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I'm looking for the experience of commanding an entire army in a battle, and I don't mind painting the minis and setting up a table to make that happen.

However, my limitation is time and attention span. I like how some skirmish games are explicitly designed to be played in an hour or two with set game turn limits and abstracted unit/figure actions.

I'd like something of the same on the grand tactical, army commander level.

Are there rules that aren't concerned with the minutia of maneuvering individual units, but can represent the large ebb-and-flow of battle as to be played (to a conclusion!) within an hour or two?

I'm looking at the pike & shot era for my minis, but I'm happy to pilfer from horse & musket or medieval era rules. Hell I'll take fantasy, too!

You'll want to post questions like these in the Historical Games subforums. Game Design is for people looking for feedback for rules they're working on.

That said, I can recommend For King and Parliament, which is an ECW version of the To the Strongest! rules for ancients and medieval wargaming.

You can find a review here. I also have a couple AARs on my blog.

It's a grid based wargame, so that takes care of a lot of the little niggles of moving units, and since it's grid based, you can have differently based units on either side or even on the same side.

The game is played either with counters drawn from a bag or cup, or two decks of poker cards with the faces taken out (my preferred method). Cards are drawn to both activate units and fight. It's got an interesting "push your luck" method of command. Most units activate on a 2+ to start (so any card). But then you can keep drawing cards to activate a unit, but when you fail to draw a higher card (with modifiers), the whole brigade stops activating.

Thing is...

You do need to think about the *whole* game. The grand tactical battle requires a grand table and a grand army and a grand setting. Even in 6mm, setting up alone for this kind of battle can take an hour or so. Once you've put that much time into the set-up, do you really want a game that you can play in 45 minutes?

Having said that, on the medieval low fantasy side of things, A Song of Ice and Fire is a really good stab at this and does a decent job of simplifying set up: a job that could be even better if you did away with the vast collection of miniatures that comes in the box and replace them with chits or 6mm infantry stands of equivalent troop types to get the sheer scale of the regiments closer to 1:1.

Check out the following:

Blucher from Sam Mustafa Games

Et Sans Resultants (ESR) (sp) from The Wargaming Company

Warmaster Ancients may also interest you for Ancients