A lot of these issues with these games come down to the very peculiar way the designers want you to play through a very slanted, very loaded scenario against you. The scenarios are very "narratively" designed and you are expected to play the specific way the guy who designed the scenario expects you to. The campaigns are thus unplayable without save-scumming and the regular scenarios while better often come down a single key-hole play finding the "right" maneuver path and then winning lopsidedly. This makes the game and its scenarios come down very heavily to random events, and as a result you feel very little like a commander and more like a spectator.

War is super cool and fun