Prator: I did use quickgroups, and I did use all of the keyboard commands you listed. I still find it difficult to keep a large army organized... moving them is easy, but once any fighting starts they tend to scatter, particularly if you're playing Dark Elves and have to manage a lot of newly-created skeletons on top of your normal troops.
The game is slow because it takes a long time to walk across the map and/or gather resources, and there's no way to adjust the game's speed. Soloing the map gets boring after a while because it takes even less thought than making an army to overwhelm the map.
usually i advance by putting my avatar in front acting as a tank.
when moving your army use the groups.
First group being a few melee fighters which come in front.
Put them there and press H
Second the ranged fighters
put them after the melee press H
thirdly the healing squad (except for the dark elves)
position them and press H.
they don't move at all when you've pressed H so they won't scatter as well.
for the dark elves i usually tend to use about 30 necromancers and 20 sorcerers
the necro's spawn an army right after the first hit.
I havent had a real difficulty on Hard level with them.
Now when those skeletons spawn i CTRL + click on them to select all the visible skeletons and move them out of the way. i usually save them up.
there is an option to change the running speed with artmoney but it takes the fun out of the game running @ 200/300%. There's some legal alternatives.
1) snakeband : +5% run , fight and cast x 2
2) rangers leggings : +10% run (stormrunner = +5% run)
3) aura of fast walking
so i tend to run around at 120% all the time.
the slow gathering of resources is easily altered by building a stonemason, sawmil, melting works,... before building the resource gathering structures.
