So, I was reading somewhere (probably one of the blogs linked on my page) about how making a list should consider point efficiency. There are several roles you need to fill in an army, scoring, anti-vehicle, etc, and the idea is to study your codex and fill each role as efficiently as possible. The author of the blog said you only compare your units to your own codex (because even if the land speeders are cheaper in another army, you can only work with what you have), however with allies this may not be true. Once you determine who your ally is going to be, you need to see if you can fill some roles more efficiently from that codex. However, for now I am sticking with C:BA, and starting with scoring units. First up is the scout.
Scoring
The first group I am going to look at from C:BA is the scoring units. My rough draft of this post had a lot of spreadsheet math, broken down into lots of details, and points per kill, and stuff like that. Instead of posting all of that, I am going to basically sum up. If I am taking scouts to score, the most important thing for me is that they can stay on the objective, so I am taking 10 scouts, and giving them camo cloaks. This means that the scouts will have 4+ armor save and 4+ cover save. So it would take about 60 boltgun shots fired from MEQs to remove this unit. If a unit had all plasma, there would still be a 4+ save (area terrain + cloak), so it would take 36 plasma shots to wipe them out, or they can go to ground and get a 2+ save by going to ground, which would enable them to be able to absorb 180 boltgun shots or 110 plasma shots. While I wasn't going to do a bunch of match, I think talking about how many points you are paying per absorbed shot is relevant when talking about a scoring unit, so taking the median of 36 and 180, you can absorb about 108 shots for 170 points (my unit has all sniper rifles). This comes out to 170/108, or about 1.57 points per shot absorbed.
Shooting
You want your scoring unit to contribute, so an average unit of 10 scouts with sniper rifles will inflict about 9 unsaved wounds against MEQ in the open over a 5 turn game. This comes out to paying about 18.5 points per wound this unit inflicts.
Melee
If this unit gets charged, it can withstand about 40 melee attacks, or about 4.5 points per wound, which makes it the least efficient scoring unit when it comes to getting charged. What is interesting though, is that this unit is equal to a tactical unit in terms of wounds inflicted on the charge (since the WS 3 will translate to generally hitting on a 4, just like the tac squad), and a scout squad armed with melee weapon is more point efficient on the charge than a squad of assault marines (same number of attacks, still needing 4s to hit and wound, and cheaper).
Disruption
Scouts have outflank, infiltrate, and scout. This gives them a lot of disruption capabilities. Personally, I used to like outflank, but now that you can't attack the turn you come in, I am kind of meh about it, since it isn't really better than DoA; the assault marines have better armor to absorb that round of shooting, and aren't susceptible to being blocked off the board.
Looking at infiltrate and scout, I noticed that you can infiltrate 18" away in the open, then scout move 6", to start the game withing 12" of the enemy, even in line of sight. Since you can not assault first turn if you use either of these abilities, I am not sure what you gain, since scouts aren't great for standing up to charge. I guess if you can get into cover within 12", with shotguns, combi-flamers (or maybe even boltguns), along with a melta bomb for the sgt, you can create enough of a threat that the enemy will have to take a turn to deal with that unit (if you go to ground they probably will have to use a unit to assault you too). If I was going to do this though, I would probably pass on the camo cloaks, and I would probably combat squad the unit into 2 units, on opposite sides of the board from each other, creating 3 fronts for the enemy to deal with. I realize 2 of these fronts are not very dangerous, but the more choices your opponent has to make, the more chances he has to make a mistake (and if he completely ignores them, krak grenades in his backfield will hurt soft targets, and if the scouts are still alive one turn 3, you can throw them at whatever your assault marines are about to charge to suck up the over watch.
Conclusions: I was trying to talk myself out of scouts, as they don't shoot as well as tacticals, outflank is inferior to DoA, and they aren't so much cheaper that tacticals anyway. However, after the disruption paragraph, I may have talked myself into 1 squad (which I would have to buy, since my 10,000
points worth of Marines do not include a single scout.)
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