The main problem with the game was when it was released. It was announced in March of the year it released, to be released in August. It was built on an entirely new game engine they made in-house; it was so new they didn't even put the 3D engine in the beta until June; a mere 2 months before it was set to release. As such, it had massive memory leaks and other memory related problems which made it nearly unplayable. You had to go in (and you may still have to, dunno if they fixed it since) and manually change the Large Address Aware flag on the .exe file, allowing it to use more than 2GB of RAM (the default limit for a 32 bit application). If you didn't, the game would crash after an hour or two due to being out of memory from the massive amount of memory leaks. On top of that engine was a game which was also not tested or fleshed out as it should have been. It had all sorts of interesting little things and made for some decent procedural storytelling in the random maps, but gameplay was entirely unbalanced ("Let's see, I can spend all my money building an army... or easily make my leader and his children godlike warmages who can decimate any enemy army with ease."), AI was terrible, game bugs were manifesting alongside and in addition to engine bugs, and in general it seemed they had a bunch of ideas, but no overall design document as to how those ideas would be pulled together into a compelling and cohesive whole.
And yeah, tactics has always been one of the weakest points of the game. You have to do it though, as the RNG of skipping it will always be way worse than doing the tactics stuff.
In general, it's what a good game should look like 50% through development.