First, this is part of a broader effort designed to make war more interesting with minimal changes, see here
http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,3933.msg97163.html#msg97163So: This is something that I've considered for a while, and I think would make a big difference, especially if overcrowding were tweaked to make a bigger difference: Set maximum battle-widths that depend on region type.
Rurals, as one extreme, would have the currently very large (is there a max?) line widths, allowing thousands of troops to fight side by side if they so choose.
Mountains, to pick the other extreme, would have much smaller battle-widths, perhaps only a hundred (number chosen for ease of thought in this example rather than an actual suggestion, that would need to be considered) soldiers wide. What that would mean is you can't go around them, you just have a hundred of their troops fight a hundred of their troops at a time. So you can have a small, elite army hold off a much larger army of crap troops with very lopsided casualties in a mountain pass. But, your small elite army would get cut to shreds by the ravaging hordes in an open field.
The other regions would fall somewhere in between. Depending on the complexity of coding there are a number of options, but if we say that rurals can have a line ten thousand men long (again, chosen for easy thinking, not realism) and mountains can have only a hundred, with forests only having five hundred, maybe a thousand in hills, badlands at eight hundred, etc.
You then have situations where you have to consider where you are going to fight. You have to pick the right troops to fight in a mountain vs a rural. The idea of having one army for your realm would be laughable for anything except the smallest city states, because you would need different troops in different places. And you would have to use your troops differently in those circumstances.
This would basically make geography much, much more relevant than it is now, with (hopefully) only one small change to the code that sets up battles.
