It's like @Shyze3D@feddit.nl said in a thread I can't reply to because my instance hadn't federated that Community (and won't retroactively federate comments):

it‘s an amount of micromanagment I don‘t want to deal with. There are already so many combat units with special abilities and specific counterunits.

You could rename them to "serfs" (or some other more period-appropriate term..."slaves" comes to mind, but would carry its own baggage) and "citizen-soldiers" (the latter term actually used in some documentation already) and do away with the sexism. But it wouldn't fix the annoying micro. That's a more fundamental game design issue.