There should be options to make followers passive, neutral, and aggressive with optional radius.
Passive - Followers will not even flinch (NO MOVEMENT) even if attacked. This is for RP followers that you don’t want to have to re-place every time something attacks your base.
Neutral (similar to current AI) - Followers will not attack nearby enemies unless an enemy attacks the player or another follower.
Aggressive - Followers will attack any player or aggressive character within a radius that can be selected from several options. If the enemy is defeated the follower will then return to the location where they are placed.
Please back me up on this exiles! I am sooooo tired of re-placing my RP “just-for-show” thralls and having my fighters stand there until I get whacked.
Although I agree with your motivation, I don’t like the solution you’re proposing, because it would make the RP thralls still count towards the follower cap.
Instead, I want to have an option to place decorative thralls that don’t count towards the cap, can’t fight, can’t be leveled, don’t have any AI. You know how placing crafters inside a crafting station results in a crafter thrall being rendered and animated as part of that crafting station? That’s what I want for decorative thralls.
I like your solution even better CodeMage! Thank you!
Edit: now that I think of it…how would this work? I don’t want to have to attach thralls to a workstation. I want to have them animate with Stray’s Thralls. Better yet, I want them to emote without use of a mod.
That’s another good idea, but mod authors are dropping mods every few months lately. So, I hate to depend on mods to accomplish this goal. Multigun provides a guarantee that his mods will be maintained, and I truly appreciate his commitment to our community. However, this kind of commitment is extremely rare, and many mods have been abandoned. I realize that mods are free and when someone contributes the product of their time for free, that is a gift. It just feels like a punch in the gut when that gift gets taken away, things disappear, and your castle feels less like home, or things end in catastrophe (buildings crumble).
Also, the goal described in this topic is not fully achieved with non-follower actors. The “Aggressive” setting would be a good add in my opinion, because your followers would not stand idly by watching you get hacked before taking action. If I post guards outside my castle, I want to know that when I walk outside, I am not going to walk into an ambush. This is mostly an immersion issue for me. I am not truly afraid of a fight, but I do feel like giving my guards 50 lashes for letting a rocknose hang around on my lawn right outside the front gate.
So, perhaps the best solution would be
The option to convert a thrall into a passive, emoting, non-combat (level 0) actor with no reaction to combat and movement limited to emotes. It would also be nice if Funcom could provide mining workstations that by default DO NOT produce materials (ore, stone, wood, etc.) Then allow admin settings to enable resource production. Yes, there are mods out there that do this, but they try to do too much and conflicts abound.
Provide an option to make thralls “Neutral” or “Aggressive” (see above). This would make those lazy guards react when an enemy strolls up to your doorstep.
I didn’t know Pippi was capable of that, and I will try it. I’ve always been afraid to use Pippi, because it seemed like it was for servers only, but I hear plenty of people using it for single-player saying great things. Thanks, @droch-aon!
Here is how my experience with Pippi is turning out. Yeah, I am not an IT person, and Pippi seems to do almost anything, except provide an easy route to creating thespians.
