fire value for mortars

[Green]

Note that the quote above says that the "alternate fire resolution" does NOT apply to mortars. Also, one would expect that (against single targets), the alternate fire rule would INCREASE firepower, not lower it (if there is only one target, the full *2 firepower would hit that target, not be spread out over many targets according to their strength). This also helps explain why only mortars seem to be so weak (they do not get their fire values doubled like other indirect assets...). But of course it cannot explain the actual fire values observed in the game, which really seem to be unexpectedly low...

My apologies. As you say, mortars are indeed excluded from the Alternate Indirect Fire rule. Somehow by the time I got around to replying I had forgotten that the entire question related to mortars!

But I believe their attack value is still proportional to the total size of units in the hex. I assume the calculation uses the same basic proportional method as used by the Alternate Indirect Fire rule but only the target unit is affected. Of course the firepower is not doubled as they fire twice but otherwise the calculation should be much the same. So the attack value will increase as the target size increases. And target size would include the size of any non-target units in the hex, even though the non-targets would not be affected by the attack. 

Makes sense to me since more targets would mean each target would be more compact and therefore suffer more damage if attacked.