u/-Tickery-

One change I’ve noticed.

The new general system, one dude commands the whole army and can fight multiple battles, leads to some insane wars.

Nobody (real people or AI) spams small armies, they have a couple big ones, so you get giant battles of 100s of thousands of men, multiple times a month. This leads to absolutely insane casualty counts for anything pre ww1.

The German unification wars, which are intended to be short and sweet, cause millions of casualties on both sides despite a quality advantage.