Fix the Civilians faction, please.

[Take One]

In the AE, the Civilians faction contains both "ordinary" nameless NPC civilians, the likes of which we see wandering around the world, and lots of "named" NPCs like Amanda Vines and Tsoo Tattoo artists, Baby New Year and other such creatures.

 

The problem is that there is a "Random" selection which picks from all of these entities and uses it to populate a Rescue objective, for example. It is much more likely to grab a named entity than one of the unnamed generic ones which usually is the ones you actually want.

 

I suggest the creation of a new Civilians group which only contains the unnamed NPCs, and a random selector, so we can have random civilians show up in our missions without having to face the risk of seeing Tsoo tattoo artists or Baby New Year where they don't belong.

 

I don't think changing the current group is a good idea, because that would possibly break existing missions, so the creation of a new "clean" group is probably best.

Edited March 21, 2021 by Take One

[CursedSorcerer]

I agree. 

[Take One]

I just realized a perhaps simpler option to fix this faction.

All the unique named individuals in the faction should be marked so as not to auto spawn, much like we can mark bosses and AVs in our custom factions to not auto spawn.

Also the unique individuals without a proper name, such as the Tsoo tattoo artist, who is an individual but doesn't have a name, should be marked in this fashion.

Like in the screenshot below:

 

 

That would just leave the truly random civilians to spawn, and still letting us place all the available characters deliberately.

Unless I misunderstand how the "random" choice works, or there's a difference in how our custom factions and the game's standard factions work, or in how "persons" spawn compared to bosses/EBs/AVs.

It would have the added benefit of not needing a new separate faction.