Loyalty and Relationship-Based Covering

One thing that I've noticed is missing in ace (which seems like an oversight, considering all the nice things they did add) is the ability for the player to specify loyalty patterns for characters, or even specify targets for covering.

When "Cover" is an active state, the character will take the hit for just about anyone in the party- which is neat, but I'd like the ability to do two things:

A) Cover As An Active Skill: For characters such as Paladins, to be able to use the "cover" skill as a targeted skill which lets you specify who you're going to cover for the next round, and have it work exclusively with that character only. (In a sample battle I ran with the paladin, two other characters were on the low threshold- my fighter and my sage/healer. Game-wise, I wanted my paladin to cover my healer because he could bring people back from the dead and heal them, so the fighter dying wasn't a big issue. However, when the boss attacked, the paladin covered the fighter, and then on the boss' second attack, the healer went down and died, effectively screwing me up.) If the cover skill is being used as a targeted skill, I'd like for it to take effect automatically regardless of the HP of the targeted comrade (in other words, the Paladin will take damage for the selected character this turn, regardless of whether they're in critical health or not). In other words, similar to how 'cover' worked in Final Fantasy Tactics, wherein you had to declare whom you were covering.

B ) Cover As A Pre-Determined Passive State: For characters who meet a certain 'loyalty level' threshold to be able to cover other characters when their HP is low. I'd like to be able to pre-determine these relationships in the script, so that for example Actor 2 will always cover Actor 7 when their health is low -though not vice-versa, since Actor 7 is a mage, so reciprocal relationships would have to be explicitly stated: 1 => 7 means only that 1 will cover 7, a reciprocal would have to require 1 => 7 , 7 => 1, and so on.

B.1) Cover as A Loyaty-Activated Passive State: I'd like to be able to have an added functionality to B where there is potential loyalty-based covering that is only unlocked through relationship improvement. So, for example, the protagonist (Actor 1) could potentially be covered by actors 2, 3 and 4, but that depends on whether their relationships are advanced enough. Obviously the protagonist's progress and choices would be tracked by several variables, for example:

And then have it set up in the script such as:

Do we have any valiant scripters out there willing to tackle this? :)