"How many of us are there?"

[Count_Swagula]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): It's a bit silly to hear people constantly ask "How many of us are there?" especially for a queen, considering it's a hivemind, and the queen's hivemind strength is directly porportional to 'how many of us are there'. Essentially: for the marines, squad leaders should be able to view how many marines are under their squad, their names, assignments, and locations (if sensors are enabled) - and maybe the locations of other squad leaders. For aliens, the queen should be able to have some verb that displays a count of how many aliens of what type there are. Kind of like staffwho.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): It makes squads more coordinated (hopefully less stupid), and gives aliens greater information about what they should already know.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): What I'd put here is described above and below

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): Give PDA's to squad leaders and potentially the same for commanders (maybe as an item in their lockers). They would automatically come pre-loaded with a cartrige and have a box of spares. The cartrige would allow them to view a crew manifest that displays the names of every ID assigned to their squad, with a gps location (or a map, if you're feeling up to the task), and potentially the same for the leaders of other squads, for coordination's sake. The commander's one would probably contain all squads/soldiers. The listings should be sorted by assignment, and not soldier name, so it'd look like this:


Alpha Medic - (name) - (gps)
Alpha Medic - (name) - (sensors disabled)
Alpha Engineer - (name) - (alive)
Alpha Standard - (name) - (gps)
Alpha Standard (name) - (alive)
Delta Leader ( name) - (alive)
Bravo Leader (name) - (decesased)

You get the idea.

For the aliens, it'd basically just be a verb the queen clicks, and then it dumps this into their ooc area:
PRAETORS - #
RUNNERS - #
etc.

Sorted by caste, of course. There's no need to dump their names, considering they're just numbers anyway. Perhaps a death count, too.

[UnknownMurder]

I like this when ONLY the Command Staffs can read this and the Queen.

[JohnKilla56]

Pretty much always on suit sensors bro....... but either way its a good idea in my book and they had this in the Aliens movie so it makes since that we would have it.

[Felkvir]

+1. And why restrict the ability to sense how many aliens there are to just the queen? Like he just explained, it's a hivemind. They're all naturally connected.

[speedybst]

+1. Hate it when you have no idea how many aliens you have to help you in your ambushes.