Implement AToW Companion SPA Checks

[binaryspica]

Environment

Ver 0.47.7

Description

For now, when MekHQ checks the unit with more than one personnel, the unit's skills are average of all the crews on the unit, and only the SPA that the majority of crews are possess is counted for the unit.

But, is it mandatory or there is any reference on the rules that actually says so? I have read Campaign Operations but nothing says so. You just need to hire enough crews. And nothing on SPA says all the members are have it. At least I don't get why even the drivers are have to have the gunnery skill, and all the gunners are have to have the skills for the mobility. It is actually unrealistic, for who shoots the gun is the gunner and who drives the vehicle is the driver. Also you can't set all the crews the same SPAs at once and have to give it individually, that makes me sick.

Also, I was think about to make the option to only checks for the vehicle commander, and the rest of them are not considered at all. But is there any rules says not to do? After read the rules I think that it is a grey area and it is nothing wrong to do it, though, but I am not sure you are also agreed on that.

[Windchild292]

@HammerGS Rules check on this one

[binaryspica]

I found it on the rules question forum that, at least Special Pilot Abilities are not bound to the specific personnel, but it is bounded to the whole unit. Although MekHQ does not able to set the default skill and SPA for units, but only for personnel, right now.

[gsparks3]

Rules forum answer is here, for reference.

Really the issue is that the tabletop rules barely treat crewmembers as individuals at all, with them instead acting as a sort of unitary, amorphous blob with the relevant Piloting/Gunnery skills and SPAs. This is difficult to reconcile with MekHQ's detailed tracking of every individual crewmember, with no way to assign abilities to the crew/unit as a whole in the manner described in the rules thread. The simplest change might be to have one Commander for the vehicle/infantry unit in question (which is already implemented, and can be set manually by the player by assigning the desired personnel a higher rank than other crewmembers), whose SPAs determine the overall unit SPAs. This still has the downside of partial crew kills possibly resulting in the death of the Commander and thus the loss of their SPAs, contradicting the ruling from the forum, but I can't think of a better way to do it that would not require some serious code work throughout the program.

[Windchild292]

@gsparks3 raises the problem with the ruling. MekHQ implements personnel in an RPG style instead of as in a tabletop style.

I have discovered that there are proper rules for this as per the MekHQ implementation in the A Time of War Companion, which would be the way this would be implemented in MekHQ. If I were to implement it, I would have all characters operating weaponry checked as an expansion from that, and same for elsewhere. I have renamed the issue to clarify this.

[pheonixstorm]

I don't think the code owner is even around anymore as this has been around for a LONG time.

[Windchild292]

Hence the Needs Code Owner Tag @pheonixstorm... the whole setup doesn't have one

[GiovanniBertuccio]

Could vehicles and infantry be implemented the same way as tech and medical crews? With a named, XP-tracked character in charge and numerous grunts behind the scenes that are still on payroll?

This would make MekHQ crews substantially blob-like, addressing the issue of vehicle crew SPAs, and fix other problems like having to handle so many personnel manually, and the way AtB Commander Leadership interacts with multi-crew units.