Big Stacks or small Stacks

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    • depends on requirements, If you have to battle the enemy, larger stacks.
      If you want to have mobile vanguard that can do various actions a larger stack is too slow to do, a smaller stack is required.
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    • Both is fine, as long as you know what you are trying to do. Some people are missile/arty damage then use units only to occupy provinces and prevent rebellions, some others use the units for head on fights. I saw an entire war against europe vs. russian emp and communist, and for some reason, Russia's troops had almost full health, and they won with arty and rockets, they mass produced militia, infantry, and med tanks, either infantry as meatball damage absorbents for arty, or to hold provinces, never actually engaged in combat.
    • It depends on your tactics, let's say that you want to overwhelm your opponent by sending units from every road possible, them small stacks is better (You cover more área), but if you want to use spearhead tactics and punch throug a spot in the enemy lines You should use Big stacks. Another situation is using an artillery grup for example, a stack of 5 artys is weak so you need add 2-3 AAs and 5-6 defensiva units yo protect them, in that case You have to use big stacks
    • ~I like big stacks and I cannot lie~, but in all seriousness: Obviously you shouldn't go over the stack limit so no matter how big you go, just be aware that you are wasting fighting strength for every unit above 10. If you are looking to protect your 10 strongest unit it may still be useful to bolster the stack with more units to soak up damage.
    • Small stacks are meant for skirmishing and Capturing provinces quickly, You HAVE to stack up into oversized armies at point of enemy contact, Saves you from unnecessary loss.
      "In my humble opinion, on the subject matter, topic and content discussed beforehand; I would like to humbly propose, convey my idea on the subject and remark; this, with the help of the afforementioned post" - Karl von Krass

      "The Golden Spire is looking for members, Anyone with good sense of game mechanics and a discord account can apply"

      Secretary of Nova0213
    • vietcong2005 wrote:

      Should my units operate in smaller stacks or should they operate in larger stacks?
      Basically, if using 1-10 units the square law first seems to apply. So 3 units have the strength of 9, 4 units the strength of 16 etc. This turns out to not be as drastic: if we ram a single tank into two the two end with 75% health left (actually slightly more due to damage efficiency). That means they have 75% health * 80% damage = 60% strength, so they lost more than 25% of their overall strength in the battle. However, stacking units would still be very advantageous on the small scale.

      Normally, if your army is smaller than 11 and you fight, the damage of your whole army combined is used against all armour classes. However, if the army is 11 and larger, only the top 10 units with the highest damage against an armour class determine the army's damage against it.
      This does not mean that only 10 units can contribute to the fight. If 10 AT guns and 10 Infantry get attacked by enemy tanks and infantry, the damage of the 10 AT guns is used against the tanks and the 10 Infantry against the infantry. So only 10 units are fighting each armour class but it can be more than 10 units contributing overall. This makes large stacks effective in straight-up battles.
      Another factor supporting large stacks is the damage efficiency. The damage efficiency of a larger stack goes down slower as there's more health, so the smaller stack's damage falls faster through the fight. In a fight of 100 tanks against 10 tanks the 100 tanks actually win with 94% health left instead of 90%.
      But before we start celebrating, the 100-stack would now have 94% health * 95.2% damage = 89.49% strength. This means the 100-stack lost more than 10% of its fighting value. Larger stacks of a single unit type apparently don't turn out to be very effective.

      If you make a large stack you don't want it destroyed, so most players will add a lot of different counter units to it, making it slow. Slow force and concentrated on top of that, means your enemy can easily pass through and devastate your economy, or disable your airforce, gaining a large advantage over you. For this reason many players prefer smaller stacks for distracting, taking the initiative and not allowing the opponent to do counter-damage to the economy.
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    • "Big" stack for defence of key provinces, "small" stacks for attack, flanking, acouting and so on.

      It depend on situation on battlefield. If enemy use several small stacks on same route, you should use big stack on defence for closecombat, and as many smaller stacks of ranged units as possible for ranged firefight.

      If you enemy use single so called "doomstack" you should use several small stack for flanking, but soll at least one big stack for defence against "doomstack".