A small tweak to combat mehanics that would change a lot

[Corbeau]

1) Units can counterattack artillery, so long as they have no defenders, fairly easily in real life.

Well, that should be left for the defender's turn, no?

2) You can create unit flags and give them appropriate bonuses or penalties based on range.

What do you mean by this? What bonus/penalty are you proposing and for whom?

3) You actually CAN make it so that units can simply deal out damage and not get counterattacked via I think the "bombard' flag. However, they are unable to kill the unit's last hitpoint. I'm not entirely sure why that is so, or is unalterable.

Fair enough. However, some experience shows that, in practice, the effect is ridiculous. I'll look into it a bit more. But it was a side-proposition anyway.

4) Retreat isn't really possible if your unit is exhausted or the attackers have superior movement. They'll just hunt you down and exterminate you anyway. Put into coding, it'd probably be complicated.

That depends on many, many things. In reality, retreat is possible much more often than not, wit casualties that comprise much less than 90%.

[Corbeau]

A problem with this change would be that, effectively, it means no Kill Stack, meaning a (much) greater chance of having a stack of 20 units and all of them working together.

There are two ways of solving this, I'm guessing both need some additional work.

1. Simpler: whatever damage is incurred on the defending unit is copied to all units in the stack. It means: if the attacking Dragoon hits a defending Musketeer for 16 HPs which is 80% of its strength, all units in the stack receive 80% damage. (OR a random amount of damage, averaging at the percentage the main defending unit received; meaning, some units in the stack may be destroyed even if the defender survived, while others may remain unharmed.)

2. More complicated but much more realistic, more thought-through and requiring more planning by the player: stack limit. "A tile can have a maximum of three combat units in the stack." This would not be a physical limit for the amount of units on the stack, but instead, there wold be a penalty for movement AND defence for units entering/exiting/passing through/defending from the tile with more than "stack limit" of units present. Penalty should, obviously, depend on the excess of units. One more would add 1 MP to movement through the stack and reduce defence value of all units in the tile by 1.