Field manual
Before you attack: how to read a scouting report
Sending a rally without scouting first is one of the most expensive mistakes in Last War — and one of the most common. The game gives every commander a clean, free intelligence tool, and the report it produces tells you almost everything you need to know about whether the fight is worth taking. This guide walks through how to pull a scout, what the report actually contains, and the four numbers that decide whether you win, lose, or trade poorly.
Why scouting is not optional
A march of troops you spent days training can disappear in a single rally if the base on the other end was stronger than it looked from the outside. The map only shows a base name, an alliance tag and the rough power range — it does not show the tier of the troops inside the wall, the strength of the heroes on the platform, or whether the player has a fresh Garrison waiting to absorb the first attack. Scouting closes that gap. The cost is one Scout consumable and a minute of waiting; the upside is the difference between a clean wipe and donating your roster to the enemy hospital. Veterans scout before every meaningful attack and before every rally they accept, even on bases they have hit before — a commander can swap heroes, retrain troops or hospital-stock between fights.
How to scout: from map to mailbox
Tap the enemy base on the world map, then tap the Scout option in the action menu. A march of scouts is dispatched to the target and, depending on distance, takes some minutes to arrive and return. The result lands in your in-game mailbox as a Scout report — open the mail tab to read it. Scout marches are cheap to send and do not engage in combat, but the target is alerted that they were scouted, so do not assume the report stays private. R5s typically scout the rival's leading members in the days leading up to SVS and cross-reference the reports with the LastRank profile of each name — the report tells you what they have *right now*, and the LastRank history tells you whether they are climbing or coasting.
What's in the report: building levels and Garrison
The Scout report opens with the rival's building levels: most importantly the HQ (Headquarters) level, the Command Center, and the Barracks. HQ level is the rough tier of the account; Command Center caps how many heroes the rival can field at once; Barracks caps the size of each march. Below that, the report shows which heroes are mounted on the wall — the defensive hero loadout the rival has staged for incoming attacks — and the size of the Garrison, the standing pool of troops parked at home that absorbs damage before the rival's main army takes any. A rival with a small Garrison and a weak wall is exposed; a rival with a deep Garrison stalls any rally that does not bring overwhelming force. Memorise those three lines — they are the heart of every Scout report.
March Size, troop tier and morale
Power is not the only number that decides a fight. The march size — how many soldiers the rival can pack into a single deployment — is gated by Barracks level and by alliance/research bonuses, and it interacts with a morale mechanic that the game uses to scale damage, HP and defence. A larger march, all else equal, hits harder, takes less and resists rout longer than a smaller march of the same tier. The other axis is troop tier — T9, T10, T11 in current updates. A higher-tier troop almost always beats a lower-tier troop if the counts are close, but a much larger march of T9 can still grind down a small T10 force because morale outweighs the tier gap at extreme size differentials. Special Forces research is the single biggest swing here: it lifts both deployable troop count and per-unit performance, and a rival deep into the Special Forces tree punches above their headline Power.
Hero synergy: who hits the front, who hits the back
Once you know what the rival has on the wall, the question becomes whether *your* squad counters it. Each hero in Last War has a target preference — some hammer the front line, others reach for the back row where commanders typically stack squishier units. Heroes like Tesla are valued specifically because they target the back row, and a rival with a thin back row gets shredded by them; conversely, sending a back-row hero against a defence that has a wall of dedicated tanks in front buys nothing. Open the Scout report, note which heroes the rival has on the wall and in which slot, then check your own current squad: if your top damage dealer hits the row where the rival is weakest, you have a tactical edge before counting numbers. Specific hero meta shifts every season — the public reference most veterans use for current picks per troop type is cpt-hedge.com.
Centres, chips and gear: the silent stat gap
The last layer the report exposes is the rival's investment in the three research Centres (Tank, Aircraft, Missile) and in their hero gear. A rival whose primary Centre is far above yours has stat bonuses on every attack that do not show up on the Power number until tropas hit. Hero chips and equipment (UR / SSR rarities, levels above 10) compound the same effect: at similar troop counts and tiers, the player with maxed components consistently outperforms. The practical read for an alliance leader is this — the four lines worth scanning every Scout report are HQ level, Garrison size, hero loadout on the wall, and current-tier troop count. If three of the four are stronger than your own, walk away. If two are weaker, rally with confidence. If it splits down the middle, the fight is decided by hero synergy and timing, and that is where the previous section earns its place.