I am having some trouble with this.

[con20or]

We designed Waterloo to be played at 1:6 and made it the default.

At the larger sprite ratios the unit frontage becomes incorrect and unit overlap then becomes far more common. It is really just an eye-candy element for people who want more impressive battles and whose PCs can handle it. There is also a unit cap of 200 sprites so a ratio of 1:2 for a 1000 man regiment would not be depicted realistically.

There are tweaks that you can make if you want the best of both worlds, you might remember my explanation here:

http://www.norbsoftdev.net/forum/nuts-a ... atio#69705

[Marching Thru Georgia]

We know there are areas where we can improve unit manoeuvring at close quarters, but most of the very bad examples you see online are rare occurrences or due to an impressive but unsuitable sprite ratio. Any edits we make to force unit avoidance results in frustrating traffic jams if people have other routes blocked with other troops. We had very strict rules in place early in development but it took half the day just to get all your forces onto the road as units waited for gaps. It was not fun and this game has to be both realistic and fun.

This is a red herring. The game is designed to use battalions that are 200 sprites in size. It makes no difference how many real men one sprite represents.

Traffic jams on roads are not a good reason to allow this situation to continue. Rather it represents flaws in the initial placement of brigades and divisions on the map and a flaw in the pathing calculations themselves. Instead of always trying to use the shortest road route to a destination, a better solution would be to find the shortest path that uses a vacant road.

[roy64]

It's a shame the tweaks are only for the sandbox games because a sprite ratio of 1:6 looks totally crap & I can't see any benefits in the movement of the battalions either, they still can't go from A to B without first going of in some strange circular direction while doing a conga line.

[Saddletank]

Personally I thought the default sprite ratio of 1:4 and 125 sprites max per unit of Gettysburg worked fine.

The comments about unit frontages are a smokescreen as well since you never change the number of artillery piece sprites in a battery - they always have a 1:1 ratio. If a player raises his sprite ratio from, say, 2:1 to 6:1 he should have fewer guns in his batteries so that the battery when either deployed for action or in column on a road takes up the correct amount of room compared to an infantry battalion in line or march column.