Keep in mind that the ground combat in SE5, unlike that in GalCiv2, is not just "two opposing walls of troops lining up and shooting lasers at each other", though - it actually has quite a few elements of (someone will flame me for this, but I don't care - it's true) real-time strategy games, so ground combat is almost a minigame in itself - perhaps an ugly one, but the underlying model is far better than GalCiv2's "the one with the best multipliers wins, and perhaps having more troops will help" or even SE4's "invisible walls of troops which are at least individually represented" model!
