This is probably a really stupid question and a little harder to explain, but one thing I can’t understand about military operations is does ,unit stacking" exist in real life? For example in games like supreme ruler, the operational art of war (toaw),etc, you can put a bunch of battalions on one single hex. In real life a battalion, brigade,etc all have their ,footprint" or the territory they occupy (although I am not sure what’s the correct term for that, if someone knows please tell me) , for example a average battalion occupies around 3x2 kilometers of terrain when defending. For the sake of an example let’s say that it occupies 2.5x2.5 kilometers, which is like a hex in ,The operational art of war" , in toaw and gazillion of other games you can simply put a bunch of battalions one over another and have them all be in that single hex (which is let’s say a small village). Can you do that in real life? Or to give an example, let’s say that there is a border between 2 enemy countries which is long only 5 kilometers and there are 8 battalions, since a battalion can defend around 2-3 kilometers in length, that means that 2 of them would defend the border without overlapping in the ,first echelon" or first row, but what happens to the other 6 battalions? Can you put another 2 battalions in the first echelon/row to strengthen them and then put remaining 2+2 battalions in second echelon or would you need to make 4 rows one behind the other, so 2 battalions that don’t overlap, then another 2,etc.?
I’m not sure what you’re asking. Is there a limit to the number of soldiers you can fit in any given area? Of course. Is it possible to fit two units into the amount of space ordinarily occupied by one unit? Impossible to answer, because there’s no such thing as “the amount of space ordinarily occupied by one unit”: How much space they take up will depend on their orders and mission.
War game “stacking limits” are a way to factor in a variety of real-world considerations in the concentration of troops:
How do you keep them all supplied?
How do they move along a limited road network?
How effective are they in directing their massed firepower at the enemy?
How much defensive cover is there to protect them?
Sometimes doubling the number of troops in an area doubles their effectiveness. Sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the particular circumstances of the engagement.
There’s some real life examples of very heavily concentrated units, like Vyborg-Petrozavodsk Offensive in WW2:
If you lack air superiority you will probably regret cramming so many targets in a small area though.
You can most definitely stack units in real life. The Soviets stacked the hell out of the Kursk pocket with defensive troops in anticipation of the German offensive. Anti-tank guns were especially overabundant. Tanks were stacked very deep in the local reserves to be sent out as needed against the strong panzer spearhead. And it not only worked, it was an excellent tactic.
ETA: unit stacking was discouraged at the strategic level once nuclear weapons came on the scene. The US army decided that it was too easy to lose a whole army to a single warhead.
The game Objective Moscow (mid-1970s look at both a current and a 1999 Soviet invasion of Western Europe gone bad, and everybody (including China) then invading the USSR) mentioned this problem in its designer’s notes - something along the lines of, “Theoretically, the entire Soviet army could fit into a single hex. They would be incredibly crammed, but they could fit.” The stacking limits were set based on cohesion and effectiveness; after a certain point, more troops in a confined space aren’t going to improve the attack.
Game designers always had to deal with: On the larger scale (divisions, armies, regiment) and even the squad level there were a lot of units in a fight that were historically a the front lines (or in the firefight) but would be relegated to the rear in the game without stacking rules. The only way you could avoid that was if you made the hexes tiny and counters too awkward to handle or made the map so huge the game would be impractical and too expensive.
Stacking’s always been a way to get around the fact that the hexes or squares or whatever are arbitrary divisions imposed on a map for game purposes.
Let’s say your game has 25 km hexes; a division in one of those hexes may in reality be deployed along a 20 km front, and have a 10 km rear area. You could easily enough have another division not in contact be behind that in the same hex.
Or if they’re attacking (or deployed for really tenacious defense), they could have a divisonal frontage of 10 km, giving you room for 2 divisions in the same hex realistically.
Now if you were to stack 4 divisions in the same hex, you’d be implying that each division is attacking or defending on about a 6 km front, which is possible, I suppose. But I’d argue that a well designed game would have some kind of penalty for doing that to reflect the greater troop density- higher casualties, more vulnerability to indirect fire, higher fog-of-war, etc…
Less so for naval and air units… you don’t want to stack them.
They really have minimum separations, that roughly work as the one ideal density.
It would be possible to run tanks and other machinery with their tracks/bodies touching, but it had better be a linear mission… they can’t turn !
In the Battle of Long Tan, Vietnam, the NVA thought that they might force an Australian morale collapse by attacking an Australian base. They knew the australians had superior weapons, and attempted to “stack” 3000 approx NVA infantry in a circle a round the base. They knew the men were sitting ducks, but hoped that the Australians couldn’t shoot…
Boom boom boom … The Australians knowing they were surrounded, lay down a ring of explosive shells (artillery, mortars) and bullets into the forest, with the aim of 1. preventing the circle reducing radius, and 2. breaking morale … no individual platoon or regiment in the NVA would obey orders to advance into the firing zone… the dead mans land.
The NVA idea that they may lay siege also, as the Australians received supplies by air, and their artillery fire varied in range and the NVA were decimated, literally 10% of the NVA were found … corpses.