And somewhere in all of this care has to be taken to avoid turning nobles into travelbots, with no real input or purpose in battle.
I agree %100. I would honestly hate knowing that all the battle fun was being controlled by someone else. I have always liked the whole idea of: The Kings can ask the Duke, the Duke can ask the Region Lord, the Region Lord can ask the Knight but there is no guarantee that any of them will do what was asked. It should, in my opinion be the same with the military chain. In many ways I dislike the idea of Marshal override formations all together. If he wants the troops deployed in a certain way, then he must ask and they must comply. In that sense we already have a powerful formation builder. The marshal tells everyone how to deploy and depends on them to do what is needed.
At the same time I understand the frustration of having a third of the troops under your command using last battles defensive line settings while the rest updated there line settings for the coming attack. It can really suck and there is no way to ensure that even a majority will log in and make the needed adjustments before battles. The Marshal formations help to solve this though it does limit how ones men can be deployed. I figured that if there was going to be a Marshal override, like there is, it should allow flexible creation of creative, new and fun formations.
In the end though, making sure my troops were in order before a coming battle has always been one of the things that kept me logging in and caring. Take that away and how much and the new player really control? At the least, I would love to see an option in the line settings that would let the troop leader decide if he will deploy per the Marshal formation and fall back on his own settings or instead simply deploy per his own settings.
I am not really sure if I would at all mind if all Marshal override formations made a departure from the game...
