SCOUT attacks's - Combat intensity

[Wiedrock]

Running the same attack 40'ish times with the following setup.

Combatpredictor_1.jpg (833.64 KiB) Viewed 1471 times

The usual results looked like this. We had about 20% HELD attacks (none "halted at range"). Note the hit Soviets DAM/DES/DIS.
Usually we got around ~350-500 Soviet elements hit.

Combatpredictor_usual results.jpg (807.43 KiB) Viewed 1471 times

After this 40 runs I got the first SCOUT.
Note the hit Soviet elements. We went from 350-500 to 1059, more than Double (sometimes triple).

SCOUT Manual.jpg (364.88 KiB) Viewed 1471 times

We have established a while ago that in some (~about 50%~) Hasty attacks the Artillery SUs are not firing at all. But even if they fire it does not reach such levels of hitting.
Since the SCOUT is defined before combat takes place (I can't make sense of this), it seems to bypass some of the Hasty-limiting combat performance effects.
Not sure what the manual is referring to when it speaks of: "will result in reduced fighting and losses on both sides", but that seems not like what is happening if you compare it to a Hasty attack of any kind.

Since the setup with the two Divisions is so hard to get to become a SCOUT, following an example of a single Division. We see the same behaviour of rather large hitting compared to normal hasties.

SCOUT single Div.jpg (269.04 KiB) Viewed 1471 times

[Wiedrock]

As a comparison - here the double Division attack as a Deliberate Attack.
The total of the DAM/DES/DIS is 1051 elements, same as the SCOUT?!
Again: "will result in reduced fighting and losses on both sides" ...compared to what?

SCOUT vs Deliberate.jpg (279.77 KiB) Viewed 1470 times

[Joel Billings]

I don't know the exact specifics, but I thought that hasty attacks have less artillery bombardment. Perhaps in these cases, the Germans units are much better at causing disruption and losses than the defender (which is out in the open and not in forts). This means the higher shooting in a deliberate attack gets the Germans starting off well and they just shoot the heck out of the Soviet unit which doesn't cause much damage back. In a scout battle, the battle won't close to close range, but that doesn't matter if the Soviet units are low experience and/or already shot up and disrupted by the time the battle closes. Also, for units get a chance to shoot back if they are shot at and missed. The better their experience/morale, the better the chance they will shoot back. That's why those numbers are so important. Very low exp/morale units will shoot rarely, and when they do, they will likely miss, giving the better quality an extra chance to shoot and hurt the poor quality unit. These dynamics make it very hard to predict combat. Sometimes letting a defender shoot more will actually hurt it if it's got low exp/morale.

[Wiedrock]

Hobo also got an taste of SCOUT intensty.

[Wiedrock]

Here other examples of PvP games where SCOUT intensity causes ROUTS. The results are obv. only showing the ROUT but the finalCV show that it have all been SCOUTs.
For the two German examples (there are way more) you see the transfer from SCOUT to ROUT in the footage.

WitW_SCOUTs.png (27.64 KiB) Viewed 571 times

This is the WitW Living Manual. So the text for WitE2 was just copied. Now one would have to answer if it ever worked in WitW as described or whether SCOUTs had the same/similar performance as Deliberate attacks as well all along.

[Sammy5IsAlive]

Here other examples of PvP games where SCOUT intensity causes ROUTS. The results are obv. only showing the ROUT but the finalCV show that it have all been SCOUTs.
For the two German examples (there are way more) you see the transfer from SCOUT to ROUT in the footage.
WitW_SCOUTs.png
This is the WitW Living Manual. So the text for WitE2 was just copied. Now one would have to answer if it ever worked in WitW as described or whether SCOUTs had the same/similar performance as Deliberate attacks as well all along.

These look like the battle you usually get on T1 when taking Riga? IIRC the soviet unit routs because it goes below a certain TOE threshold - even though the combat odd aren't good enough for a 'true' win.

[Wiedrock]

Yes, the ROUT most likely is triggered in such a way. But the TOE shouldn't go that low and it wouldn't if the SCOUT wouldn't perform as if it was a deliberate attack. If the manual is right on what it writes about SCOUTs the intensity is likely bugged.
Or the manual is wrong since WitW.

I mean, realistically you can either go hasty(halve-assed), scout(tried, but too weak and too smart to waste men, so you get intel and retreat) or go balls to the walls. Somehow the latter two seem to be the same in terms of intensity.

[Joel Billings]

Could have something to do with the fact that the direct fire system allows units that are shot at to often fire back. They have to pass a skill roll, something early war German units are good at. So bad defending Soviet troops that are lucky enough to fire, but then miss entirely because they have low skill, leads to high losses when the good attacking units fire back. I'm just guessing, but this isn't anything that's going to be changed.

[Wiedrock]

That's fair.
It's just that then the description of the manual and the naming of the 'tactic' is wrong.
It could be named "backhand blow" or "sudden breakthrough" or ...

Note the specific "DES:DAM:DIS"-ratio for all the SCOUT occurences.
Note that seemingly this "boost to DES and DAM" causes the total hits to be often more than in the deliberat attack.

My favourite I have found in streams so far and which highlights the hit-result-ratios pretty well.

SCOUT_ex004.jpg (119.35 KiB) Viewed 342 times

Here some examples for VtB Germans doing SCOUT-ROUTs. Getting SCOUT as Soviets seems way harder due to needing multiple units usually and all have to pass the roll if the manual is right (with usually worse leaders and less leaders in the chain).

SCOUT to GER ROUTS.jpg (422.56 KiB) Viewed 342 times

Attached some VtB setup which gave a good amount of SCOUT results. Mixed together are all combats with the same SU committments for the collage.
Again the hit-result-ratios are off for the SCOUTs.

[Wiedrock]

The SCOUT seems to (edit wrong: never) rarely use any Artillery fire, which is fine. So it is as Hasty and somewhat random if/how well Artillery fires.
The Combat log (excluding the Artillery Phase) for the SCOUT is about halve the length of the Hasty.
Edit: Somehow the Soviets in the test above never got any Artillery firing, testing some Germans in 1941 - they can fire Artillery in SCOUTs occasionally.

For the VtB test series we see Soviets hitting German elements:
The average hit counts (DES+DAM+DIS) of the three Hasty attacks (that do not "halt at range X") is 237.33.
The average hit counts (DES+DAM+DIS) of the three SCOUT attacks is 477.67.
237.33 is 49.7% of 477.67.

~50% ...May just be an odd coincidence for it to be x2.
So (in this setup) the SCOUT hits twice as many elements as the Hasty (on average - with limited tests).

The three Deliberate attacks have an average hit German elements of 402.67. So 84.1% of the SCOUT.

[Wiedrock]

The combat indicator changes from hasty to deliberate when it is converted to a SCOUT.

[Wiedrock]

The SCOUT seems to (edit wrong: never) rarely use any Artillery fire, which is fine. So it is as Hasty and somewhat random if/how well Artillery fires.
The Combat log (excluding the Artillery Phase) for the SCOUT is about halve the length of the Hasty.
Edit: Somehow the Soviets in the test above never got any Artillery firing, testing some Germans in 1941 - they can fire Artillery in SCOUTs occasionally.

Corrected this, since (at least) Germans seem to have the chance to occasionally fire Artillery. The Soviets in the long executed test setup simply seem to have had bad luck or I did not check the few Artillery-containing SCOUT's logs by chance.

[Wiedrock]

There is an oddity with the finalCV being "normal" once a SCOUT gets halted at range. So here we do not see the usual single digit "special scout CV".

Now since Deliberate and Hasty attacks are seemingly halted at longer ranges once the Attacker's CV are lower than the Defender's CV I wonder which CV are being used in those SCOUTs, since we have 50CV Hasty attacks turn to SCOUTs against 800CV Defenders and not get halted at longer ranges.

Halted SCOUT CV.jpg (170.98 KiB) Viewed 99 times

And in the following I want to highlight the CV increase of the German side.

CV increase SCOUT halted.jpg (150.86 KiB) Viewed 91 times

EDIT: In a current PBEM I found the following. Again note the finalCV increase (units were entrained!).

CV increase SCOUT halted002.jpg (225.93 KiB) Viewed 69 times

[Stamb]

It is unknown why Wiedrock does not share this to illustrate how bad it can be, but this video is definitely the most ridiculous thing that i have ever seen playing this game for years.

https://youtu.be/x1KtpKq1Nho?si=Brb9bj0X_P88CFDJ&t=171
(If for some reason link above does not lead to minute 2:51 then scroll manually)

[Joel Billings]

Re the video, I assume those units were near the 10% ready threshold values with lots of damaged elements. Given fort 2 and light woods the non-adjusted CV was 2 (probably, which would reflect that weak status. The units were shot up enough in the combat by a fresh German unit to rout. It was in the routing, with so many damaged elements, that the big casualties happened. Basically the units were paper tigers, and it is likely that the attached Soviet support units that didn't hit 10% were what kept the battle from being a German victory (they shielded the 3 on map units from total defeat). So that result can be explained, even though it looks bad.

[Wiedrock]

This is another one. https://youtu.be/YpJUs9vucnM?si=O29l1m5QoSpm_uC1&t=555
It contains many more examples. The first one I want to give some context for.

The first combat after the timestamp is the one I already shared before in this quote.

My favourite I have found in streams so far and which highlights the hit-result-ratios pretty well.

Here we can see the amount of damaged elements before combat and the total amount.
Now we take an early 1941 Division and reduce the Artillery + Flak since that is mostly missing.
Now we give it 45MOREX and 100% of the rest.
Now we put it into a Heavy Wood Hex with Fort lvl 1.
So we get this:

1941_example.png (354.29 KiB) Viewed 26 times

It has an defensive CV of 275.
How I set it up it has 1228 elements. The battle has 3699RDY+59DAM.
The manpower and elements is little too much for all 3 Divisions+the Artillery Regiment to be at this condition.
The Artillery may look like this (~120elements):

Art_example.png (19.9 KiB) Viewed 26 times

Scout example leaders.PNG (186.75 KiB) Viewed 18 times

And here also the Leaders.

Overall what seems reasonable to assume is that the combat contained at least 2 almost full Divisions and one which may have lacked like 30% TOE or so and may have had some more Fatigue.
With generaous rounding (can be done in whatever way) and obvious assumptions.
3x~14250+2000Men and we get to 44750 ....close.
3x1220 elements + 120 = 3780 (contains damaged) versus 3699+59=3758 elements in the combat....close
And even if it is +/- 2k Men and +/- 100 elements here or there, this does nto change much.

So I don't see where in this any treshold or amount of DAMaged elements would explain such an outcome.

The Germans attacked across a river.
The Hasty CV were 50, which means defender's CV were 16-times larger.
Even with a deliberate attack with 100CV the attack should have never gotten to close combat (and most likely wouldn't have). But the SCOUT did SCOUT magic on this.


Further sidenote:

Combat delay points are added to a hex as follows:
§ 3 Points – Deliberate attack with final odds < 5 to 1.
§ 2 Points – Deliberate attack with final odds >= 5 to 1 and < 10 to 1.
§ 1 Point – Deliberate attack with final odds >= 10 to 1.
§ 1 Point – Hasty attack with final odds < 10 to 1.
§ 0 Point – Hasty attack with final odds > 10 to 1 unless there is an enemy unit (including the original defender) still adjacent to the hex. In this case a delay of 1 is still imposed.
§ 0 Point if the attack failed but was changed to a scouting battle (23.4.2).

So this goes on top.
Sidenote, in Heavy Urban the SCOUT adds 5 Combat Delay usually.