[.85] How come attack values stack in a group but defense values do not?

thats totally normal....

why would defense stack? its not like having 50 men with 1 defense will make the group have 50 defense ie they would take the dmg they take against 1 def

instead if you have 50 men with 1 attack IT IS lke having 50 attack because if all 50 attack they will do "50" dmg

I think you always get 3 attacks of 9 strength, vs a fixed defense since each unit is attacked individually.

IMHO it should have used another way of calculating these values.

For units it should have been a different notation like 3x9/7/2 (3 figures, 9 attack, 7 defense, 2 moves)

but finding a neat way to represent stacks of different units with different values won't make any sense anyway.

An alternative would be to calculate for the entire unit a single tactical strength number factoring everything together, that is simply summed to the other units in the stack to come up with a stack strength value.

yeah its impossible to have a real "measure" of the party strength

anyway i think the actual system show well how it is, just need to take a good look at it

if it has very high dmg and very low hp and defense means its a numerous party with lot of stuff but easy to take down with aoe, ranged etc

if it has high def, hp and medium dmg with few count means its some big beast who is very strong and hard to take down and so on

Defense doesn't stack, but hit points do.

The entire unit is attacking as one but getting killed off individually. That is why the attack strength will go down after you kill off some of a units members. So it makes sense in a certain way.

In GalCiv 2, I believe this was a change made in one of the last patches.

The downside here is boss monsters with 100+ defense would end up largely immune to normal troops under this scenario.

Not really. Damaged units do less damage if they survive.