Ally/Captive Dialogue Triggering on Entry

I'm having an issue with an arc I'm working on where the Captives'/Allies' "unaware" dialogue is triggering upon entering the mission. It's supposed to trigger when the captive / ally sees the players, but it's doing it on mission entry.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?

I believe this may be a new bug. A mish I've been working on didn't have this "Captive text" problem before and now it does. I noticed it last night while testing.

GlaziusF noted this issue in one of my arcs, and the captives/allies have mobs around them.

I think its a new bug.

Yes I noticed this bug in my new arc as well. It's rather annoying from a storyteller standpoint to have a big heap of Ally/Captive Unaware dialogue flood the player upon map entry.

I recently finally found my way around the copyright filter, but had to republish my arc.

@Daggerjack - All For Love in Cimerora - Arc ID: 544491

Uff... I'm up way too late. I've been dipping my toe in the MA community (i.e. I lurk a LOT and post only when I feel it helpful, or nescesary) But yeah, this has to be a bug. I can line up a series of dialogue to go off (for the most part) with patrols, but everything Allies and Enemies have to say before the actual damage dialogue part they yell out as soon as one enters the map. I've been doing what I can to work around it, but in some cases it's unavoidable.

The A.I. isn't too slick either. If set to Defensive, they are reluctant to attack unless they are attacked themselves, and then they spend half the time setting up (stealthing, buffing, whatever). By that point I've pretty much picked off whatever I'm fighting. I've avoided Agressive, because I don't want my NPC allies going all General Z on stuff either. I want the player to be in control of the action.

Anyway... I've noticed it too. I presumed it was a bug and have tried to work around it accordingly.

Oh, I have no plans to include more than one or two in any given mission, mostly for flavor, and then most of those are pre-generated NPC's (signature characters). Granted, when I dry-run my arcs I do it on a low setting so I'm only facing 2-3 opponents at any given time. By the time I've taken most of them out, Manticore, for example, has stealthed, did some teleport thing, then fires a net arrow about the time I take out the last one in the group.

I refuse to set aggressive because I want combat to be the player's call; not that of an 'aggressively helpful' NPC that decides to aggro the whole map by randomly attacking one thing after another. They're backup, flavor to give the players a chance to know more about the game's lore and it's characters in it. Until the SSA's, actually getting to know the Freedom Phalanx is nonexistant, other than you need to take care of something that obviously they're too busy to take care of (the TF's) and franky, that's a shame.

They will attack as soon as you, or they, are hit but if enemies miss they'll just stand there waiting even when you're fighting. I think if they initiated as soon as an attack is made (hit or not) toward you or them would be 'defensive' enough.

Anyway, I appreciate the response. It just doesn't seem like the regular in-game AI is as black and white as the AE AI, and would rather see them take a look at it.

Of course, it could be the controlled circumstances I'm going over my arcs in make it appear differently. I'll admit that's a possibility as well. However, if that's the case, they may need to look at the AI in general. In the regular game I've been really put-out about how many things run away nowadays with little provocation, particularly AV's and GM's. Just seems unbecoming of them to run like a schoolgirl when they're being attacked.

So, a bit of time has passed on this and I was wondering: did anyone /bug this and what response did you get from our dev overlords?

I bugged this on 5/16 and in fairly short order got a canned response about bug fixes being priortized, some taking weeks/months/whatever blah blah blah . . . and it also mentions that the COH support team doesn't directly address issues filed as bug reports. So I guess we can expect to hear about this never. Maybe it'll get fixed, maybe it won't.

I actually have one mission where it's not triggering, and it seems that something wonky about the AE editor that doesn't give me the option to set up an animation for my captive for that one also keeps the verbal deluge at bay. I'm gonna try hand editing some other missions to delete the same info and see if doing that, while denying me starting animations, will keep them from blurting out their lines on other maps/missions, too.

Let us know if that works, k?

Okay, here's what some tinkering has revealed so far:
The problem seems to be with using anyone besides Civilians from the Standard tab as your hostages. Using Arachnos or other mobs--even those who resemble civilians, like Nem Automatons--triggers the speech prematurely.

Some Civilians don't let you set inactive animations: specifically, the generic males and females in Business, Casual, and Citizen subgroups, plus males only for Police. Most others have a rather anemic selection of animations compared to Customs or even other Standards. But they are useful for mission testing purposes until this matter gets sorted out.

Also note: don't choose General Z or General Aarons from the Civilians, as both trigger speech prematurely just like customs do. There are probably others that do, too, but I'm not ready to invest any more time into that for what will hopefully only be a stopgap measure.

I'll be sure to file a bug report with my new findings, for what that's worth.