Boils down and simplifies far too much to the point of making things repetitive and boring. Tasks are now turned into tedious exercises in waiting for circles to fill and unfill.
Battles again are repetitive and dumbed down, there's not much involved you just sort of move your circle around, and watch numbers go down.
Duels, which in previous games are exciting and sort of rare; here they're annoying and frequent, if you play any sort of warrior or general, you're going to be dueling the same 3 bandits over and over again, in a system that just feels flipping a coin most of the time.
I personally don't care for the pause/play gameplay used here, i preferred the turn-based previous games, i really don't think it adds anything worthwhile to this series.

Positives: The visuals are nice, the new artwork is great, granted it was introduced in the previous game (which i don't own), and makes this always tempting to return to for just how expressive and interesting the character artwork is.
The return of the officer mode adds a great deal of replay value, added to this is an option to randomize faction placement, which means you'll not run out of stuff to try.

Overall, a shiny but weaker entry in the series.