Rich,
If you are attempting to reduce melee and increase fire combat then you only have to rework the stacking limits.
I think it has been shown that a unit in 2-rank line can put 320 muskets in a single line across the front of a 100m hex, and a unit in 3-ranks can put 480 men.
Now we know that Company commanders and Battalion commanders had a set of drills and regulations that they would use when commanding their troops. We all want to be Bde, Div, Corps and Army level commanders, so....
We make the stacking limit to achieve results that fall in line with the drill.
Coys and Bns would NORMALLY use a full interval between coys and bns in regards to depth. This full interval would be a depth equal to the frontage of a unit. If we have determined that a 3-rank unit needs 100m frontage to form line, then commanders would leave that same distance behind the unit empty to allow it to manuevre properly.
Therefore, we could set a stacking limit of 500 men and call it good, but there are units that exceed that strength. If you are going to break the unit down then it should be in accepted drill methods. The Austrians could have Massen, the British Wings or Grand Divisions, etc, etc. This would force players to put large units into seperate hexes when deploying in line, and column, but would hamper squares and lead to abuse. So....
A stacking of 1,000 men (no need to change scales) would take care of the vast majority of units we would use, yes some exceptions would need special handling, but very few. This would allow two units of 480 men (3-ranks) to be in one hex. The engine would limit the amount of fire power coming out, penalizing the second unit for moving forward in the hex to fire, etc, and this would allow players to form bde, div columns at half-interval. Target density and pass through fire would penalize enough for such tactics.
There is no need to redo scale needing new maps, etc when just a simple adjustment to stacking limits can achieve the same results. Dropping scale creates new problems, as one can see in your Company Level game, i.e. a bn of 6 coys attmpting to form square actually forms 6 little squares, unless someone disrupts of course, which could portray the bn having problems getting into square properly, but looks very wierd.
But, hey to each his own.
Colonel Al Amos
1er Dragoons
AdN
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