I talked a little about this here (An Ideal Stonehearth) but I agree that the hands-off approach isn’t working. The less-micromanagement approach is actually leading to much more micro-management. But too much control would get in the way of the game’s vision and make this a very different game.
So I like the idea of having an ATB or action bar behind the scenes per combat unit that fills up. Once it does, the Earthling randomly picks 2 options from his skill list and the player can pick which one of those to execute. This not only makes combat more engaging, interesting and varied but the player (as the divine being) isn’t necessarily making the decision for the unit; the unit is selecting two random choices his/herself and the player is providing divine inspiration (sotospeak).
How this correlates to what you’re talking about is more specialized skills can help differentiate the classes more, thus a Footman wouldn’t need to equip shields as they would be a class specific item for the Knights.
Also, instead of having a movement buff that kind of breaks the combat as it is now, give the Footman a “33% chance to Dodge Arrows” buff which would help with the Paper-Rock-Scissors aspect of the combat and make one of their Skills a self boost that temporarily boosts movement speed. This way, movement speed isn’t boosted until combat is already in place.
Some other skills I thought would help nicely would be a Dash Attack that not only takes into account enemy placement (hit multiples at the same time) plus help to close distances quickly if trying to take out archers.
Footman should be able to defeat archers one-on-one and giving them an arrow dodging perk and skills that centre on movement and offence helps that, just like armour-piercing perks help archers against Knights (who, in turn, have Counter Attack skills, aggro and high defence and HP to counter the Footman). And Clerics having their own skills that give the player better options to heal, buff, or debut enemies in combat and have more room for strategy AND tactics in combat. And just make it more fun!
I would love to see something like this implemented in the game, it would really open up combat. And the ‘never know what two skills the Hearthling makes you pick from’ aspect gives it just enough of a kind of Card-game, Adventure-game type randomization and decision making feel to it and also keep it mostly hands off. Sure there would be a lot of rebalancing to do to implement these kind of RPG elements in but considering this system wouldn’t really interfere with the AI systems already in place and, if anything, only build on the AI systems in place, I think it could work really well.