[1.25f] Recon uncertainty is shown in a confusing way ?

[BlueTemplar]

I've been seeing new (and not so new) players having an issue with this for years, to the point that IMHO the way this is implemented is seriously broken.

game04_r002_01-start.zip

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continuing below...

[BlueTemplar]

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First, my Recon points are wrong here (according to the Recon tooltip), it should show effective Recon / 400 = 53-2 / 400 = 51 / 400.

(Which in itself seems to be wrong, I would have expected the effective Recon / 400 to be 53-42 / 400 = 11 / 400, because otherwise it's going to result in weird jumps when you go from : not seeing the troop count and types at all, to first starting to see them.)

You can see that the unit troop numbers doesn't match with the number of troops shown : 10(00) shows as 4 and 4(00) shows as 15.

I'm guessing that this is done in order to give a hint to the player that these values are uncertain (ditto for unit stats), however I'm afraid that in practice new players just keep trusting these values over and over. Surely a better way could be found ? Something like showing X ±Y, or coloring them gray/transparent ?

Similarly, when the combat starts, round 0 shows a yet different number of troops :

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On TOP of that, what keeps misleading new players, is that the combat odds have their background color-coded (and big front and center), while Recon is not, hidden away in a corner.

(It's only mildly frustrating when the actual number of troops is much smaller than shown - which I have trouble remembering happening, and it would be yet another bug if the estimated troops can only go up, but not down - but players really don't like the opposite situation, when they get "jumped from the bushes" by much more troops than initially shown. At least in case where they had no idea that ANY units were there, the fog of war was present to prevent overconfidence, and if they only knew that units existed, the question marks on them was also a warning.)

I'm not sure about the best way to communicate that, but I guess that color-coding like this would be a start : (red = bad)

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(with an outline for the odds so that they are still readable in a red on red situation)

(Even better would be to show odds too as X ±Y : 1 or 1 : X ±Y, but this is opening a whole other can of worms...)

TODO : links to examples of confusion...

[BlueTemplar]

So, after more testing, the troop numbers corresponding to Defensive Power (before modifiers), seems to be the ones not multiplied by 100 : the ones showing up to the left, and also in the Odds popup (unsurprisingly, I guess).

Save before combat (with Recon not maxed out yet, so wrong numbers) :

game04_r004_testing_recon.zip

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(Save after combat available from the thread in the War Room linked above.)

[BlueTemplar]

it would be yet another bug if the estimated troops can only go up, but not down

BTW, from the above testing, there's no bug like this here, just lack of me paying attention :
at least one of these 3 different troop counts can indeed go down : as I have seen during this specific test for the one used for odds : going from some recon to max recon, (unmodified) defensive power went DOWN, despite none of the defending militia having been killed (or retreated to another hex).
(Assuming here that the game would always tell you when an enemy troop gets killed in a combat with your troops ?)