Thanks for the explanation, I understand the problem now.
Reverting the change to the old behaviour would not resolve the problem though, it would just reverse what you have to do to exploit it. In the new system you have to prevent your own combat tick with multiple stacks vs less stacks to trigger the exploit, in the old system you just have do your own combat tick with multiple stacks vs less stacks to trigger the exploit. In the old system each of your 5 stacks consisting of 5 planes would damage the enemy 1 stack with 5 planes with full damage, while not receiving any defensive damage back, and the enemy would only deal its offensive damage once, spread out to your stacks. The end result would be the same, the player with the split stacks has an advantage because he deals 5 times the damage. it's even easier to use then as no micro management is needed.
Unfortunately this is not easily fixable, as it would require a major rework of the combat system.
The underlying problem is in the way the game handles defensive ticks for stacks that are positioned nearly in the same spot. It always applies the stack penalties for each army individually, then combines the damage and deals the combined damage back, while the offensive damage is spread amongst all stacks. This also happens for ground units, which creates a similar balancing problem. To fix this we would need to rewrite the combat system to apply the stack penalties after the damage of each stack is combined, which is sadly easier said than done as the combat system is old and spread in many lines of code at many different places. Maybe that can be done in the future, but right now we don't have the capacity for that. Therefore we opt for an easier approach by making the exploit harder to use, by making the offensive tick trigger right at the start of the patrol timer and not after 15min, so that you have less time to properly time it. It then stands on a similar micromanagement level as the "shoot & scoot" exploit for ranged ground units, which similarly benefits the more active player and was regarded by the community as "feature" (at least in S1914 as range combat is more important there :D).
Reverting the change to the old behaviour would not resolve the problem though, it would just reverse what you have to do to exploit it. In the new system you have to prevent your own combat tick with multiple stacks vs less stacks to trigger the exploit, in the old system you just have do your own combat tick with multiple stacks vs less stacks to trigger the exploit. In the old system each of your 5 stacks consisting of 5 planes would damage the enemy 1 stack with 5 planes with full damage, while not receiving any defensive damage back, and the enemy would only deal its offensive damage once, spread out to your stacks. The end result would be the same, the player with the split stacks has an advantage because he deals 5 times the damage. it's even easier to use then as no micro management is needed.
Unfortunately this is not easily fixable, as it would require a major rework of the combat system.
The underlying problem is in the way the game handles defensive ticks for stacks that are positioned nearly in the same spot. It always applies the stack penalties for each army individually, then combines the damage and deals the combined damage back, while the offensive damage is spread amongst all stacks. This also happens for ground units, which creates a similar balancing problem. To fix this we would need to rewrite the combat system to apply the stack penalties after the damage of each stack is combined, which is sadly easier said than done as the combat system is old and spread in many lines of code at many different places. Maybe that can be done in the future, but right now we don't have the capacity for that. Therefore we opt for an easier approach by making the exploit harder to use, by making the offensive tick trigger right at the start of the patrol timer and not after 15min, so that you have less time to properly time it. It then stands on a similar micromanagement level as the "shoot & scoot" exploit for ranged ground units, which similarly benefits the more active player and was regarded by the community as "feature" (at least in S1914 as range combat is more important there :D).