In my case, each individual unit involved is its own squad. Nobody directly commands anybody else. I don't expect the AI to take over for a person that disconnects either. With this in mind, is it possible at mission startup for each client to transmit its player to the server? That would at least give me the correct list.
Somebody on the BI forums mentioned a CoC multiplayer addon for things like this. Their system is expansive, and does a lot of things that don't matter to me in this mission.
What I was thinking of try is in the init.sqs:
A. Running server AI script if it's running on the server. It would be delayed a second to give the clients a moment to transmit it.
B. Otherwise, this is the client, and transmiit player name to a global array.
I presume all machines will have that array, and it should build up right when the mission starts. I should be fine with that. In fact, I'd be trying it right now if I could test it at the moment . . . :-\