Yes, but not every war forever for whichever nation the player is piloting.

And you don’t have to (and often you are unable to), but least you have an opportunity to do so. A choice.

Micro-managing individual battalions doesn’t fit very cleanly into a game about geopolitics.

Battalions? Not necessarily. Divisions (like in V1) or brigades (V2) very much so. If you want to make a ridiculous strawman argument at least try to stay accurate.

Manually moving around units to exploit the AI does not help the verisimilitude of the simulation. Conversely, if you aren’t exploiting the AI, then it’s just busywork that can be automated…

Complete rubbish. History is full of examples of small forces outsmarting and outmaneuvering larger forces. The same applies here.

I don’t think you understand what Victoria is or at least was before V3 mess came out. It is NOT an economy simulator. It is a geopolitical simulator and war is inherent part of it - or was in Vic1&2.

Also no.

That means it is still broken.

The reasons that V3’s combat was broken wasn’t actually due to no units

Yes, it was.

Victoria 1 had proper units with the brigade attachments. It had two kinds of attack (normal and shock) impacting either strength or morale. It worked a treat, I actually enjoyed it more than HoI.

In Victoria 2 they screwed it up by picking Europa Universalis system instead of V1 system. It is worse than V1, although not broken.

In Victoria 3 some utter cretin made a moronic decision to remove proper units. It ended up in unplayable mess. Paradox Devs were told about it upfront, but they are arrogant bunch of arseholes.

What they should do is to remove the almighty mess they created and go back to V1 basics.