Possible to manually pick the locations in a mission?

[Nafsmar]

Let me clarify. When creating a mission and say you want to place a collection or a rescue in a particular area all I seem to be able to do is choose front,middle or back. So is it possible to manually place stuff where you want to or is it always random to the option you select?

[cranebump]

You can't manually pick, but, if you get the right map and object numbers, you'll find things will pop up in the same places, consistently. Takes some messing with settings and sometimes choosing different maps to make this so. I also find the wide range of places things can appear to be a pain. It's not as big a pain as all my NPC dialogue firing as soon as someone enters a mish, though.

[Nafsmar]

Thank you for this info. I figured you couldn't but just wanted to make sure.

[cranebump]

It’s tricky to get things just right. Been running tests as I design latest arc. First mish ended up placing an ally (whom I had to switch from escort in order to make subsequent spawns work) who has appeared at the same place in every run since my second edit of the mish. Mish has two glories that drop clues. Wanted the second glowie to spawn a flood of adversaries (who are after the same data) in middle and front to seize control of the facility, so that fighting back to the door actually held some danger. Ended up spawning the max level of patrols I could, but, as the map is so small, they spawn on floors 1 and 2, rather than just on the lower level. I’d like to throw in an ambush trigger, but my event chain is too small to keep it from being circular. So I settled for the patrol spawns, giving one of them some dialogue indicating arrival. 

 

The cool thing is that the facility has wandering friendlies (“lab techs”) who take on the invaders, so it’s something like several battle spawns. And not all the friendlies fight, which has this effect of people running for cover while some duke it out. All in all, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for or, but it’s close, which, with AE is usually goood enough.

Edited May 11, 2020 by cranebump

[Nafsmar]

13 hours ago, cranebump said:

with AE is usually goood enough.

This is what I am seeing lol. I did switch maps to make it work for me. I guess writing a good 5 mission story arc is really tough work. I am now going onto week 3 (I play sporadically) of trying to get it just right. Ty for the advice.

[Ankylosaur]

It is hard work but rewarding (for me anyway). Part of that may just be how hard it is to get it to work - when you pull off some interesting mechanic, and it works, consistently, you're just thrilled. 🙂 

 

I find if you can populate all of a category something, they tend to show up in the same location. For example, if there is room for one "any" and 2 bosses in the back, and you put in three different bosses marked as back, they each appear in the same location every time.  I presume the game engine is essentially reading the text file and loading the back locations in the same order each time which makes that happen. So then if you want to resequence them in page two of your mission, you control who shows up in each of those three spots based on their sequence.

 

Even with that some maps seem to be just quirky or organized oddly and you can't ever get them to quite do what you want. (Looking at you SERAPH Steel Canyon - why is there a front location in the very back room? Why do things marked as front show up in the middle? Argh).

 

Outdoor maps being a single zone are another challenge altogether to do anything unusual with.