How to avoid ships evacuating too fast?

[Arparso]

What's the preferred way to delay evacuation procedures? Sometimes my crews leave the ship already at around 40-50% health, which seems a bit early.

[DreamorCZ]

My preferred way is to go to tacticsbase.ini and change EvacDamageLimit as I need for every crew rank.
Also, you can use 'NoCrew' as the last resort of the problem.

[Arparso]

Ah, thx, EvacDamageLimit sounds like the way to go

Is there actually any way to set the crew's experience level without adding an NPC to the ship? (or, alternatively, to add a random NPC to a ship through scripting)

[DreamorCZ]

From what I know, crew level can be changed only by NPC and default level is Rookier for all ships.

Only thing I can think out is use of 'Choose(weightN, commandN)' for random NPCs but I'm not sure if that can be added to ENTITIES.

[Arparso]

Yeah, well... assigning NPCs to ships isn't THAT hard - there is a MoveNPC() command (or something like that) available. The problem is, you'd have to create those NPCs first somehow. Doing that purely within RULES without access to the ENTITIES section seems impossible. Or is there a NPC-related command similar to CreateShip() somewhere?

[The Old Dragon]

As far as I'm aware, NPC's can only be created in either the entities section of the mission file (for either mod or campaign level scripting) or in the NPC.ini file and added to the ship through the .rules files (for campaign level only).

The only way I can think of to add a random character to a ship, would be to pre-create the characters and assign them to a hidden object. From there, you could write a script to pick and move one of them to the target ship.

Not particularly pretty and will probably cost you a useable ship to implement, but it's a start.