Clearing rubble

[Green]

In some scenarios I have given up trying to clear rubble presuming the scenario designer has set this due to historical reasons (only a presumption on my part!) and length of scenario.  Another interesting trick is "RUBBLE" only changes to "Rubble" when the hex is cleared, easy to miss this. 

If the clearing engineer unit has less than 100 pers its chance of success will be reduced accordingly.

No, I do not think the number of men changes the probability for rubble clearance in any way. When the manual says "The probability that the rubble will be cleared in the hex is half the Digging-In Parameter Data value per turn", it means literally that.

I am not saying that this is how it should be but this is how it is.

John

I just ran a test scenario with France 40. Standard PDT digging in value of 4%, so 2% for clearing rubble. One French engineer battalion (247 men, quality B) cleared the rubble in 10, 30, and 90 turns on three consecutive runs. This seems to be statistically in line with the 2% chance per turn. Then I did the same with two engineer battalions, 247 men each. They cleared the rubble in 4, 5, 19, and 8 turns in four consecutive runs! So it certainly seems as if extra units equal less time...

The variability is high so you need a reasonably large sample size. Your results suggest a pattern but anything is possible. Perhaps if you repeated your test the results would show the opposite pattern.

I think it is easier to see what is happening if you increase the % in the PDT. I did a test with the digging in percentage set to 100%. So the rubble clearing probability is 50%. A test consisted of a single turn which is equivalent to flipping a coin. I tried this 20 times with a engineer company consisting of a single man. He cleared the rubble 9 times out of 20. So this looks like 50% to me as tossing a coin 20 times and getting 9 heads (or tails) is exactly the sort of result you would expect statistically since the average would be 10.

I then tried it 20 times with a stack of 4 engineer battalions, each with over 500 men. They cleared the rubble 11 times. Exactly the sort of result you would expect for 50%. If the percentage was increased from 50% in any significant way the you would expect something quite different. If the chance was doubled then obviously the stack would have cleared the rubble 20 times out of 20. I could have kept testing but I decided before starting that 20 would be sufficient.

This is not proof that a stack does not have an advantage of some sort. But it strongly suggests that number of men is irrelevant. And if a stack does have an advantage, it cannot be because the digging in % is increased by some factor or that each unit does its own separate test, as these would have produced very different results. So I am struggling to imagine what sort of advantage it could be.  

John