Just to clarify my point. I'm not talking about what you can command the allied troops to do, I'm talking more the impact they have on the overall battle.
What would be cool to see is your allied troops being able to win a battle (where they outnumber/rank the opposing army) easily without you needing to actually fight as much. The strategy cards are good at stuff like this but I'd like to see more of an engineering and commander focus on them as well.
In both DW7E and DW8E they can win a battle like that though, if they have moral advantage, as long as you're guiding them to keep them focused, rather than spread all over the map. DW8E also seems to have sped up how long they take to defeat officers or take forts off screen.
The main issue is that the opposite army generally has advantages that the player's army lacks, like extra reinforcements that raise their moral, even if they start the battle in a disadvantage. So, even in a battle that starts with a player army advantage, without the player actively fighting, the AI can lessen or turn around that advantage, but it's not due to the officers themselves, but just advantages that the AI armies get that the player's own army lacks.
Those advantages are there because it's assumed that the player will be fighting too, not just giving orders and using stratagems, and the player certainly counts for more than a single npc officer. So, they need a balancing factor. Overall, they'd need to heavily revamp the combat engine itself to make the player equivalent to a single npc officer and so make a game balance that doesn't need to give advantage to the enemy army, if they actually attempted to make the game completely fair for both armies, but I just can't see them ever taking that direction, especially since the whole point of Empires is to reuse DW's engine, not being a standalone game. It'd take first a huge change in a core Dynasty Warriors game itself before an Empires game could actually progress in that direction.
