I tried googling this and only found a couple threads that sort of discussed it -- rather than necro one of them I decided to start a new one.
I was looking at the "explosion height" option and trying to figure out the best choice -- I found this documentation:
battleExplosionHeight:
A coefficient that controls how much vertical power explosions have.
0 = Explosions are completely flat, as per the original game.
1 = -30 damage units per level (this penalty is in addition to the horizontal penalty of -10 damage per tile).
2 = -10 damage units per level.
3 = -5 damage units per level.
The "flat" explosions of the original game always seemed very unrealistic and silly. But since tiles are apparently twice as high as they are wide, it doesn't make much sense to pick options 2 or 3 either, since those would allow explosions to propagate more vertically than horizontally. Hence option 1 would seem to be the remaining choice. But it does make me wonder, wouldn't the most realistic solution be to make -20 damage units per level, since levels are at least twice as tall as tiles are wide?