Quote Originally Posted by screwtype
But since you asked - I really have no idea what is meant by this sentence, perhaps they mean a return to classical TW sizes, ie 60/80/100/120 men per unit or something.
I think Palamedes is speaking from a multiplayer perspective when he talks about magic numbers for unit sizes.

In STW multiplayer, the default size was 60 men and the consensus was that that offered the best balance between fighting and maneuverability, although, cavalry was considered to be a bit cumbersome at that size because the maps were small and if one man in the cav unit caught the edge of an enemy unit the whole cav unit got drawn into a fight with that unit.

In MTW, the default was cav = 40 men, most non-spear inf = 60 men and spears = 100 men. The 40 man cav helps maneuverability and the 100 man spears helps with the rank bonus, but overall it's still based around the 60 man size. We can see in Samurai Wars for MTW/VI that maneuvering 60 man cav units isn't as much of a problem on large maps, and that 60 man size means the cavalry retains its usefulness for more encounters than do 40 man units. Also, after STW, you could disengage cavalry from a fight.

In RTW, the default seemed to be based around a 40 man unit size, and there was no way to get it to 60 because the next size was x2. The perception by many veterans at the time was that the default size of 40 was causing the fast routing in multiplayer and that 60 was preferable while 80 would reduce maneuverabliity too much. Gil Jaysmith posted that the solution to fast routing was to play at huge unit size which made him seem oblivious to the importance of maneuverability to the gameplay. Huge setting can also reduce multiplayer fps a lot.

I can understand wanting to cover a wider range of unit size than the factor of 2 that 60/80/100/120 provides. However, why were the steps made larger when all you have to do is increase the number of steps? Increasing the size of the steps demonstrates an insensitivity toward providing multiplayers the kind of control over game parameters that they need to improve playbalance. You can also see this in the on/off nature of the morale, fatigue and ammo settings, and further in the condensing of what were once 3 separately controlled parameters into a single on/off setting. You also see this in the removal of separate money settings for attacker and defender, and the reduction of the money settings to discrete values in RTW v1.0. It wouldn't matter if CA balanced the game well to begin with, but they didn't. Multiplayers were left not only with an unbalanced game, but no way to improve it either. The money setting was changed back to a continuously variable amount in RTW v1.2, and M2TW apparently restores separate money setting for each team. However, the game mechanic simplifications in the new battle engine are apparently still there. Magic unit sizes aren't going to fix that, and those numbers would change anyway with the new engine. What's important is having the units and armies fight long enough for flanking tactics to be employed, and for those flanking tactics to be effective unless the idea is to have a shoot and rush type of gameplay.