General CE#

First of all, there's far too many different enemy formations to even be able to have a single value expressing an echelon's effectiveness – even the best RFHG echelon will suck against scouts at night, any echelon with less than two armoured tanks will suck against Judge, etc. pp. So the whole idea is fatally flawed and entirely pointless.

Even apart from that, the weighting is totally whack, e.g. overemphasizing armour. A 3SG2MG echelon sucks in combat because it has too little offensive power, cannot burst down enemies on the first mag, and will take substantial damage regardless of how much armour it has; a lower CE echelon with 1SG1HG3MG will meanwhile likely not take any damage at all. So not only is it useless because you need different echelon types for different enemies, it's doubly useless because you can't even use it to compare echelons of the same type.

The same goes for enemy CE – that is mostly inflated by enemy HP, especially for bosses. With newer white faction enemies, force shields also massively boost CE (while being easily neutralized by HOCs.) It doesn't even attempt to factor in how mechanically difficult an enemy is, which is in practice most often the limiting factor.

The only time you should care about CE optimizations is if you want to use Auto Battle for underlevelled teams. Since Auto Battles also suck, taking extremely long and eating a shitton of resources for not many drop chances and not much EXP, this most likely shouldn't come up either.

And because this wasn't useless enough yet, CE can also just plain glitch out:

TL;DR: Ignore CE, and dickpunch people who have MGSG support echelons.

Theatre mode#

Theatre mode uses a completely different formula to calculate boss fight CE. It has heavily diminishing returns, once you're past the "every echelon slot is filled with literally any levelled doll" threshold you're looking at stacking thousands of CE points for double-digit differences in final battle scores. Not worth bothering with unless you're already in the top 100, and even then it will be ultimately betting that decides your fate.