You tell me that 1UPT is unrealistic because well, its a global scale so really more than one unit can fit on a tile.
Okay.
And we all agree that Unlimited Stack is both unbalanced for gameplay and unrealistic (you can't fit infinite things on one tile)
Okay?
So where do you draw the line? Does 3UPT stack or 5UPT stack count as "okay"?
The point is that the argument doesn't make sense.
The scale is dynamic, and the units are representative, like they are in chess, of changing amounts of infantry, and the tiles are representative of changing amounts of area
(Wonders take up an entire space in Civ6, and those are not the same spaces as entire city centres, and they won't necessarily be the same size as swathes of forest)
I feel like stackers say this because they really only have two arguments:
1. the congo line puzzle problem is annoying
2. realism
You are setting up a classic Straw Man: assuming we have to choose between 1UPT and Unlimited Stacking. We don't, and I for one have never argued that we should.
Both 1UPT and the Stack of Dufus are just plain Bad Mechanics for a game.
1UPT clutters the map with independent units that each have to be moved separately, clog any chokepoints on the map, require massive amounts of time to move (the term Micromanagement springs to keyboard here) as numbers of units increase, and provides a lousy model for tactical combat that now covers gross amounts of time and space to resolve.
Stack of Dumb over-concentrates units and therefore undervalues them enormously, OR requires intricate rules for the interaction of various types of units to make them meaningful OR reduces the entire combat portion of 4x into "stack up everything, move to contact". It commits the greatest sin in game design: it's BORING.
And in passing, could you explain to me how 'tiles are representative of changing amounts of area' when the size of the map and so the number of tiles is fixed from start of game to end? Changing technologies and conditions make the number of humans and human constructs you can stuff into the same area (tile) change dramatically throughout the game, but the total amount of space (numbers of tiles) remains fixed.
And that is one of the keys to the stacking problem. The number of units, whatever numbers of people, animals, and/or equipment they represent, Must change throughout the game. The Dupuy Institute spent hundreds of hours studying just this aspect of military history back in the 1970s to 1980s, and came up with the following:
Space in square kilometers occupied by an army of 100,000 men by historical period:
Ancient Armies 1.00 (melee weapons, bows)
17th century 5.00 (Renaissance pikes, crossbows, knights)
Napoleonic Wars 20.12 (smooth-bore muskets and field cannon)
American Civil War 25.75 (rifled gunpowder weapons)
World War One 247.5 (machineguns and modern artillery)
World War Two 3100.0 (tanks, motorized movement, air power)
‘October War’ 1973 4000.0 (early guided missiles, rockets, jets)
The other Key to the stacking problem is this: you could theoretically 'stack' 100,000 ancient/classical warriors into a single 1 kilometer square plain. BUT there isn't a spot of land anywhere on earth where 1 square kilometer could feed them for more than a day, and there are very few areas where within 20 kilometers (a day's march) you could gather enough food to feed them for more than a week or two, a tiny fraction of the shortest Civ Turn.
So Unlimited Stacking is just as idiotic in conception as 1UPT: they are both Fantasy, and more importantly Bad Design from a gameplay perspective.
Battles are won by concentrated masses of men, animals and equipment, which 1UPT does not allow. But the numbers you can concentrate effectively change dramatically as the military and supply technology changes, a dynamic process SoD ignores. The answer, I would think obvious, is to do away with both of them as models for a game process.
Instead, vary the stacking limit by technology and terrain. At start, with Ancient people and Ancient capability to move food (oxcart, pack mule) you cannot concentrate much of anything and still feed it (parentheticaly, you also do not have the Command, Control and Communications, modern C3, to make large numbers do what you want them to, so 'large numbers' add nothing to your combat capability). Humankind and Millennia games, both recognizing this, allow you to stack 4 and 3 units total in the early game, respectively. That may be a good place to start. It doesn't matter whether one unit represents a 400 man ancient Sumerian
Sanga or a 2000 man Macedonian
Taxeis: there is more than enough physical room in a tile for either, and far more than one of each. The problem is that early on no organization in the game has the capability to feed a 100,000 man Dupuy model ancient army in one place without using an entire fleet to supply them with food.
Whereas, by WWI, 100,000 men represents maybe 2 Army Corps, a fraction of a State's army, and they may possibly take up the entire tile physically (almost 250 square meters per man), but more importantly, the State has primitive automobiles and trucks, railroads, steamships and (steam boats on rivers) and telegraphs, telephones and radios to coordinate the care and feeding of 100,000 men and all their animals and equipment. We may use 6 - 20 individual units to represent those Corps, depending on how we set up the results of technological progress on stacking, but we can also Feed those units, which we could not do 1500 - 3000 years earlier.
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