Right now, if have an oncoming horde if at all possible, I’ll pick them off at range, retreat and repeat, because every guy that dies is another point you didn’t get. Of course while this sort of min-maxing micromanagement is best for points, it isn’t really all that fun.
The points part, is easy, there could just be some sort of decreasing bonus applied based on the time to complete and eradicate the threat. You may lose a few more troops not waiting a day and a half for the reinforcements to arrive, or kiting around them non stop shooting them with arrows and freezing them with spells, but you purged the blight that much sooner, plus it encourages speedy, climatic, bloody finale. Yay!
Some of the things we’ve discussed earlier would encourage melee battle a bit more, like the possibility for leaders and heroes to rise up out of the ranks, but as it is now, if you’ve got a good ranged unit, you really don’t want to send him into the fray because ultimately they become a less effective ranged unit, even on slim losses. Also, if you have a few random troops traveling with them on the way, you might not want them involved at all. “You stay back cowardly noble!” (As if we would have had to say that to him! Ha. Silly coward. ) In a normal battle, we wouldn’t necessarily expect our archers, cowardly nobles, healers, and other weaklings to be mixing it up in the battle, unless the infantry grunts couldn’t handle the things on their own. No we’d expect them to contribute what they can, and then come out relatively unscathed, unless we said it was all hands on deck. So maybe if the basic ranged units didn’t really have range, per se, but supported the battle? It would make mixed card armies a more useful thing, because right now, if you are rolling for melee, you really don’t really want to toss in your archers/blunderbuss in unless you absolutely have to, and who wants to micromanage pulling out the artillery from a relocation for just a few moments because they are going to get in the thick of things. Our stout dwarven warriors would’ve kept the zeds away from the valuable artillery… well, if they survived, anyways. So maybe if range worked more like the Orc Chariots, but then didn’t contribute to melee, ( unless you toggled them to, there’d be a good reason to roam the map with mixed (ranged/melee) unit type stacks.