There are provinces strategically so important you have to have them in the game, but so small that it is just physically completely impossible to have more than a certain number of troops in them. Penalties aren't enough in some occasions - Gibraltar, Tarawa, Malta, Midway, Panama C-Z...
No matter what you do you just cannot pile a hundred division to Gibraltar.
Gibraltar is only about 7 sq.km, compared to a typical small HOI3 land province, which I estimate to be at least 700 sq.km.
For that typical province on land I'm not convinced by the argument that there should be a max. number of Divs allowed in the province. I think you could place a lot of Divs in a province. Take London with a population in 1939 of around 8 million people. Once the bombing started in late 1940 about 13% of the population evacuated the city, that's about 1 million people who abandoned their homes. So a lot of Divs could occupy the city without any great problem, using those homes, schools, public parks, etc. Certainly 50 Divs (about 600,000 men) seems to be no problem.
I can't see under what circumstances London would be occupied by 50 Divs in the game any way. It would mean stacking the entire UK defence force in one province, and leaving the remainder of the country undefended. Even in HOI2 the AI would attempt to spread it's forces along the frontline (or beaches if not actually invaded). I think we don’t need to worry about creating special rules preventing it.
If you take an example of offensive action, Germany could stack 50 Divs near Cologne ready to attack France through the Ardennes, but again it would leave itself woefully exposed on its flanks, and the frontage rules mean that most of these could not enter combat as they tried to advance down a narrow corridor only one or two provinces wide, where those provinces are hills/forests.
If a human player wants to stack 50 Divs in London or the Ardennes I don't think they should be prevented from doing so. But strategic considerations would tend to prevent such huge stacks from occurring anyway.
The size of some islands (or small territories such as Gibraltar) that must be represented in the game clearly present more of an issue, compared to the typical province. Gibraltar is one of the most densely populated territories in the world, with just over 4,000 people living there per sq.km. However, comprising only about 7 sq.km it has a total population of only 28,000. Clearly even 3 Divs (about 26,000 men) would cause a major logistical challenge.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure how the game mechanics could deal with this. The game engine doesn't know the size of a province, and treats all of them as roughly equivalent. You would have to introduce a new parameter into the model of the world.
To me this seems unnecessary. 9,500 of the 10,000 land provinces might reasonably be abstracted to cover a similar area. You would be changing the game engine for 500 provinces, or perhaps even far less. FE amongst the islands Kasakka mentions is Malta. Malta is actually a group of seven islands, and the total area of them is over 300 sq.km. IMO it doesn't particularly require any special rules to represent its size. You might find in the whole world there are only a very small number of
strategically important islands/peninsulars where size really would matter. 10? 20?
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that I’m in favour of there being no penalties if someone does try to create unrealistically high concentrations of units in an area. These include:
- Movement penalties
- Bonuses to air attack
- Supply problems
