I hated the customizable fight order back in WarlordsII days, and I still hate it now: it is very powerful and can save many units in many a battle, but it is boring and tedious to adjust the fight order for each and every battle - especially by drag & dropping each unit. However, not doing it might loose you the game versus a human opponent, so I always feel compelled to do it.
Here are some of my suggestions to reduce the problem:
- Allow fight orders to be saved with the player's profile, so that I can quickly switch between 4-6 saved fight orders instead of drag&dropping several units each time.
- Changes to the fight order only become effective in the next turn. This limits fight order changes to one per turn. This is probably the easiest fix to implement, but I think it would be unpopular. I dislike it myself.
- Allow the definition of conditional fight orders, i.e. if a player specifically wants it, he can make a fight order for specific terrain types, defending or attacking. This would be similar to saving/loading fight orders. If a battle happens, the game would look through the player's fight orders if one with matching terrain is found and use the player's default fight order otherwise.
- Instead of a strict fight order, each unit has a rank probability assigned by the player. The actual order for a battle is then determined by these probabilities (which may or may not be affected by terrain).