How to read the enemy stack?

I am quite a fan of Civ4, as I had flushed Civ 5 as rubbish... I like the mechanics of the stacks, and accept the occasional stack of doom that some AI will place aganist me. I now use Realism Invictus that penalizes large stacks, fact that doesn't prevent my neighobur mongol to send 14+ stack every 12 turn... damn it.
What I find annoying is the abesnce of an alarm, or a simple evidence of a stack: during my normal game, in RI or plain BtS, a lot of secondary issue is going on every turn, it' s the juice of the game, some late barbarian raging, a single peasant is revolting near the capital, a lone worker is on road building out of boundaries and some recon has to be diverted to defend it while it works...
and at some point your sneaky friend mongol send in a stack of doom. In wartime I use to zoom out and use the enemy military layer to be sure to have every menacing units under check, but really, during pace time it is demanding to do so every single turn... so I have to reload - that I hate - as I didn't see that huge monster that penetrated my recon layer of archers stationed on hills that have to do a single thing: to shout as enemy approach. I would appreciate a single war advisory that tell me - Er, majesty, we have a million soldier with catapults and kelshin at our est borders, did you noticed?

But this is only a dream, and I will live with the problem, it's part of the game.
What I really am asking here is:

-How do I read a stack???

When the enemy stack is over 12 - 15 units, I can't understand a thing. I hover my mouse and it tells a lot of detalied, usless information on a particular unit, a difficult to read list of other units perfectly alike (why not write (7)???), the last unit with that insiduous counter (7), that means it is seven units, but the list is blurred on top, several units lacks, I refine my defence basing on the information and than I am defeated, I roll back the combact log and I find a lot of invisible enemy units that I weren't able to see.
I want a system to read ALL the units in enemy stack: do I have to enter worldbuider each time? And close my eyes on every other thing that it shows?
Is there a specific mod for this?

Thanks a lot!!!!

Drono

 

This is a good question and also look forward to some help here. But it is often possible to deduct stackdetails in Military Advisor, Deployment. Details about actual location of enemy units could perhaps be improved there in some future BUG/BAT update?

 

I find the main issue why large stacks suck so much is due to siege weapons and collateral damage being overpowered. They render turtling useless and nullify defenses too effectively that you cant defend against large stacks. But 1UPT in the newer Civ games also suck.

I started playing CTP2 again, and for me it has the best balance for unit stack limits and siege bombardments, but it runs like crap on modern PCs.

 

That's pretty much true. With the exception of the machine-gun era (pre-tanks, pre-artillery), sticking a bunch of defensive troops in a stack in a city just doesn't work against a comparable stack (technologically + numerically) with siege.

 

Which is why I always build some siege promoted with drill or collateral damage for defensive purposes.

 

It doesn't always collapse everything so when there's 50 or 100 units in a stack it can be a rather annoying issue on a laptop screen even with minimized interface.

 

I think only once in my life I've promoted a Siege Weapon to Drill, and that was, because it was a GG-siege-weapon that ran out of CR and Barrage promotions ^^ .