I have about 25 bandits at my fort and it seems that once roused, almost all of them bum-rush the player.

This is in an exterior cell.

Many of them are archers who should stick to their xmarker.

Any way to break the fort into 2 - 3 zones, so the player has a little more control / survivability in the engagement?

Thanks!

Well there may be a floor-plan-design way to solve this... but that is not my area of expertise.

instead, if it were me I would make them non hostile to the player then turn them hostile with trigger box or scripting.

This is from the top of my head, not tested:

Say you have three groups of bandits. Give each group its own faction (eg: Bandits1, Bandits2 & Bandits3). At the beginning of the dungeon, place a trigger box that adds the player to all 3 factions using http://www.creationkit.com/AddToFaction_-_Actor. Then place another triggerbox just before the area the player meets the first group and script it to use http://www.creationkit.com/RemoveFromFaction_-_Actor on the player. Then do the same for the other two groups. I think this should work as long as the three groups are separated by not being in the same faction

EDIT: Or even simpler, wouldn't it work if they were just separated into the 3 factions? As long as there isn't another faction added to them that they all share, then one group won't be alerted to the players presence in the level by another group, would they?

- Hypno

Thanks, guys.

I tried the factions thing, but if the agro radii overlap, they fight each other.

Actually, using a mix of unaggressive and missile / stay at reference 256 (radius) type lvl bandits, it wasn't too unmanageable.

I was just thinking the Beth designers have these colored zones boxes at some of the forts. I was thinking they were somehow used to control the bum-rush.

I would suggest using packages to handle this. In your quest, create some aliases for your bandits. They should fill when the quest starts, assuming you point the aliases at the specific references. Then, use the appropriate AI packages to have them stand their ground, move in to attack, so on. Conditionalize the packages in the aliases package stack based on the quest stage. You can advance the quest stage by using trigger volumes.

Package names forthcoming, trying to fire up the CK.

Edit: For the archers, the HoldPosition package template is nice, as well as HoldPositionWithTravel (to give them a small amount of mobility), as well as KeepDistanceFrom (to just try to keep them away from the player). Maybe give those a shot?

Chesko:

Thanks!

I think some of the hold position leveled bandits already have those packages baked in. I will have to investigate.

The keep distance package might be useful on another character and might make her harder to defeat.