By large I mean with 2 or more full (or almost full) stacks for each side.
Compared to previous games (hello Takeda from Shogun 2), I find them rather common in both Attila and Rome 2, possibly more than half of the battles I fight through a campaign.
My opinion is mixed though.
The battle gameplay is still heavily based on the traditional 20 vs 20; from the battle deployment, to the size of the units, the size of the maps, the UI (controlling 40 units feels uncomfortable). Only sieges saw a major improvement to work with more units. The AI regularly loses 5-6 of them around when controlling 40-60, which leads to me having to waste another 5 minutes after the main action to find whatever units the AI has scattered around the map.
In my experience, large battles tend to go in one of these 3 ways:
-the ''merging'' battles: both me and the AI prefer to wait for the reinforcements before engaging, which leads to merged, 40 units armies then meeting in battle; those tend to be good, even if a bit hard to control, part due to my lack of experience with 40 units, partly because of the above mentioned gameply limits; nonetheless not bad and I see potential in this even though my tactical maneuvering hasn't been great compared to a standard 20 vs 20 one.
-the ''rush to reinfornce'' battles: here the AI makes all its units run towards the center of the map where the battle takes place, they arrive tired and get beaten back because I beat the initial army, then withdraw towards my reinforcing one which didn't run and is fresh; I don't enjoy this kind of battles as they tend to break away from any tactic and they are simply a mass brawl; cavalry units from the AI also arrive much earlier than the infantry, meaning the get slaughtered;
-the ''overwhelming numbers'' battles: retreat or auto-resolve depending on whether I'm the one with the big numbers or not; game killer.
The main issue here is that the type of large battles I find the most enjoyable happens the least, while I get mostly the last one. So I was wondering what kind of experience do you have with them?