Defeat All Snakes

I promise, it's not a condemnation. We poor, mad fools who tinker blindly with Satan's Engine are all in it together as far as I'm concerned. I just couldn't help but see the funny side thinking "I know I had an answer to this written out, where was it?" and then finding out.

Unless I'm misreading your situation, rest assured that this is a very confusing issue that everyone runs into sooner or later. It might be one of the most-asked questions regarding the AE besides "how make farm?" Here's what I wrote the last time you ran into it: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/43141-problem-with-custom-group-selection/#findComment-560779

I am so, so sorry, but I think I may have found your problem. Autosave in the AE is a deathtrap. It is integrated malware. It will never help you. It exists solely to brick whatever it was you were working on with no warning. My advice is to turn it off immediately, and to try and get into the habit of hitting the manual save every now and then as a twitch reflex. I cannot apologize enough for not telling you this sooner, but I'm at the stage now where this has burned so many people that I just assume everybody knows. That said, there may be other explanations, as autosave usually at least leaves a corpse. Is it possible something was moved around in your file structure? Sadly, though, it's likely the only comfort I can offer is that all your custom characters and groups should still be intact, and that recreating the actual arc structure is generally much faster the second time around, when you already have the setup figured out and know where everything's supposed to go. And yes, I speak from experience. Once again, condolences, and I can only hope I'm wrong.

"Free a Captive" doesn't have that option because that event type always has the liberated character run for the exit. They can't do anything else. It's not the one you want. What you want is the Ally event. Pick that one, make sure it has a surrounding enemy group, and then set "Betrays When" to itself, the same Ally you just made. It'll go hostile as soon as you defeat the guards around it.

Depends on what you mean by "rescued." If you mean when you lead them to the exit, then yes, as far as I know, the above is correct, and they'd need to be an Escort. Find the "betrays when" dialogue box at the very bottom of their settings section, and, if you want them attacking when they reach the exit, make sure they're set to the highlighted option below. "After rescue is completed," on the other hand, will set them to hostile as soon as their captors are taken out. If you want them to go hostile after some other trigger, though, like reaching another objective or when you defeat a specific boss, or even just as soon as you take our their guards, then they can absolutely be an Ally spawn. It also doesn't matter if they're set to non-combat or not, as that only applies to their escort behavior. Once they go hostile, they lose those restrictions, and their attacks will all come online.

By default, I generally gave enemy spawns High Pain Tolerance from the Willpower set. It's a good low-key boost to their survivability without turning things into a tedious grind. The issue with EBs and AVs is something that, as far as I can tell, is only happening to you, meaning it's probably either something to do with your personal settings, or some obscure, unique issue as yet unidentified. If you want to test that, go ahead and publish a WIP version of your mission with a BUG TEST DON'T PLAY THIS description to avoid abuse, and perhaps some of us can run through it a few times and tell you what we're seeing.

Allies absolutely scale down between ranks, I just tested it to be absolutely sure. However, not all AVs are scalable. Some simply don't have an EB version, which seems to be the issue you're running into. See if there are multiple versions of the same AV, one of them might successfully downgrade.

Please, we're not smarter. We've just made all of these mistakes and frustrating discoveries in advance.

To quote Mike from The Young Ones, "I don't want to say anything negative, but no." AE mobs can't interact with one another outside of attacking. Best you're going to get is the 'menace' series of animations, which can honestly look pretty convincing. When they work. Which is roughly 50% of the time. There is a 'ground punch' and 'ground punch received' combo, however, if you ever want a mob just beating on another character. It occurs to me that you could also use a Battle spawn in which all the participants have fast healing/decent defences and only basic or high-cooldown punches to attack with, so they'll fight but won't be able to drop each other. But again, you're making do.

Made a fascinating discovery! It turns out that caltrops count not just as enemy spawns, but as members of the assigned encounter group. Meaning that if that encounter's completion requirements are set to 'entire group needed to complete' instead of 'only boss needed to complete,' then the fight won't conclude -- and the mission won't progress -- until the caltrops despawn. Since just about every encounter in the arc featured caltrops, this got very confusing until I figured it out. I don't know if this is new or common knowledge or what, I've never seen it happen before. I'd recommend either switching out the encounter parameters to only watching the boss, or taking caltrops out of the powersets, which is probably the quicker solution. I was hunting all over for the fleeing enemies I must have missed, only for the objective to complete a minute later. And speaking of our buddy King Gold, head to the enemy group he's a part of, right click and hit 'don't auto spawn' so he doesn't accidentally show up again in another encounter. Poor guy's had enough. Solid work either way.

Obviously I’ll defer to the OP themselves, but I’ve re-read every post they’ve made in the thread and I don’t see it. They just needed the body found as part of the mission and wanted to avoid the body bag route if possible — to “Show the NPC has been murdered and the player finds the body,” “even if they can't click on it.” The body bag route is probably the most reliable as you can make it an objective and then use the ambush without any potential problems, but since the whole point of the thread is not doing that, then the way I’d probably handle it myself is more or less your second suggestion: -Pick a smaller, linear map. -Set mission completion to Find the Exit. -Have one or more enemy spawns or patrols midway hinting at the awesome murder they just done. Have a mandatory one that changes the objective to finding out what happened. -Put the dead guy in the last room along with one or more glowies constituting evidence of the frameup. The corpse itself can shout the shocking reveal. -Have said glowie spawn the cops or whoever back in the middle and/or front areas shouting narratively helpful things about you being the killer, whom they presumably intend to bring to justice. Its not perfect, but this is the AE, where our primary choice is what kind of mess you want to put up with.

It should. You just need one mandatory objective for a complete mission. Clicking a glowie definitely counts.

Okay, I think I'm done awkwardly pretending I didn't read this and searching for a blush emoji I already know isn't there, so I guess I'll just say, oh, gosh, thanks, and if I'm any good at any of these things, it's because I've had the good fortune to somehow consistently run into people who forced me to bring my A-game. Okay but seriously what's up with that.

Yes. You can set them as a friendly boss with the unconscious/dead slab emote and just have no surrounding mobs - or have surrounding mobs that are in the same pose if you want to present a massacre instead of a single victim. They won't get up because bosses have no reaction emote, and since the boss is friendly, it won't attack, either. However, they will spring into action if enemies get too close or wing them with an AoE. You can use the "boss unaware" text bark to present a narrative as well. *You see a dead body, it's f***ed up like WHOAH* or something to that effect. I've used this trick over and over again, you just need to make sure you pick a map where you can guarantee that the body will spawn separately enough from any combat areas. Even if the team drags enemies to that location and break the illusion, most players -- most players -- will understand that this wasn't intentional and is just the sort of thing that happens in AE arcs.