Use of flying objects/critters in AE

I'm working on an arc (revising an existing one actually) that would involve a scene sort of like Independence Day with Will Smith where a giant alien craft is hovering over the city. In addition, I would have flying critters also to accompany the ship and in general in the mission.

Is there anyone to bias a critter/npc/monster (e.g. the Arachnos flier) to be airborne primarily vs. always being on the ground unless led by a character its chasing to be airborne? Also, is there a way to have multiple allies show up in the same spot? Again, this vision of you leading a team against a tough invading force; but if the allies are so spread out, it takes away from potential interaction you can depict between the allies, and the allies and the participant.

Thx!

I believe that if you give a foe flight, their standard pose is still to be standing on the ground. From my own experiences, I think that ambushes are more likely to fly in than just run, but I could be wrong; that was awhile back so you might want to check into that to see if my memory's correct or not.

As for your allies question? "Not that I know of", sorry. :/

I'm not sure about ambushes, but I do know that patrols on certain maps will switch between hovering and walking, depending where they're going. First noticed this on outdoor map "City Map 01" which has fire escapes and low rooftops. (See Mission #1 of the arc in my sig for an example with rocket booted custom critter patrols.)

Outdoor maps are most likely to cause critters to fly. Ambushes do tend to fly if they can, patrols often do to, although neither flies very high.

As for your allies, you can use patrols and boss spawns set to "allied" to give the player big groups of friendlies. They won't follow you though.

The pattern I've seen most often that flying mobs use (particularly custom ones) is either stand on the ground or hover close to it while they engage you. Once they sense they're losing (low hit points, have missed you several times in a row, etc.) they get a lot more willing to fly off with a significant increase in altitude. I can't tell you how many times I watched a mob basically fly upward at about a 45 degree angle to a height that'd probably correspond to 30 to 60 feet, and spend some time hitting me with nothing but ranged attacks.

One other possible idea for allies is to trigger ambushes based on engaging a boss (and perhaps one or two more as the boss continues to lose hit points), but set the ambush to allied. If you make the ambush difficulty hard, it'll usually spawn in a fair number of allies per ambush. But like Eva's suggestion, once the allies arrive, they won't follow you around.

So as far as is known it is not possible to duplicate the patrolling Cabal from various croatoa arcs, or the hordes of longbow fliers from those boat missions redside?

Just for shiggles, I tried loading up lots of rocket booted custom critter patrols on outdoor maps with "vertical" aspect to them, to observe how much real flying goes on.

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Graveyard 01 (the Chimera map with the big "crater" in the middle) had patrols occasionally flying straight up and down the crater cliffs when needed, but that's all. No cross-crater flyovers, which was what I was hoping for. 18 max patrols.

City Map 01 (Industrial) (the one with multi tiered walkways that you see on Sister Psyche TF, Freakshow sonic devices) had more flying activity, even when I only had 18 patrols in. Upping it to 41 looked really neat. Not quite Croatoa Cabal, but getting there. Flying up to and down from walkways, and across to warehouse rooftops and pipes, too. 41 max patrols.

City Map 02 (Industrial) (one really tall building with walkways spiraling up it) lived up to my expectations, as verticality is this map's defining feature. A good amount of flying, but not that many patrols allowed, and the patrols seemed sparser than in City Map 01, and seemed to stick closer to the walls of the factory rather than City Map 01's rooftop-to-rooftop action. 23 max patrols.

Cimerora - Battle Map (first half of the final ITF mish). Nah, not much flying going on at all, except when the patrols want to go all the way up on top of the towers or the walls. Which, given the small number of patrols, isn't often. 11 max patrols.

Cimerora - Sybil Temple. Nah. The only flying I saw was hovering up and down the three steps in the center of the temple. 5 max patrols.

Thorn Tree 02. A lot of along-the-ground hovering, a tiny bit of dead treetop to dead treetop flight. Not much. 16 max patrols.

Grandville - The Fab. Fair amount of flight on the inside, but mostly just along the walls. 13 max patrols.

Cap Au Diable - Power Station. Not bad. Little bit of shipping crate to rooftop action. 21 max patrols.

Croatoa 07 (the mountainside one). Disappointing. Little bit of hilltop to hilltop hopping 20 feet away, but other than that, just along-the-ground stuff. 10 max patrols.

Little Round Top - Generic (Rikti War Zone). Like the graveyard map, just flight around the edges. 15 max patrols.

Boomtown - Construction. Bit of flying up to telephone wires and train tracks, not much. 11 max patrols.

Skyway City - Blockade. Lots of flying all over the map, but just straight up and down for the most part. 14 max patrols.

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I say City Map 01 (Industrial) is the winner here, thanks to the number of allowed patrols, and the evenness and nearness of aboveground surfaces (walkways, pipes, rooftops) that encourage patrols to fly horizontally far above the ground, Cabal style.

Any other nice outdoor maps I missed, wanna give em a try?

Hmm, for the Grandville one, is that the open one like on the last leg of the STF that has the arachnos ship flyover? I think I will go for city01 though I would love to use the Grandville map as the final one. Also wish we could include maybe like rikti ships. I tried the Rikti EBs but they also stayed close to the ground.

I remember during issue 17 beta, they had the Abyss map from the hamidon red side, and that had a big crater, but even there, mostly walked along the bottom, etc.

The Grandville map I checked was called "The Fab", it's actually the first mission of STF. I didn't check the other Grandville map out, so give it a try!

Also, I noticed that the number of patrols the system let me have was cut in half if I selected a "Defeat All Enemies" detail, which I did for the above post. So you might actually get double all those numbers if you don't have a "Defeat All".