Defeat All Snakes

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.

Did it ever occur to you that maybe the mission was SUPPOSED to break in order to present a greater challenge? Of course it didn't. You disgust me. Positron, pls bam this idiots

ArcID: 17374 -- The Game of Thorns Circle of Thorns Online, the hit MMO from Abraxas Entertainment, has ground entire economies to a standstill. More addictive than high-grade narcotics, more popular than Pocket D and more contagious than the common cold, the game boasts a playerbase in the billions. And some people take it very, very seriously.... The classic (I guess?) redside arc, in which you're hired to assassinate someone's MMORPG character and things spiral out of control from there. As proud as I am of GoT and as flattering as the community's feedback has been over the years (seriously, thank you everyone,) it was my first outing, and could use as much improvement as that statement implies. However, its development was also deeply, maddeningly cursed, to the point that I'm now genuinely afraid to touch it in case the whole thing somehow deletes itself, formats my SSD and creates a black hole in my apartment. Please go in with a ready tolerance for jank. Critics are raving! Arc ID: 43772 -- DETH ETERNAL Welcome to DETH ETERNAL, a lightning-fast virtual reality adventure where you are the toughest space trooper ever to suck vacuum!! ...It's Doom. It's literally Doom. ...It's literally Doom, written in the AE system by a young Praetorian refugee as a gift for someone she cares about, as a way of expressing things she perhaps finds herself otherwise unable to. DETH ETERNAL is easily enjoyed as a brainless, demon-killing comic-book romp with a cliched story and corny dialogue; but the attentive may glimpse a deeper theme behind the curtain. Blueside/Vigside/Dethside. Two intense action missions, two playable cutscenes. Was a gift for someone specific (and awesome) and will misgender you as a "badass dude with a big ol' gun," something it kills me still isn't recognized as an actual gender in our backwards society. You may also take advantage of: A Windows 95 compatible sound card / A modem with at least a 9600-baud setting / A TCP/IP or SPX/IPX network. Roger Ebert had this to say: 45220 -- The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year The Christmas arc people keep telling me to kill myself over. I promise, I'm taking your feedback very seriously. TMWCotY is an anyside holiday arc best played with AVs turned ON. I know that's counterintuitive for some, but two of the AVs in the final mission won't scale down, which despite repeated testing, I was not aware of until after the competition. And while the main companion you get can solo most of the map as an AV, he can struggle in his lowly EB form. Oh, and major spoilers: on mission 2, the glowie is in the very first room, where the contact says it is. Probably on the wall you're facing as you walk in. A lot of people understandably had trouble with that one. 83% on Metacritic! Bit entries I made specifically for other people but I still think are pretty okay, I guess: ArcID: 57205 -- THE GRIM DARKNESS THAT CAME TO PARAGON. **THE GREEN TIDE DESCENDS UPON ATLAS PARK! CLEANSE THE XENOS FILTH FROM THESE STREETS IN THE NAME OF THE HOLY THRONE OF THE 100% NON-COPYRIGHTED SPACE EMPEROR!** A gift for a 40k-loving e-friend. It's a short, stupid, one-note joke arc in which you murder entirely non-copyrighted space orcs for ten or so minutes. Designed to be completable by a low-to-mid-level beam rifle sentinel, so it's deliberately on the easy side, and best played with a high mob count, obviously. Two EBs, no AVs. Good for: Space marines, dwarven slayers, actual paranoid psychotics. Enjoy it before it inevitably gets me banned, sued, and finally murdered, probably by a Bulgarian assassin Snarky hired on the Oranbegan dark web for half a billion inf. Ave Imperator. Mic drop. The hot takes keep coming! Arc ID: 43504 -- Heart of Gold, Heart of Glass The Goldbrickers drop a diss track on you. It's a declaration of war. This was a Black Hand Society redside arc designed for a specific character, a troubled ex-singer with a substance abuse problem, and will misgender you as female. An older arc that I still thought was different enough for a mention. It's true. Arc ID: 58359 -- Shining Scars Manticore has the great idea of doing the same thing and expecting a different result. This was a 2023 Christmas gift and story denouement for a specific character, and isn't recommended for general consumption. It's only like 75% comedy, too, making me even more of a dingus for posting it. However, the first three missions are also a Shining Stars parody, and I have a feeling some of you might appreciate that, so here it is. Will misgender you as female, ex-Arachnos, and entirely too sweet for your own good. But that's, like, your problem, man.

I run it with the stealth pool pick, and it works out great. Cryogenic aura, all-over green for additional spook. If you're worried about end and don't care about stealth as a power, definitely try the combat jumping/IO pick as suggested above, it'll look about the same with a much smaller footprint.

You did. Five level 50s and you didn't think to read what you were going out of your way to opt into on any of them? C'mon, man. That's not on anyone but you. There are no fingers to point, here. The silver lining is that this is a totally rectifiable mistake with no long-term consequences even inside the enclosed fantasy world this game consists of, and you'll probably make more pretend money in a single evening on a level 50 than you would across your entire career as a 1-to-40. If I were you, though, I'd take a break, a couple deep breaths and go for a walk.

I have a closet full of mini-bases on EVERLASTING that I've made for RP events and never touched again. Please feel free to take advantage of them, clear the cockroaches out. POKROVA-22598 The wreck of the Pokrova, a half-sunk Ukrainian destroyer which was used as the lair of a possessed assassin during a military/cosmic horror storyline. Simple exterior and interior. Bleak and moody. DEAD-23702 Louey's Bar and Grill, hangout of the Dead Man's Hand. If you're redside, it's located in the Hard Way in St Martial; if you're blueside, it's in the guts of Crey's Folly. A disused site used as a gang den before both sides wiped each other out and the local vultures converted it into a bar. Cozy despite being a total slum. Good rest spot for the absolute bottom of the barrel. WIZARDSWELL-30078 Comic, games and bookstore, with a D&D table. One simple interior, zero effort antechamber. May expand one day. BABYLON-21853 Unstable psychic landscape. Used as a Praetorian ex-Seer's receiving room for mind-to-mind exchanges. Functions decently as any liminal, otherworldly or between-life-and-death setpiece. OLMEC-22242 Mother Mary offshore refinery, co-built with @Voidtek and final location of the Black Hand Society's Silverado arc. Exterior platform, Terminator 2 lava room, portal chamber and post-shootout corridor. Very very niche, but maybe one of these things is just what you need. FITZ-23052 Multiple teeny one-shot event locations. Antechamber is Arachnos-themed due to the nature of the last one, just ignore it. Aleph: Redside hospital room. Heth: Blueside hospital room. Daleth: Vanguard intelligence/simulation room. Yodh: Vanguard ceremonial/debrief chamber. Koph: Arachnos supercomputer, originally the Project:Destiny gestalt intelligence. Zayjin: Arachnos elevator leading to Koph point. And of course, as always, PROFITS-770 is there to baffle and disgust you if you're ever finally sick of it all.

My best guess with what little we've been told is that you're putting in more things than the map allows for, especially as defendable objects spawn ambush waves which can eat up your slots without really telling you. Check the information right above the map on your mission editing window, see what it says. Your problem with the defendable object not being attacked isn't really a problem, that's how they work. It won't be attacked until you've triggered the guards surrounding it, at which point more of them run in trying to destroy it. If it was just under attack the moment it spawned, it would probably be destroyed without the players ever seeing it, and you'd get a lot of angry comments from people telling you to Defeat yourself. It's not perfect, but this is an old game and the AE is a house of weirdly-shaped cards that don't always obey the laws of physics as we understand them.

Statesmanomics.

Looking back, as I wallow in my screenshots folder, every so often I've managed to snap a portrait of a character or event NPC that turned out to be more expressive than usual. Here's a few of them.

I answered this question awhile ago on discord, here's a copypaste. And yes, the file structure's just changed. architect/critters and architect/villaingroups is what you want.

No. You can change their names via the regular GM spawn dialog, but there's no "giant monster" category in custom groups. They're their own unique thing. No. GM spawns are highly restricted. It's one per map, only a few maps have the option, and no, the interface won't tell you which ones until you select them individually and check their spawn count. Yes, though it depends on the GM and the animation. Many GMs aren't regular models and don't follow regular animation prompts, while the ones that do are subject to the fact that animations don't work half the time in general. Also, a lot of models have a much smaller list of viable animation types than show up on the list. It's a longstanding aggravation that a lot of these won't work despite playing just fine in the preview screen. I hope this list of heartbreaking disappointments was helpful! For future inquiries, please refer to my AE FAQ:

Sure, let's make ourselves even more redundant.

DETH ETERNAL clocks in at a cool 23%. This area seems to be the sweet spot, I only had one serious malfunction (pink and green space hellions?) and it was easy enough to correct, if baffling. My Christmas arc (The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year) settled at 46% and, despite taking a full minute to open, was largely cooperative while I was working on it, with only the occasional mechanical breakdown or weird contextual glitch. The Mu escort on mission 3 is a much more precarious one than I first wrote, but the one I first wrote just stopped working. Game of Thorns, my first ever foray into the AE, starts to melt its containment housing at 52%. 50% seems to be the eye of terror, the point at which you enter the realms of madness and never return. I had to rewrite so much of that arc as entire sections were inexplicably swallowed, costumes would deform themselves, Gremuloids were suddenly eight foot tall and text would just go missing. I'm almost grateful that the file is now somehow unpublishable, meaning I can't make any changes to the published version. You're welcome, everyone.

In AE, if the bosses still aren't spawning, try setting party size to x4. I seem to remember that being the threshold for full force.

Look man, I'll settle for what we have working as intended someday.