Scatter
Whether objects on a mission are allowed to scatter, or the intelligence level at which a house's objects step aside from an incoming threat.
IQ threshold
- Applies to
- global rules
- File
rules.ini- Section
[IQ]- Value
- integer
- When omitted
3
A cell that is warned a threat is coming asks each of its occupants whether it should get out of the way, and one of the answers that says yes is the occupant’s house holding an IQ at or above this level. The comparison is against the house, not the object, and it never asks whether that house is under computer control: a map that raises a player house’s IQ this far has its vehicles stepping aside from incoming fire without being told to.
The threshold is only one of several ways past that decision, and the same warning reaches other objects through the others; PlayerScatter covers the full test and the two further decisions that read it.
Mission allows scattering
- Applies to
- mission behavior
- File
rules.ini- Section
[<Mission name>]- Value
- boolean
- When omitted
yes
The setting lives in a mission’s own section and is read from the mission the object being asked to move is currently in. At no the request is refused at the top of the routine, before anything else about the object or the threat is looked at. PlayerScatter covers the separate decisions that lead to a request being made in the first place.
[Harvest]Scatter=noHow absolute the refusal is depends on what is being asked. A vehicle or a soldier is refused only when the request is not a forced one, and forcing is the common case rather than the exception: some three dozen call sites pass the forced flag, among them the player’s own scatter order, a team’s scatter mission, an object answering the shot that hit it, a crew or a survivor emerging from a wreck, and an object left standing on a building’s footprint. A vehicle also has an earlier refusal that never reaches the flag at all — on the sleep, sticky and unload missions, and for a train whatever its mission, its routine returns before the flag is read. An aircraft has neither exemption: its scatter routine tests nothing but this flag, so a mission marked this way pins it completely.
One caller checks the mission itself rather than leaving the refusal to the routine. An object that has just been damaged and is not allowed to answer the attacker is offered a scatter only when its mission permits one, and that request is forced — so this is the one forced path the setting still stops.