Unit abstraction?

Carl,

Just a little footnote here, since I hope you decide to purchase the game for all of it's great qualities and not this single one that is divergent from your desires.

Dom2 has a modding tool. In this tool it is possible to adjust upkeep, statistics, gold/resource cost and even .tga (the icon representing a unit).

You could if you desired Mod the game, keeping all of it's current balances and nation/theme ideas (the whole of Dom2) but change aspects to create a more epic feel. Say, lower the cost of every unit by 1/4 and upkeep by 1/4 and stats by 1/4, increase the leadership of all commanders by 3/4ths and suddenly those armies of 200 that we were talking about are 800 without directly changing anything in the game. This might be hard to represent those big battles (The battlefield is unfortunately only so big) but even small skirmishes (75-100) all take on a grander feel for you and it would more than likely fill up your battlefields from edge to edge.

The limitation on that would be the size of maximum units (32000) in the game, but its worth a shot. Or alternatively you could modify the .tga so that it's like MoM and add multiple figures (if you can squeeze it in) per unit.

Some ideas at least to fit your style of play.