Is there a way to create unguarded allies or hostages?

[Draggynn]

I suspect this is an issue that many of you have solutions for.  I'd like the player to encounter several characters before the mission truly "begins" (by having most of the enemy spawns triggered by a later event).  As such I don't want these characters to be guarded since the bad guys haven't arrived yet, but for the player just to be able to walk up to them.  Is there any way to do this?

 

Originally I was hopeful that "none" or "empty" would have this effect, but it appears that option just defaults to the base enemy group.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[Draggynn]

If I set the base enemy group to none, then I can set the enemies surrounding the ally or hostage to empty and there will in fact be no guards.  This has the side effect of auto completing the rescue objectives as soon as you enter the map, so you can't really trigger things off of interacting with one of them.  I assume there isn't really any way around this?  I can make this work, just wanted to make sure there wasn't a trick I was missing.

[cranebump]

For allies set to Empty and Single. That seems to work for me.

[Ankylosaur]

I have done this setting the mission to empty, the ally to empty and populating the mission through bosses. I used to worry about so many bosses, but now that you can choose to just set them all to LTs as a player, I am less concerned. 

 

However you are right about them all auto-completing. One trick I have used here is to use mission text or the entrance pop up to say "I'm contact A. Meet me in the front room" and then have contact A be an escort that leads to contact B. Once reaching contact B, contact A says something and leaves and contact B is an escort to a glowie or contact C etc. 

 

If you want to see some examples in mine try missions 3 and 4 in Rularularian and missions 1 & 2 in Policemen vs Aliens in my sig. 

Edited October 29, 2020 by Ankylosaur