Darmian

Well, mostly the "current" timeline for Primal is shifting sands. It depends on what you're doing, where you are, mostly - along with personal canon I suppose - but I get off the Galaxy chopper after doing the tutorial and chatting to Sister Psyche only to find she's been dead for a while and there's some Yin upstart in her spot? WHUT? So, yeah. But Goldside is a lot tighter than that from Intro to the end of the Neutropolis arcs.

Oh, I also had the idea that there should be at least two (sort of!) Underground maps for Praetoria. First Ward and Night Ward. Who knows what weird horrors are down there? Any of the existing Underground maps could be adapted for these plus parts of the Underground incarnate trial map. Ick!

I'm invested in Gold Side a fair bit. (That avatar there is my main, a level 50 Gold who didn't leave). I think if anything were to be done that (a) maintained the existing 1 -20 zones of Nova/Imperial/Neutropolis then it would probably need to be an entirely new set of zones parallel in level to First Ward/Night Ward but still effectively pre War. (I can see that getting shot down fast by some though). Those two new zones would get you to roughly level 40. A final zone of 40-50 that sat on top of these and the FW/NW arc to follow, and then on into the Incarnate Trials. Crossover in the low levels? No, that doesn't swing right in my mind. Praetoria 1-20 is very definitely set in the past, there's no fudging that at all. It's pre War so it's at the latest, absolute latest, early to mid 2010. If it wasn't for the fact that all the dedicated badgers would complain I'd have Nova/Imperial/Neutropolis removed from the TUNNEL system so no Blues/Reds could ever get there, and I'd make it impossible to get back once the Rift mission is taken. Unless there was an actual time travel dedicated arc to do it, not ouro. As per @MTeague's suggestion? That sounds good, but again we're talking time travel here. Not impossible but not as easy as just wandering over. You COULD do it with a Quantum Leap (minus the body hopping) style set of missions. Go back and do such and such because if we don't then we lose the war, and we didn't lose the war so someone must have done it, but they didn't do it yet so we better do it now, and by now I mean then. Off you go! It's effectively low level Portal Corps missions. And I tackled the reverse myself in an AE (see below). Gold equivalents of Mayhem missions set during the war? Instanced attacks on Primal locations? Possibility of accolades too. As for adapting stuff for zones? There's rough material already in the code that might be usable. Time + Effort etc though. Scroll down through this to see what I mean. Praetorian Map Scales - General Discussion - Homecoming (homecomingservers.com) And some of us keep the flame going. I've got a Loyalist AE trilogy (level 19-24) and so far 2 Resistance AE arcs (level 19-24) set pre War for Golds who don't want to leave just yet but perhaps aren't ready to wander around the ruins of First Ward. Details in my sig. (And yes, they're designed to fit in to the existing canon as much as possible.)

The only map with a really good beach is a Grandville one. So unless you can handwave away the giant building as some sort of Red Skull castle it's not suitable.

North Africa? Sheesh. Are you looking for an outdoor map? If so I cannot think of a single one that would fit that.

Glad to have another returner!

I've said this lots of times elsewhere. After Red Widow's return and Statesman's death, Lord Recluse reforms (as in realigns internally rather than going heroic) Arachnos and the Etoile Islands. Pull back troops from Siren's Call. Retakes Bloody Bay and Warburg, now that Blitz is out of the picture, as full red side zones, and officially hands over control to "Prime Minister" Daos. Apart from appearances in existing TFs/SFs we shouldn't see him at all. Where is he? Who knows? MYSTERY! Arachnos reforming and being more like a "real" government might give more agency to players on Redside too. Longbow kicked out of Mercy due to this new realpolitik by order of a negotiated UN decision. Praetoria. A few loose ends to tidy up there. None of which should involve Cole donning Statesman's costume, what a stupid idea. Mechanically - but it would piss off badgers - I'd remove the 1 -20 sections of Praetoria from all TUNNEL access and have the entrance to it from First Ward sealed to non Praetorians (like the alignment doors in PD). In this case non-Praetorians includes Praetorians who crossed over to Primal. I'd also lock the Gold side ouro missions of 1 - 20 so only Praetorians who have not crossed over can do them. Again, that would piss off badgers. Kallisti!!! That's what we're waiting for!!

The second in a trilogy of pre War SFMA Praetorian AEs based around the Resistance. A full scale invasion of Praetoria by Primal Earth is imminent and the Resistance is ready for the fight. Almost. The Resistance has a leadership problem and Belladonna Vetrano wants it dealt with. Fast. (Levels 19 - 24)

Calvin Scott is available as an ally in Resistance 1-34, but not as a boss in Resistance 1-34. Seems an odd thing to miss out on. Not to mention the ally version is only a lieutenant!

Goldside? Hmm, my main is a Goldside Controller (Mind/Empathy) but even so a Controller can handle the content, just don't expect to be a heavy damage dealer against Ghouls and so on, those bastiches are worse than Freakshow, fast mobs that claw you down and keep coming. Destroyers? Oddly enough the Big Dogs, while hard as nails, are easier to weather than the Rocket Girls, who just bazooka the bejebus out of you from a distance. Seers? Individually Seers are weak. In a mob? Ick. Clockwork aren't incredibly tough - apart from the odd bit of arc lightning that drains your endurance - but they don't close on you, so melee characters can have a bit of trouble there. Syndicate can be fast, Tsoo-like in some ways. Resistance have a mixed variety of attacks but are manageable, same for the PPD mostly. Watch for Runesoldiers around level 19/20 in Neutropolis, they're rare but can drop you. As for the Wards? Well, burn that bridge when you come to it. (There's a set of pre War AE arcs set Goldside in my sig, levels 19-25, designed to slot right in, if more content is what you want.)

Ah yes. I think we are on the same page mostly when it comes to this. Addendum to the above - though it probably can be inferred - a major part of how I "play" IS writing AEs. That and chatting to other AE creators about how we push the boundary with the limited tools we have, discussions on lore hooks and so on. I DO have, like @The_Warpact, a small gang of RL known players that I hear from regularly for a once a week meet up, and randomly in the rest of the week, not to mention the Praetorians SG that I'm a member of, though I'll happily rabbit on to prospective Gold side players about the do's and don'ts of Going Rogue as well.

Interesting topic. I've ranted a few times here and there about how I see things but here's a brief précis on how I got to this point, and perhaps this might surprise others who have chatted/interacted with me on my previous rants. I love the genre and the lore of this game and depth is exactly what I want to see and in fact try to provide when I write AEs. Story story story, that's what is important to me here. I care nothing for power sets other than that they work as promised and for me, while I appreciate the absolute labor of love the devs put in to polish and balance what we have, these are still just "stuff" and not "content". Emphasis here: I DO appreciate all that hard work because I benefit from it. I've not even finished the sheer amount of content the game has itself, never mind my eternal curiosity as to how we could advance the story or at the least iron out the sheer madness of the holes left by bad retcons and OG devs apparently developing material separately from each other and for some damn reason not telling each other what they were doing. So my mode of play is dictated by a desire to "fix" holes I find. Sure, I do it by writing AEs that attempt to fill gaps/explain the holes. Now, since I'm not a dev I cannot effect any changes at all really, but I want to provide options. Yes, it's egocentric. Yes, I've had comments that tell me that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Perhaps I don't. For a chunk of the player base I'd lay money that my approach is nonsense. Oh well. I play to push the mechanics of story as much as I can. And I try to have as much fun as I can doing it. (People see me standing in front of the second AE console from the left in Pocket D for hours, and by now most have stopped asking me if they can join my farm!)

You can literally make your own police using the Officer standard costume set in the creator and just customize it as you see fit. Dual pistols at a basic level and maybe a level of Willpower as a secondary. You wouldn't need to give them many powers, simply making them a lieutenant makes them tougher. And they become 1-54 scalable.

Praetorians primary all the way, to the extent that one of my mains is a 50 who never left.

Sent you a run-through message via forum email.

I'll get on this as soon as I can.

Welp, I stand corrected...sit corrected. Is it running better now? (Look what happens when RL takes you out of the loop for a week!)

You can force the event to happen. Softcap on KR before a KR2 spawns has been reduced to 20, so get 20 people into KR and KR2 opens fresh, with the Paladin event ready to go. Just get to the train station and go there. EDIT. Old info, see @AboveTheChemist's and @Apparition's posts.

I've spoofed this by having an escort get to the collection glowie/whatever, state that they have to do something and then run off. Then respawn the same character a little later as an ally after doing whatever they had to do. You just need an intermediate objective to trigger the ally spawn for the player to handle otherwise you may get both versions on the map together. The escort needs to reach an exit before the next trigger, so you need to slow the player down enough for that to happen in the right sequence.

Sorry @DougGraves, been mostly AFK the last week so haven't answered you. As you've discovered there are maps that have unseen limits to what will or won't spawn, and unfortunately there's no way to know which map does this until you try a particular map.

In my post about a halfway house/porting AE arcs to the game world, we posited that these could be utilized to help bring up an external Base Computer UI/AE terminal hybrid.

There isn't, unfortunately. You can't even set the initial boss to flee because if he does escape then you fail and the second spawn won't happen.

Ah, I was being slightly hyperbolic there to emphasize the smallness of the group. Might be double digits!

Not so much their existence I suppose but the fact that Primal is (a) unaware of the deal and (b) has a different relationship with Primal Hamidon due to diverging history. "Negotiate? We beat ours, we can beat this one too." But who knows Hamidon's response really? Cole didn't ask/check/consult with his "partner", he just assumed that it would go wrong. I'm not saying he was incorrect to do so, but that's what he did.

Donated. Keep up the good work!