Thanks for the quick reponse guys.
Trying the demo was of course the obvious thing to do, yet i have had demos in the past give false leads, at least in regards to performance.
Anyways downloaded the demo and kept the default setings and appears to be a go! (of course will see how thing procede in larger battles)
I must say I am quite overwhlemed by the depth! Ist time i actually needed to follow along with the tutorial step by step, and still hit a major stumbling block. I got to the point where i gave my orders, double checked the orders were given and hit the P key to watch em move out to the village... And they all proceded to go in the opposite direction! I couldnt get the buggers under orders again and so restarted the tutorial and the same thing happned.... I finally figured out the problem though... I have a tendency to click/double click on units, unit cards etc to get a feel for how thing work (as opposed to reading the instructions lol) and what I was inadvertantly doing was somehow givng St Cyr the "surrender command" Ha ha , perhaps it should be a little harder to surrender a commander , maybe a "are you sure" prompt

Anyways this looks fantastic and i wish i hadnt discovered this game so late before a long work week ahead (didnt help I was missing a dll file and took a while to get that issue resolved) Next step is to play around with the demo a little to make sure my old dog of a pc can handle the game and then out with the credit card.