Sturm Squad Problem

[AngularMan]

So I started the Vistula to Berlin Campaign an noticed some odd behaviour of Sturm Squads. As you can see in the screenshot, something seems to be wrong with their performance AND the displayed numbers. Clearly, 0.7 HPE * 80 Elements should be 56 and not 6 hits (which is an abysmal performance compared to the other infantry squads).

[AngularMan]

Here is the Savegame. I think this scenario will be hard enough for the Germans without their Sturm Squads not being able to hit a barn door

Edit: OK, I sifted through some of the other opening battles in this scenario and it doesn't seem to be a problem with the StG 44, the Pioneer 44 squads seem to hit just fine with it. But the Sturm Squads(-), of which there are quite a few, are hilariously bad. Supposedly, they have 8 modern assault rifles, but they hit less with them than Rifle Squads 43 with 5 regular Karabiner 98!

Maybe I am not understanding the battle system well enough, but that sure seems fishy to me.

[DrHiramTemple]

Can't comment on the effectiveness of sturm squads, but I've noticed a display error wherein hits-per-elements less than 0.1 will drop their leading zero after the decimal, so a 0.05 will display as 0.5. You can see this quite obviously if you sort by HPE on the combat screen. Doing the math, the sturm squads have a true HPE of .075, so that seems to be what's happened here.

[AngularMan]

ORIGINAL: DrHiramTemple

Can't comment on the effectiveness of sturm squads, but I've noticed a display error wherein hits-per-elements less than 0.1 will drop their leading zero after the decimal, so a 0.05 will display as 0.5. You can see this quite obviously if you sort by HPE on the combat screen. Doing the math, the sturm squads have a true HPE of .075, so that seems to be what's happened here.

You are correct, I just noticed that, too.

By the way, here is another battle in which you can see that the Sturm Squads are outperformed by regular Rifle Squads 43:



It's really a regular occurrence.

[AngularMan]

Playing around with the editor, I think I found a more serious problem. Giving the Squad more StGs, or more ammunition, all that didn't solve the problem.

And then it hit me, the reason why the Pioneer44 squads perform similarly with only 2 StG44s is that the quantity modifier doesn't matter much, if at all. So I gave the Sturm Squad 4x2 StGs instad of 1x8 StGs, and voilà, they performed much better and closer to expectation. Both squads should have 8 StGs, but the outcome is far from the same.

Unfortunately that points to much bigger problems with infantry fights: squads with more diverse weaponry perform better. Even an additional pistol is better than just adding another StG44via the quantity modifier. Thus, squads restricted to just one weapon tend to perform poorly.

Maybe that's WAD, but I don't know why it would be ... I don't think 4x2 should be better than 1x8