If I don't issue orders within five hours of a turn change ...
Five hours?
Five hours?! Damn... my general rule is if you can't send an order within two hours after the turn change, you don't send the order at all, unless it's a do-or-die emergency. Back in "the day" in Perdan, our standing policy was one hour. Give the MC one hour to issue orders. If you don't get orders by then, you're pretty much free to do whatever you want. We knew that for every hour you waited, you lost somewhere around 10% of your army to non-movement. And when your army is 80 characters (if not more) then that's easily 3K CS per hour you delay.
But yeah, I know what you mean with most of your post. I tried the "give the marshals an objective and some general guidelines" thing with my latest general. It was a flop, and I was told that I should take a more hands-on approach, and give orders myself. With the things going on in RL, I can't really do that. In fact, I'll probably have to give up General soon, and let someone else take over. I'm sure that will be fun. No one else at all has run for the past two months. I only ran the first time because after three days no one else was running.
Overall, you really do need to tailor your command style to deal with the people that you have to work with. If you have a go-getter marshal, like Herulcamo in Darka, you give them the objective and let him run with it. But you don't always get that. Many times (not always) you get a marshal who expects to be told what to do. And that's really hard to do when you lack the information to do it.
