A Rising Problem!

[jwilkerson]

Well several ways to counter ... one is HR ... in my game we have HR against having too many small surface combat TFs in the same hex for the express purpose of "borking" the combat model ... another is reset your expectations ... assume you are always fighting an "attrition war" ... and not seeking the "decisive battle" ...

[Moss Orleni]

We deliberately opted to not use a HR on this, the most important reason being the difficulty to establish a cutoff point for what one would consider as 'too many'.
Also, the number of occasions where you can really 'bork' the engine (meaning where you have a massive amount of ships all trying to flee from the same hex at the same time) is quite limited and didn't seem to warrant adding an additional HR.
For the remaining cases (the ones where fewer ships are involved), the idea of dispersing your fleet while under threat of superior forces is more common sense than gamey IMO.

In any case, it seems that AE does a good job already at limiting the advantages of dispersal. Didn't experience it yet myself, but I suppose the multi-intercept routine applies to submarines as well? So TF multi-intercepts and air strike spillover attacks might even force a defender to reconsider his tactics and go back to bigger TF again in order to optimize/pool his defences...
Exactly the kind of choice which makes the game so interesting!

Cheers,

Moss