Part of my problem with tactics is that they fire or not fire, depending solely on your army composition. When in real life, good commander is the one who can select good tactics against enemy composition. For example, if you have 300 knights, 300 heavy infantry and 300 pikemen, and enemy has 800 pikemen, then advance, stand fast and powerful charge are NOT all as good. Oposite, one of them is clearly better than others.
Net result of current approach is that every combat guide I found suggest to actually REDUCE number of available tactics, i.e. your army tactical flexibility.
Therefore I suggest system like that:
1. Bad tactics check. For every bad tactic available, you make percentual check. On fail, that bad tactic is added to your tactic rooster. Probability of selecting bad tactic should be quite low, like 80% - 10% for every Martial.
1a. If there is any bad tactic in rooster, goto tactic selection.
2. Good tactics check. You make one percentual check, modified by your Martial. On success, all available good and glorious tactics are added to rooster.
3. Available normal and cultural tactics are added to rooster. Tactics that change phase are excluded.
4. Available phase changing tactics are added (this one needs some work. long story short, army based on 1000 archers really don't want to charge at army based on 1000 knights).
5. Tactic selection. Now algorythm select which tactic in rooster is the best.
5a. Specifically, there are two 'players' (you and enemy), and they both have few options to select from. Every option of player A can be evaluated against evey option of player B, and vice versa.
5b. Which, incidentally, is a simple problem of game theory and AFAIK is trivially solvable.
(as a sidenote: solution can be in form of either: "take this tactics", or "take this tactics with x% probability, or take this tactic with y% probability)
In my opinion, my idea would lead to more natural experience
1. You actually want to have as much tactics available as possible, i.e. you want your army to be tactically flexible (the more tactics you have, the bigger chance of having something nice, while weak tactics, while still in rooster, will be basically ignored druing Tactic Selection.
2. Combined arms armies are stronger than single-type ones (f.e. unit of 400 heavy infantry and 400 pikemen will win against both 800 pikemen army, and 800 knights army, because it will have very strong tactics available against both of them, when opposite is not true)
3. Building high tier of stables will become good choice. For now (well, last time I checked at least), they give you small amount of knights, too small to do anything good when powerful charge fires, but big enough to make powerful charge available, i.e. reducing probability of getting tactics that are actually strong. (with new system, either powerful charge will not fire, as small number of soldiers getting boost will reduce its value during Tactic Selection, or it will fire for very good reason).
