This all just seems immensely complicated for no gain. The field is an abstraction that accounts much better for what you'd expect than more rigid specific settings.
Like, what happens if one army has everyone deploy on the top line, and the enemy is all bottom line...?
Also, assigning people to specific lines looks really, really tedious. "Hey, do we have anyone on the top line? Yes? No? Maybe??? Hey you, did you switch to top line as I asked???" The micromanaging would be just atrocious.
The 1D system has worked fine for over a decade. Why break it for something that'll end up just incredibly more tedious to manage, with a great risk of the game being utterly unplayable during a bug-ridden transition period? And a whole bunch of players getting really frustrated over ridiculous battle results due to bugs in key pivotal battles?
Let's just fix the few bugs (like archer targeting) that plague the current system instead of trying to replace it altogether.
