I wrote that no mission counts kills. Too strong. What holds is narrower: no
mission reads the two GLOBAL counters (33/34, verified 0 sites). The game does
track kills and missions test them through attribution:
built-in 105 killed_by_player(unit) -- reads [squadron+600], which the
unit-death handler sets from the damage message's _BY_PLAYER flag -- 117 sites
across 14 stages (S02: 38, S01: 32), the 17th-most-used built-in in Stage 02.
built-in 72 -- numerator is a per-(killer, victim) squadron KILL COUNTER,
incremented in the unit-death handler; 13 sites, S01 only.
So 'did the player get that kill' is a common predicate; the game just never asks
'how many kills in total'. Evidence for 105 is the game's own strings: the death
handler branches into KILLED_BY_PLAYER vs KILLED, beside LOST_TURRET_BY_PLAYER,
SHIELD_DOWNED_BY_PLAYER and the rest.
Also withdraws the 'current / initial members' gloss on built-in 72: it is
100 x (units of B killed by A) / (declared members of B), attributed kills rather
than survivors, and reads 0 unless the script registered the (A,B) pair.
Built-in 55 resolved and shown to be effectively dead (0 sites corpus-wide);
built-in 75 confirmed as five HUD text lines via a [phase+376] dictionary.
All 28 StageNN.ssb decoded: 2,085,628 bytes, 25,705 call sites, 108 of 147
built-ins used. Verified the survey independently -- 33=0, 34=0, 108 distinct,
hp_pct_test 1955, unit_state 1271, all exact.
global_counter0/1 have ZERO call sites in all 28 stages. The handlers exist and
are wired; no mission calls them. So 'does a wave start after N kills?' is
answered for the whole game, not just Stage 02: no mission counts kills.
Two idioms change how the counts read. hp_pct_test(unit, 0.0) IS a destruction
test -- 1786 of 1955 calls (91%) pass 0.0, and the handler's zero path
additionally requires state == 4 -- so unit_state and hp_pct_test(...,0) are
interchangeable and stages just pick one. And squad_survival_pct is a boolean,
not a percentage: an integer divwu before the x100 means it can only be 0 or
100, and all 29 sites pass a friendly TCAF squadron with threshold 99.9, making
it 'has this escort lost anybody'. The game has no destroy-N%-of-a-squadron
objective.
Outliers: S18-S23 (tutorials) have no flag/trigger machinery at all -- linear
lessons; S16 has no unit predicates, only a descending player-gauge ladder.
Not settled: group_ratio_pct takes two unit indices (blob+4 and blob+12) and its
numerator lookup was not read to the bottom, so it is not being labelled
'percent killed by the player'. isl.py's UNIT_ARG omitted 71/72.
