How do You Stop Non-Companion Allies from Fighting?

[David Brasher]

How do you keep non-hostile NPCs that you are cooperating with on a mission from getting in fights with each other and killing one another? These are not companions. They do not take orders from you. These NPCs all have aggression of 5. They all share a common good faction which likes faction member +100.

 

What tends to happen is that there will be a battle with the bad guys. When all the bad guys are dead, the good guys hold grudges about accidental friendly hits they received during the battle. So one of them will attack someone else to get revenge. Some of the others might view this as the crime of assault, and they will jump in to help kill the vengeful good guy.

 

This is not a problem if a friendly NPC hits me. I can ignore it. If I hit a friendly NPC and he comes after me for revenge, I can yield. But NPCs never yield to each other.

 

I have heard that some companion mods have a mechanism to stop your companions from killing each other. Perhaps a similar approach could be used with the quest related non-companion NPCs in this mod?

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Deleted1848331User]

You could put a script with something to check their dispostion with those other people. Such as zzNPCID01.GetDispostion zzNPCID02 <=20, then zzNPCID01.SetDispostion zzNPCID02 100. Not sure if it would work, because I haven't messed with dispostion before. If you mess around with it, like putting GetDispostion zzNPCID01 zzNPCID02 <= 20, etc... If it doesn't work at first, start messing around with it ;D

[Avalon4]

Hmmm, well I know there's a mod that lets you toggle a character's IFH flag on (by means of a ring 'token', called Ring of Companionship I believe)

 

Maybe you could use the scripts in that mod as a base for wider tuning of NPC moods?

[lonewolfkai]

Check this out David: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35257#fileanchor

 

It might be just what you're looking for.

 

ALso keep in mind that it can cause issues with certain quests (vanilla or modded) where NPCs actually need to kill each other. You'll have to deactivate it for quests like that. Check the comments on it from Bethsoft forums for further details. Skycaptn won't put any sort of confliction notes about it in the descript/readme for some reason.

 

I actually have it as a suggestion for my Stealth Wars mod since the NPCs there could sometimes start a civil war inside a city!

Edited February 2, 2011 by lonewolf_kai

[vvk78]

Ring of Companionship is perfect to make your companions (or any NPCs to whose inventory you can add items) peacefully work with one another.

 

You can also set the IFH (Ignore Friendly Hits) flag manually using the console:

1. Pop up the console using the tilde (~) key

2. Click on the aggressive NPC (called as "actor" in game parlance), whom you want to pacify

3. His/her/its name will be shown at the top of the screen with an identifier (formid) number

4. Type these commands into console (explanatory comments are after the semicolons):

 

gifh                   	;GetIgnoreFriendlyHits - See if an actor is ignoring friendly hits
sifh 1                 	;SetIgnoreFriendlyHits - Set whether actor must ignore friendly hits (0-no, 1-yes)
SameFactionAsPC        	;Returns 1 if the calling actor is in faction that the player also belongs to
GetFactionRank         	;Get the faction (group) to which the selected actor belongs
SetFactionRank 0001DBCD 0  ;this is faction for player and close friends (0=lowest rank,9=highest, -1=remove from faction)

 

5. NPC will become part of your faction (if not already so), and will always ignore hits from friendlies

6. Press the ~ key to close the console

7. This is a permanent change, so make sure you back up to manual savegames before and after this quick hack. It will remain in effect, even if you quit and later restart the game.

8. You can use the excellent Refscope mod to find out exact NPC stats before trying any workarounds/hacks with their stats.

Edited February 2, 2011 by vvk78

[David Brasher]

These are all very good suggestions. Thank you.

 

I ended up making a spell that effects the seven NPCs in question. The spell is added to you at the beginning of the quest, and removed from you at the end of the quest. The spell uses:

AAMyQuarrelsomeNPCREF1.StopCombat 

on the seven reference IDs.

 

It seems to work okay. I might need to test some more and try using it at the wrong times to see if I can get some weird behaviors. But so far it seems to be doing its job. Not a very elegant solution, so maybe sometime I will get one of these other solutions installed and doing a better job.