I guess the devs are going for the much simpler combat route because the aim is more of a Empire Management game akin to Civ rather than a warfare focused game like TW or HoMM.

He! he! i guess i am one of those who will be disappointed as i was hoping for more meat to the combat. I loved the fun desparate battles i fought in TW series and RTK series.In those series a well placed army at bottlenecks, bridges or forts could inflict heavy damage onto much larger armies making strategic army placement/movement very important as opposed to just swarming in with superior numbers. Playing as Gauls i loved ambushing the Romans in the forests where i got bonuses. I also always ensured my Gauls stopped on defensible positions like hills because the Romans had a far superior army and i needed the extra bonuses i got from fighting from a high ground.

In MoM i got annoyed at the combat simply because there was really no viable way to defend against the swarms of enemy armies except by building a bigger better army yourself. Warfare basically boiled down to a race between who could churn out the better army fastest. And the winner of the race was usually decided by who could grab the most land in the beginning.

so is it going to be a D&D(4e) damage system then?

and what if the spearmen Vs. Calvery system worked like civ 4 -certian units (or weapons) get bonuses agaist other units

It doesn't need to be that complicated to be enjoyable.  Think of the total war series where all the combat math is attack rolls against defence rolls, with modifiers.

Seems like picking damage flavors that had nothing more than cosmetic effects would be dull in the long run. Ideally, I'd like to see some high-cost general defense enchantments as well as less costly things like +1 vs. Fire magic or whatever.

You forget wildly demanding customers like me. I want *every* part of the game to be as deep as it can and I want an automation-rich, keyboard-friendly UI on top of it. Total control freaks should be able to twiddle nearly everything every turn, but the game should also work for people who want to make a bunch of broad decisions, delegate supervision of most of that, and focus their UI time on the areas that they find most interesting.

Of course that kind of thing might be philosophically impossible for the scoring/multiplayer crowd.