Your praises and comments are spot on.
Some quick notes:
The AI does tend to fail in mid-game due to the number of options. With various maps, mods, game settings it can manage mid-game but still tends to fail in late game for being a truly difficult opponent
There are various versions of battle sims available. One in game, and others created by us using the map and mod commands the devs gave us.
As in most games with micromanagement much of it can be fixed using 3rd party macro programs.
There is a way to save and restore unit orders. Here is a fairly complete keypress chart.
http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Hotkey
and you might want to take note of my sig as far as exams
