MA Wizardry Needed!

I have that sinking feeling that I am trying to achieve something which cannot be done. However, my knowledge of the MA has some large holes in it so I am hoping that I can get, if not an answer to my question, at least a decent workaround.

I have a mission that involves an Ally. She is pretending to be someone else in a civilian setting, allowing the player character (who, for the purposes of the mission, is pretending to be her 'personal assistant') to go off and sabotage things whilst she averts suspicion.

I would like to either:

a) have an ally, surrounded by friendly civilian NPCs, who upon getting near her will give out the relevant clue and follow you, leaving the civilians behind.

OR

b) have an allied boss with a civilian surrounding group who will give out clues when you get near her but will not follow you.

I want to avoid having to defeat any enemies around the Ally, for storytelling reasons.

I would also like to keep the file sizes for custom groups down on this arc.

I look forward to responses. If I need to explain more then please say so.

Cheers!

a) You can't surround an Ally with non-Enemy people. Either they're alone, or they're with enemies, unfortunately.

b) If they're alone, they start talking the SECOND you enter the mission. Annoying bug, but there it is.

c) To keep them from following you (sort of), just tell them to Do Nothing or else Wander Off. If you outrun them, they get lost anyway.

Does that help?

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Thanks for the reply BUT I do believe it's something I want to do that the MA doesn't support

It's a shame but I think I'm just going to have to rewrite some elements of the mission. Having allied civ patrols with objective-spawned Security Guards will probably make slightly more sense as a workaround.

Cheers for responding.

I'm not sure exactly if it's what you want, but load up ZAGMUK Act Three (#342751) and walk into mission 1. Captain Davis should be the first detail you encounter. If that is similar to what you're going for, I'll tell you how I did it.

Mission 2 of Matchstick Women #3369 uses a few different variations of the ally/boss/surrounded by friendlies as well. If one of them works the way you would like to see, I'll also let you know how to make it work. They all have dialog assigned to them, but I think some don't go off, or still go off in the wrong spot.

I have a Release Captive spawning with the surrounding mobs as friendly in one of my missions (#3 of "Jumping in Feet First"), the way I did it was to have them spawn at the back of a particular map after the boss is defeated (and the mission completed, by the way).

Upon spawning they'll spew out some lines. Upon aggroing some enemies they will spew some more. I wasn't able to make them say a line upon arrival of the player, but they did do so with the spawning after the boss fight and with the ambush that followed the boss' defeat - which I added to make sure they talked their lines on time.

Worked decently, may be something to look at. If you carefully select the map, you could make the captive + allies spawn upon a glowie click and they'll say some lines. And if there are no enemies around (fill the rest of the spawn points at that "front/middle/back part with bosses that spawn upon something impossible, like rescuing the captive from the friendlies), it could work for you.

Just 2 inf