That sounds like a great idea until someone like Arklon plays and his opening move is deploying Command Centers for no reason (and probably failing the mission).
I finished putting the structure kits in the Convecs. And now you fail the scenario if any structures are built. Although since you have 0 people, it doesn't really advance your cause to build them in the first place.
I did that in one of Vaga's other missions. All my units just up and drove off and the mission ended. "Where ya goin? I'm just setting up base. Fine than, piss on you guys..."
Yeah, I realized that I've made 2 mission where you have to evacuate with convoys and 1 where you have to evacuate in a starship. So evacuation is definitely a recurring theme. This one follows the trend.
When playing multiplayer, the scenario now builds the convoys to match if you select Eden or Plymouth for your colony. I wrote up a quick function that randomizes the AIs color and ensures it is not set to one of the players' colors. It relies on HFL. You can also turn night on in multiplayer, but the night never transitions back to day. It is designed for daytime play though (no built in lights out sneak attacks).
I made the scenario more random. Now one surprise attack and one fixed patrol will be randomly selected and not be present each play through. The turrets on attacking units will be randomly selected from pre-built lists. So you might get a bunch of Thors attacking first one round and a mix of Rail Gun/EMPs attacking first the next play-through, etc. Also, whether attacking tank squadrons are lynx or panther is randomly selected except where they need to be set one way or the other for unit speeds to make sense. Each squadron of enemy units that initially start on the map will randomly choose whether they start in a patrol or spread out in a guarded rectangle position. Hopefully that will create some replayability. Some of the variables could make the mission a little easier or more difficult to play through.
I still need to finish defining the patrol routes and guard rects for the starting enemy units, but this should be easy. I want to make the single player AI evacuation convoy a little smarter with how it uses its tanks to defend itself. It will still be pretty rudimentary though. The mission briefing/storyline needs proof-read and cleaned up. Then should be final testing for difficulty.
The storyline has the evacuation convoy traveling to the rescuers' base, so it doesn't really matter if vital vehicles are destroyed like the ConVec carrying the CC. Current victory condition is getting 70% of the non-combat units to the final waypoint and 3 out of 4 of the evacuation transports. If you don't read the storyline and play the multiplayer version, it won't make sense why you don't lose when your ConVec with a CC is destroyed, but I think this is better then trying to define losing conditions based on all the different combinations of vehicles you could lose and no longer be able to sustain a new base.
That reminds me, maybe I should make a failure condition if you decide to dump your truck cargo or your structure kits.