Spring RTS Engine

I am starting work on my own little mod, and I have alot of questions.

This mod will include infantry, being inexpensive, and quick to make they will be widley used, thus being common on the battle field (a clash of a few hundred will not be alien in this game). They will be standing about half the height of a tree. So, what do you guys think would be a good number of polygons to shoot for when making an infantry unit?

Infantry units will not be bound to just a main fire arm, is it possible to add in seperate animations for all their task? For instance, lobbing a grenade, bashing someone with their rifle, healing a freind etc...

Lets say these infantry men have just taken a vital strip of high ground, and they need to keep it while tanks, arty, and other slower units come in to fortify the area. Would it be possible to make them dig foxholes? Either as a command or a structure that all of them know how to build? I bet that wouldn't be too far off, but what about making them lie down and man it?

Are we bound to the standard construction particle effect? Or can I just go ahead and make an animation of a guy with a hammer bashing away at a spot as the object gets built?

Do animations need to be scripted or can I just make a normal animtation in my modeling program and export it to a script, or just as some kind of animation file?

I bet that with this amazing game engine alot of this stuff would be possible with a little work. I have even more questions, but I would rather discuss them instead of just ask straight out like the ones above.

1. Probably around 500 for that size. Do keep in mind that lasers will not work with infantry at that scale. Therefore, all your weapons will need to be missiles (guided or unguided) or ballistic to work 100% of the time.

2. Any weapon, any animation. Don't know about rifle bashing (the engine doesn't really handle melee), but animation wise it's certainly possible. It's all very tedious though.

3. You could have them build the holes and then have the holes load them in, yes. However, lowering the infantry's line of fire makes them effectively useless due to the way the engine works since they can never line up a clear shot.

4. Yes, the nanolathe is currently forced upon us. You can certainly animate the unit however you want, but there will still be a beam.

5. They have to be scripted. No one's released any kind of exporter that I'm aware of.

Would it be possible if I used a line of sight weapon for a small unit like an infantry person? These people will have weapons like m-16, and m4 rifles. Also their counterpart will have weapons like ak47s, and ak74su's.

Laser weapons will work, but they cannot be particularly fast. The game does not update often enough to handle really fast lasers. Basically, just test until you find a speed that works.