Others have complained in the past that combat is boring.  I think so too, but not exactly for the reasons I recall others saying.

Here are my complaints / suggestions:

1:  Have fewer battles but bigger.  Combine the huge stacks of separate units into one stack for combat purposes.  I'm tired of fighing 3 medium-sized battles, or 15 tiny ones, when I could have had 1 big/epic one.  Even if the enemy stacks on a square were really supposed to be separate because they are moving to different places, have the combat system automagically combine all units of one faction on one square temporarily into 1 pile for purposes of that fight.  And do away with that little limit of 12(?) units per stack/battle.  A few weeks ago in one of the 1.19 beta versions I attacked some small town in a forest and was shocked/delighted to find myself being charged by about 40 enemy units.  Really.  I won and it was fun.  But the point is, it worked.  Nothing crashed.  They can have bigger stacks and bigger fights than they permit without breaking anything.  Just permit them. 

2:  Speed up the animations, and/or let us skip them.  This has been mentioned before, but I want to spell out exactly what I think should happen, in which order, when, for example, one of my archers shoots at an enemy.  First, 4 things should happen AT ONCE:  hit points deducted from the enemy as shown in lower right, my remaining moves reduced in lower center, cursor changes to something other than the bow & arrow (if enemy died or my guy is out of moves) and my guy's yellow border changes to gray on the left (if my guy is out of moves).  Then they can start the animation.  But if I do something like right-click to shoot at another enemy, or left-click to select another of my units, immediately STOP the animation and act upon my new command. If I hit the spacebar, stop the animations and wait for me to do whatever.  If I hit spacebar in the enemy's turn, have them jump to the final position without any more animation.

3:  Fix autoresolve so we don't have to fight manually as often.  Any horrid system would be ok if you don't have to use it too often.  Currently it undervalues mobility, attacks that the enemy can't retaliate againts (like archery) and most special abilities like dominate, crushing blow & savage strike.  I don't think it even uses any ability that you have to specifically call on.  Mounted archers are tedious winners in manual combat, but losers in autoresolve.  (This is one of the good things about the special book content, and the reason why I play as Xander in at least 50% of my campaigns -- his special abilities are automatic and work in autoresolve, so I don't have to fight manually as often).