Ground Combat Question (Please no peeking CHIPPER)

[Coach Zuck]

Finding some "interesting" results in ground combats that I don't get above a 1:1; although it happens a lot on 1:2 attacks.

Is it common for the way the code is written that one unit takes the Bulk of casualties.
I have had several combats where one unit's Assault (AV) drops to single digits ( as low as 1) from 200 or more. Typically this has happened to brigades or regiments in my assaulting force. Recently happened in attack vs Chinese were a clean brigade 100% ToE Assault of 190 now has an AV of 1. This has happened in about four attacks.

Is this normal?

[Lokasenna]

Yes. Smaller units typically take higher casualties than larger units in the same fight. They are just less resilient to damage. This is a widely held conclusion on these forums, based on observation only, however it bears out in my experience in the game as well.

And yes, it is also common for one unit to take the brunt of the casualties in a given fight. I actually prefer this over evenly spread casualties, as it allows you to rotate out the badly-hit unit for a fresh one if you like, while the others stay to continue the fight.

[Feltan]

Yes, smaller units get whacked in a stack of ground units.  If you have a Regiment and a Division in combat from the same stack, the Regiment will take the lion's share of the losses.  These are my observations as well.
 
Don't know why.  It isn't historical, but that's the way the game adjudicates losses in ground combat.
 
Regards,
Feltan

[wdolson]

Ground combat has two phases. In the first, each device in each unit with offensive capability gets a shot at each of the others and each defending device with offensive capability gets to shoot back. This phase is where most of the casualties happen. Each device has so many shots per combat, so the first unit in the stack gets shot at the most. In WitP, the stack was sorted by device number, so command HQs were at the top of the stack and got shot at the most. In AE, the stack is sorted randomly with combat units on top and non-combat units on the bottom.

There are a lot of randoms involved. I don't remember them all but I seem to recall there is a random about how many shots a unit gets. It falls within a range. So every unit has a shot at the first enemy unit, but the odds of getting more shots goes down as you work your way down the stack.

By luck of the draw, whichever unit ended up on the top of the stack usually takes the most casualties. If that is a small unit, the damage is more noticeable than if it is a division or corps. It's probably a good idea to keep small combat units out of big battles and only use them for small operations if possible. Of course if you're defending that isn't usually an option.

In the second phase of combat the AV balance is resolved using the new AV after everybody has shot at one another. This determines if anybody is going to retreat, and changing ownership of bases. A unit may take more casualties when it retreats.

Forts can be reduced during the shooting at one another phase if you have combat engineers on the job, or the assault itself can reduce forts in the second phase.

Bill