Warning: long post ahead.
A few days ago I was playing SCW and got a weird result upon attacking a pinned troop downhill (lost 7 attackers to 0 defenders). I thought "well that's strange" and felt moved to look a bit deeper into how exactly the game handles assaults. First thing I did was check the manual as usual, and verified that pinned units should be defending at 1/4 strength.
I then moved on to the actual assault calculation and to my surprise I found out that the number of casualties I'd suffered was simply not possible as per the game rules. What exactly had happened then?
Ever spurred by a tinkerer's mind and having some free time in my hands, I decided to conduct a number of trials. I set up a couple of test scenarios using the standard tools (scen, oob & map editors) provided with Grenada, and spent several hours engaging in hundreds of assaults and recording results. Here are my findings.
When reading the following paragraphs, please keep in mind at all times that:
a) I may be wrong (shocking!). I'm pretty new to the series so this should be the standard assumption in all cases. Please make a mental note to preface everything you read here with the words "Apparently"/"In my opinion".
b) The anomalies recorded here may apply only to the titles I tested, to only a set of titles or to the whole SB series (my guess is the latter).
c) Expressions such as "anomalies", "incorrect", "not working as intended", etc. should be interpreted as designating deviations from the manual, which for the sake of simplicity I'll take as gospel. They are not intended to be value judgements. In fact it may well be the case that it is the manual that is "incorrect", or simply outdated.
For this post, I'll use the Grenada manual for reference. I'll also try to keep math to a minimum and only elaborate if needed or requested.
Cutting straight to the bottom line: Assaults do not work as it says in the tin. The assault mechanics deviate from the manual in three main ways (as far as I've been able to gather):
1) Defending units will retreat even when they've suffered 0 casualties. I will ignore this effect because I feel it may be related to the next finding.
2) Losses inflicted to both the attacking and the defending forces can exceed expected values (based on the relevant Assault Loss parameters), by up to around 50%.
3) Crucially, Disrupted, Pinned and Demoralized defending units receive comparatively marginal penalties to their firepower, well below the values described in the manual. This may be the result of a bug or a design decision that was never documented.
In game terms, findings #2 and #3 mean that attackers may suffer much heavier losses than expected when attacking supposedly weakened units.
So, let's tackle finding #2. Losses are indeed higher than expected across the board: all units seem to be able to inflict more casualties than they should. Hence my surprise when I collated my results and verified that AVERAGE losses DO match the expected values based on the parameter data. This leads me to conclude that some variation is added to the losses calculation both on the upper and lower end of the expected range, and it all evens out over time. (I'm personally not sure this is a good idea. Given the general short length of each battle, getting extreme results on a regular basis IMO adds an excessive level of randomness even if the values tend to level over many assaults. However this is a matter of design and/or preference).
The main issue lies with finding #3. I'll illustrate with an example using SCW. According to the manual, a Demoralized defending unit has an assault value of 1/8 its normal capacity [page 57]. In other words, it gets a penalty of 87.5% to its assault value. Based on my testing, the actual penalty applied by the game is just 20%, meaning the demoralized unit defends at 80% or 4/5 of its nominal capabilities, a +500% increase from what it should be.
HOW??
In my last test run, 3 squads of 10 men each went again a single full, demoralized squad. The results were 6-0 in favor of the defenders. This happened twice in the space of a dozen assaults. These are NOT uncommon results, as one may expect, and the reduced penalties also apply to Pinned and Disrupted units (albeit to a lesser degree, as with the "theoretical" penalty). Only after looking sideways at the results from hundreds of tests and squinting hard I noticed a pattern that seemed like it could explain HOW penalties are reduced. I made an educated guess, and it turns out it largely fitted the data I was getting.
To understand how it works one has to look at the math and, in particular, the Infantry & Weapon Assault values in the parameter data. Those values define the extent of the penalty reduction and, therefore, the extent to which it will affect a given game in the series.
In a nutshell, games where weapons have a high Assault value will be less affected (but still the effect will be noticeable). In games like SCW, where the main weapon has an Assault value of just 6, assaults are indeed very (disproportionately) risky for attackers.
WHY??
So the effects of a unit's failing morale on its assault performance have been largely nerfed, contradicting the manual. Why? I will say that once I figured out the "how", the answer to the "why" seemed straightforward. To me, this looks like an oversight-- in other words, a bug.
That said, it may well be that:
a) this is a known feature, not a bug,
b) this is indeed a known bug that's been brought up before in the 2 decades the series has been around, but nobody cares as the unpredictable nature of assaults, even against broken units, makes the game a lot of fun,
b) this is indeed a known bug, but the code is locked and/or the series is not supported anymore, and/or there's no one left to fix it, or
c) someone has a simpler explanation, everything I've written is a whole pile of nonsense and I just wasted a huge chunk of my time.(*)
(*) Well, not really. This has been fun, even if it turns out to have been a complete exercise in futility
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