Lo-Fi Games

For starters to make my point, i will start with the definition and aplicabilty of the ''feeling'' that we percept while playing a game...

We all know the famous Counter Strike, the realism that it gave us, the graphics and also the specific feeling it had, that all other games previos and afterwords failed to replicate. Now i do not know what was the feeling trigger that Cs had, but it was something for sure in there, hence better graphic games still didn't manage do overthrone it (and this i can say with my own words, being a solid withness seeing that in my country CS is still king in the internet Cafe).
Now one element i can say for sure that kicked in was the way things moved, fast paced, not clumsy nor stiky but sharp and reasonably realistical. So basecly it's the way you implement movement mechanics and how things speed up in game.

Now closing this short analysis, i want to add my diconforts about kenshi.

Before all at hand i will say that i am fully aware of it's state of development, and that i am not criticizing the current pathfinding BUT the way units are selected and organized to move. It just feels as stiff as let's say.... Silent storm if you ever played. But i must expand even more; it's not that they bump into each other while moving, it's because you move them as in an RTS.

The age of controlling manually your troops has gone in my opinion, it's much more confortable to feel having your men move around you with their own heads, rather than you hearding them like some normal warcraft 3 troops.

Think it like mount and blade, thou i hate to bring this in example, how they make their troops follow you and move with you while you charge... if i would have had direct control with a mouse over them and issue orders go here and there, it would have gave me this feeling of them being somewhat brain dead and that the only self operational command they can execute is the self defense stance (in case of being attacked they respond to that attack) .

So to end this subject and offer a solution from my point of view is to just gently take away the ability to control and select your units directly and generate a false sense of free will (of course the central character will still be mouse controlable.)
You could add buttons that reffer to the general state in which the army should be in, like:

''follow me'' - and they would just follow you in an irregural formation, or on the contrary an orginized one (don't want to go into another subject like formations)
''partial retreat'' - having some troops to hold your back while you and others run (preselecting before battle who holds out and who runs, or letting the ''emotions and relations'' that you talk about implenting fix the choosing problem)
''full retreat'' - implying that all the band runs away
''stand ground here'' (or even camp, again another subject another time),

And other commands that are necesary but i won't dig into them now, i just hope i covered the main issue and that i made myself understood in what i want to comunicate, knowing that sometimes i have some dificulty in sending my message making it too complex or too babbled.

I see your point, but you are seeing it as the wrong kind of game, its not mount and blade. Without the ability to individually order units you wont have any tactical control over a battle, other than general behaviours. A battle will just be a matter of charging as a mob.
Now I realise thats all battles are at the moment anyway, thats why to you it feels like individual control is pointless, because you cant command anything meaningful and the AI asserts itself too strongly over your orders anyway.

All that will change, you will need that control to decide who fights, who snipes from the rooftops, who roams free and who stays put, who carries Garp to safety because he lost both his legs. Its more a tactical-squad game than traditional RPG.

You can assign jobs to characters however, so what you suggest could be achieved anyway by giving all your characters strong permanent orders except your main guy. Characters can easily be automated, which is necessary if you want to leave them alone to defend your base while you deal with something on the other side of the map.

Indeed, i see your point now, altough i may not be entirely convinced yet by it. Probably because i didn't play kenshi too much because it is frameskipping a lot (i have a week system at the moment) ; i didn't even engage in a battle.

I will be gradually optimising it over time, it is pretty slow right now because of the heavy character code.