sorry if i've hijacked your thread, Garfunkel. To attempt to merge back into your original inquiry, I am going to throw out the opinion that the real issue isn't that size games confer a large advantage, but that combat is deterministic and snowball-y enough that small advantages produce lopsided victory.. unfortunately that's a much harder problem to solve, even if steve regarded it as worth effort, which is doubtful. combat by quadriture isn't so common because it's good, it's so common because you've got to put real effort into avoiding it.
FWIW it's improved over vb6, which was more deterministic, more snowbally *and* casualties were cheaper to replace for the victor.
edit: the determinism is not actually a given. it's easy to magic up 15000 tanks but it might be that campaign-buildable armies exhibit meaningful variation. without just being able to stuff the ground combat inside a do loop it's a pretty grindy process to test it.
