Discuss: Survivor.Count

[Renegade]

I pondered adding Survivor.Count as requested by EVA-251 while adding the Veteran/Elite chances; request was as followed:

I hope this wouldn't be considering suggestion hijacking, but I believe that a tag along the lines of Survivor.Count= could also be a useful addition to the logic. I've always found it weird that only a single guy would escape out of a 4-man battle tank every time.

While I thought about how to implement this, though, I ran into a rather basic problem: How to determine how many pilots any given tank has?

The obvious go-to solution would be Size=, but Size has been used for different purposes by Westwood - it determines, true to its name, the dimension or volume of the object - meaning that, in practice, several very different types of tanks have the same size values:

Harvester, IFV, Grizzly, Mirage, Prism: Size=3
MCVs, Apocalypse, Mastermind, Battle Fortress: Size=6
The Landing Craft, which also goes over land, has Size=16

Does a Mastermind have a driver at all?
If the IFV had more than one crew, what would it need a gunner for?
Are there really six people walking around inside an Apocalypse or BFT?

You may wonder why this is important; it's important for the question of default values. What to do if Survivor.Count is not given?

• No survivors?
  
• Only one survivor?
  
• Survivors based on some other default attribute?
  

Because, while one could argue that it's the modder's responsibility to ensure his mod is balanced, sentencing people to update every single tank in the game would be unfortunate.

In addition, there is a secondary question to consider: Should Passengers and Pilots add up?
e.g. if you assume 2 drivers for a Battle Fortress, and 5 Passengers - do you at best get the Passengers back, or up to 7 people?

And then there's the question of limits...assume we add this logic, and assume we use Size as a default. Assume also that we are lucky, and get the full amount of crew back.

Code:

[E1]
Cost=200

[FV]
Cost=600
Size=3

In the luckiest case, someone would make no monetary loss from losing an IFV at all. That sort of fucks up the balance. We cannot make that the default.
And that's only assuming crew.
Imagine we do code it so that Pilots and Passengers add up, and say the Pilot is a Chrono Legionaire.
Imagine how frustrating it is to the enemy to destroy 2100 credits worth of equipment, and the player just shrugs it off and bodyguards the CLEG with his new squad of GIs.

This poses the question: Should there be a hardcoded limit?
Something like "the combined value of all survivors must not exceed half the cost of the dying unit"?

On a technical level, the flag itself should be easy to do. Just make more people spawn.
In the easiest case, we can just say "obey Survivor.Count, and if it doesn't exist, behave as before; don't check who or what the survivors are". That's perfectly possible. But it would leave all default units with one or less survivors, and would open the gates for $100 tanks which spawn $10000 worth of survivors.

On the other hand, the latter can be intended. One could, for example, create a tank that opens a gate to the future, make the deploy weapon a suicide weapon, use a shiny vortex as the destruction animation, and then have Survivor.Count = 100. That's a reasonable usage of the system, no matter how much free equipment the player gets through it.

Opinions? Suggestions?