Crunching the numbers: Scottish Nationals 2025

Welcome back to the part of the hobby that makes gaming nerds look like normal people. Today I will take a look at the stats from Scottish Nationals, that I attended 17th-18th of May. If you are looking for an event to attend in 2026, I can warmly recommend the Scottish Nationals. The venue is located in Bathgate outside Edinburgh. It has plenty of space for the tables and the terrain is of a very high standard. All the participants are very friendly and everyone seemed to enjoy their games. But let us get on with the numbers.

Discalimer: I am not a professor in statistics. I learned it 25 years ago at university for 1 semester and have forgotten most of it. The most important thing to remember is these sample sizes are way too small to draw any absolute conclusions. The score sheets are written down by players having fun and then put into excel by me and then I added formulas to get out the data. Any mistakes and/or misinterpretation are mine and mine alone.

The Players and Nations:

There was 30 players signed up but only 28 players attending and there was an option to bring two lists, a red and a blue to avoid “unhistorical” matchups. 8 players chose to show up with both an Allied and an Axis list.

As you can see in the tables above, Germans was the most popular nation to field, as it always is. 12 players picked them with 9 players having them as their sole list. In the next spots we see US with 8 and Italians and Soviets with 5 players each, in the low end we have the minor nations with Romanians 1, Hungarians 2 and Finns 3.

A trend here is that the US with 8 players seem to take advantage of the new dynamic points with 4 players playing a Lee Company and 4 playing a Sherman Company. This makes them the most taken formation together with German Armoured Panzergrenadiers which also was fielded 4 times.

If we look at Force type, we can see that Tank formations is still the main choice with 17 lists having only a tank formation and 9 lists having both a tank formation and another type (infantry/Mech). This is twice the number of the second most field type, that is infantry, with 8 lists. The low number of Mech list can be the lack of options. The American Armoured rifle companies are expensive even when Aggressive (hit on 3+) and near impossible to field if you upgrade them to Careful (hit on 4+). The Italians completely lack a Mech option so that also bring down the numbers.

Missions:

In this event, the score sheet tracked, stance, points, mission and who was the nominal attacker in the mission, which is something we rarely see, enabling us to track winner/loser in fair fights.

With 70 games played over the 2 days we get a fairly wide spread of missions with only a few getting number in a size that can give us pointers not being completely influenced by list choices and player skill. Vally of Death was played 15 times and got a nice split between attacker and defender winning with 6 and 7 wins respectively. the second most played mission was No Retreat which again saw an even split with it being played 8 times with 3 wins to the attacker and 4 to the defender. After that we have a Probe and Encounter with 7 games played each. Probe and Encounter are both “fair fights” in setup but the Defender seemed to do better, so that is something to focus on in the future.

Stances:

The choice of stance is often very important in flames of war and in the previous Crunching the Numbers articles we have seen Attack getting the highest win rate, so let’s see if that remains the same.

In the first graph we see that Attack remains ever so popular, with almost half the stances picked was Attack, followed by defend and lastly Manoeuvre.

Now if we take a look at wins by stance we see that even though attack gets picked a lot it doesn’t transfers directly to wins.

When Manoeuvre and Defend gets matched up we can see from the graph below that Manoeuvre has the upper hand, with 40% wins compared to Defend only winning 33% of the games. This looks very remarkable, but again we should remember that the sample size is small and only 15 games was played with M vs D, so a single game account for 7%. So over all a nice spread in wins and losses for the two stances.

Moving on to Attack vs Manoeuvre. Here we had 14 games.

Again each game accounts for around 7% so it might be a lot less dramatic than what we see. A single win more for Manoeuvre would bring it up 7% and at the same time bring down Attack with 7% so instead of a 22% difference in win rate it would be 7%.

Lastly we have Attack vs Defend:

Now this is a shocker. Defend winning 58% of the games. What happened? Well again I will have to point to the sample size. 19 games was played with A vs M so each game will have rather big impact on the over all results, but worth noticing is that out of those 19 games 13 was the missions No Retreat, It’s a trap or Hold the pocket, which normally are among the 3 best missions for the Defender. Either very compact and easier to defend or with very good ambush options. So that might be the reason. Whatever the reason it is an outcome we are not use to seeing.

Last but not least I will show you the win rate per nation. Now a few words of warning before we take a closer look. The more a nation is represented the harder i potentially becomes to get a high win rate. Let’s imagine if all armies was Germans. Then in every game won by a German there would also be a loss by a German so they could at best be at 50% win rate. In the table below I have not filtered out same nation games so just keep that in mind. Also nations that is featured in very few games is sensitive to large outswings, such as the Romanians only playing 1 game and losing, therefore getting a win rate of 0%. From a view of perfect balance in the game we should see every nation have around 40% win rate. Normally 20% of the games end in a draw and the remaining 80% should be evenly split between the two nations playing.

Looiking at the 4 most featured Nations, Germans, Americans, Soviets and Italians it seems to be fairly balanced with only the Americans looking a little high. This might be the price of the Lees and Shermans or because good players try and locate those tiny advantages and therefore play a certain nation.

That’s all from me, this time. I hope you have found it fun and maybe even interesting and I urge you to have a look and draw your own conclusions.

Happy hobbying.

-Soren-