podcat later corrected themselves and said they were referring to overwidth, not overstacking. Are they actually looking at the stacking penalty as well?
Would you like to go into more detail about how this makes sense to you? This is something I've had difficulty trying to rationalize within the context of the game mechanics. It makes sense for real life that having trees or rocks or other terrain features blocking positioning would reduce the amount of space you have for units in real life, but it has been said that combat width is a completely made up number with no actual basis in reality.
I'm not really sure how this is meant to improve the situation. Removing the penalty and then shifting the amount of width we're allowed to bring into combat is still going to run into the problems of doing your best to meet or be slightly below a perfect factor of the combat, in order to bring the greatest amount of power that you can.
We still have the over stacking penalties which we could ramp, as well as supply. But if we did limit formations per combat with no other limiter inside the battle, people would just aim for the fattest divisions they can get. The trouble would then be finding ways to dissuade the use of fat divisions, and I can think of a couple already but I'm still stuck with the question of...
What is the point of all this? What is the intent behind any of these changes? What purpose are they trying to serve?
What problem are we trying to solve?
@Cyklonmannen wants to be able to add battalions to a formation without having a voice in their head niggling about the width. I don't think fixed width values for different terrains really solves that problem, it just gives us more numbers to niggle about which I think makes the situation worse. Because even if there is a much greater variety of widths that are theoretically possible that mellow out the averages line in my graphs, each actual battle is going to be associated with a piece of terrain, and such is locked into one particular line, which is going to have particular highs and lows the players could build around and rather than 20w, we're stuck with 24w or whatever. The line is only fuzzy on average/in aggregate, each specific example is going to be rather clearly defined.
This random widths idea, or one based off tactics, or something that can apply to any battle, is one of the few suggestions that actually would actually give us fuzzy lines about how good any particular template width is in all cases. This all cases thing is important, because that is what is going to define how viable all of the different widths actually are.
I've rewrote this comment a bunch of times to try and slim it out, I hope my point still gets across. Let me know if it doesn't.
