on average, lower-range units but defeated an, on-average, higher-morale army than yours. That's especially valuable as a tactic when playing barbarians fighting against civilized factions.
Another fun possibility which I've experienced is to have the main core of your army engaged for a few minutes, and then decide where to make a decisive push by comitting your back line or reserves. If you choose right, which isn't all that difficult with some experience, the enemy's army falls apart like a domino.
The same things are of course possible with the faster vanilla combat, but you have much less margin for error. Actually compared to modern CA games, with the smaller differential of morale values between low-tier and high-tier units, it becomes in practice impossible to sit back and judge the battlefield and make decisions after two units are locked in combat, at least in my experience.
Also, I don't know if this is a feature of EB or of MTW2, but the AI tends to split his army into main force and cavalry skirmishers, and try to flank me and harass with them every time. It also tries to sneak past the front line with spearmen and attack my general unit.
The slow battles in EB have advantages however - the slow rate of exhaustion increases the time differential between two midrange units fighting vs two longer lasting units fighting, this opens room for a metagame where you choose which unit to send against which so that the first side whose hands become untied from its initial combat can use the freed units to help its still engaged ones, and thus create an avalanche effect. This allows for victories where you started with, on average, lower-range units but defeated an, on-average, higher-morale army than yours. That's especially valuable as a tactic when playing barbarians fighting against civilized factions.
Another fun possibility which I've experienced is to have the main core of your army engaged for a few minutes, and then decide where to make a decisive push by comitting your back line or reserves. If you choose right, which isn't all that difficult with some experience, the enemy's army falls apart like a domino.
The same things are of course possible with the faster vanilla combat, but you have much less margin for error. Actually compared to modern CA games, with the smaller differential of morale values between low-tier and high-tier units, it becomes in practice impossible to sit back and judge the battlefield and make decisions after two units are locked in combat, at least in my experience.
Also, I don't know if this is a feature of EB or of MTW2, but the AI tends to split his army into main force and cavalry skirmishers, and try to flank me and harass with them every time. It also tries to sneak past the front line with spearmen and attack my general unit.
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