Quote Originally Posted by El Diablo
I think that you will find the "march divided fight united" was a military maxim in that having a large force in one place meant that supplying the force was not possible without a good chain of supply. By dispercing your troops you could forage more effectively and thus limit what you needed to ship to the troops.

The down side of this was your force being spread out meant it was possible for the enemy to counterattack. They may have only had a 1/2 stack but if you split your full stack into four the force attacked would be outnumbered 2:1.

This is the "fight united" part. The trick being to march AS FAR AS POSSIBLE divided without having to fight. A true balancing act.

That was in the "real world" in RTW you have no issues with supply and therefore no reason to disperce your troops UNLESS you have multiple targets that a fraction of your force can TAKE AND HOLD or even just take and destroy (scorthed earth). Otherwise keep them together and take the only thing the enemy can not replace (cities) - rather than armies which they can re-recruit.

Also when you play you often specialise in one type of unit from a city thus if you were sending them to the front like that you run the risk of having a 1/4 stack of hoplies being ambused by a 1/2 stack of missle cavelry. I.e. having a non-mixed unit type of force. Never a good scenario!!

My 2c
It would actually be kind of cool to have scaling upkeep costs with the size of your army stack, so maintaining 20 units in one stack would cost more in upkeep than 2 stacks of 10 units each, which would in turn cost more than 4 stacks of 5 units each, to simulate the real world difficulties with keeping a large army mustered, in the field, and marching together across long distances. Maybe CA will implement something like that in a future game.