RE: Engineers, Bridges and Suicde....illogical
Well, the extreme severity (broken / max fatigue) of what would happen should the engineer abondon the bridge is necissary for play balance. This would be a concious decision that the player would need to make to balance the pros and cons as you mention. It shouldn't be a feature that gives an advantage or throw off play balance and the penalty is what ensures that this is prevented. The only thing this feature should accomplish is to save the unit from what was a guaranteed death, to be able to get away and spend several days recovering its bridging equipment.
As for the AI, I doubt that it would take advantage of the rule (and it probably shouldn't) because, if it did, it would require further programming to tell the AI when and when not to do this which could cause it to abandon its own units. This is why orders must be given specifically to the AI on when and where to bridge and unbridge.
It is good to be optimistic about a proposal and, as I mentioned before, I think the suggestion is a good idea. But I wouldn't want anyone to hold your breath waiting on it. I meantioned that we had to keep it simple (mainly to make its adoption more attractive), but another reason why it is necissary to keep it simple is because a suggestion like this will only really benifit long scenarios or campaigns and, to make matters worse, only scenarios and title that require the use of bridging units. What I mean is, you really don't need this for T41 or E42 for example - but sure you can still use them there. These considerations combine to give a negative mark to it on the usefulness vs. time to code scale. So anything more complex will make it not worth the effort to implement... from a design point of view of course.
Anyway, not to be a naysayer as I would like to see it, just that I wouldn't want anyone to get angry if it is refused. :(
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