I never said 40, I said you shouldn't be able to wipe 40 with 3 people. But I have wiped 15-20 with just 3 people and killed way more than that as emperor before.
This is synonymous to @Rylana's idea to reduce AoE effectiveness in general and it would still be a target cap, even though a soft one. You come to a break even point where the amount of targets makes
I have to comment on some other things, even if I initially didn't want to go back to the "incentive vs. deterrence"-discussion that we had in the other thread.