I'm working on a pair of Generals Challenge maps to accompany the Global Crisis mod - one where you fight against the Syrian general, one against the Israeli general.

Both maps feature a civilian presence absent from the vanilla game. In the Syrian map, a city lies between the Syrian general's base and the disused airport where you establish your own. I'm scripting a lot into the map - if you use a nuke at any time, fallout spreads across the city and civilians (with the occasional angry Mob mixed in) begin filing past your base towards a UN refugee camp. The city's residents will start fighting you in various ways if you cause them harm. They can deny you entry to civilian buildings and start spawning insurgent forces - snipers, angry mobs, basically you don't want to anger them.

What I'm wanting to do, though, is to change civilian buildings so they start off with a random mix of civilians garrisoned inside them. Like how you can garrison a building with an enemy Jarmen Kell inside to boot him out, the civilians are stealthed while garrisoned, but if you send someone in there, you'd see between 8 and 10 people go running out.

How do I create a randomized civilian infantry unit, and how do I tell a structure to spawn with a set number of them loaded inside? Can they be made to see you as an enemy, or to belong to a specific team? I figure their KINDOF values can be changed to allow stealth while garrisoned, and the code for the troop crawler might tell me how to spawn with units inside (not sure if applicable to structures), it's the randomizing and getting the civilians to see you as an enemy so they run away in panic that I was hoping to get help on.

The Syrian General map has GLA forces slowly trying to take it over from the east who, depending on your faction, will be an enemy or a friend. The Israeli Challenge map is not dissimilar, with the Israeli base on a mountaintop overlooking a coastal town with a GLA element, separated by a wall from a notably more intact village with a different allegiance.

Everywhere you go over these towns and cities, you hear music playing from cars and street corners and see people going about their lives, walking along sidewalks, browsing markets, wandering the university campus. How much you disrupt that is on you. The goal is not to dehumanize anyone, Syrian, Israeli, or Palestinian, but to show that urban combat does not come without a price. Nukes leave fallout. Garrisoning a building means kicking people out of their homes.

You can add a spawn point in ever building, and then spawn civilians and tell them to garrison buildings nearby at the start of the round. But you must know that units that are in a team whose faction is civilian are not able to garrison buildings, you must create another player with a different faction than civilian (like gla) and set those civilian units on that team, and then make that team to see the player as an enemy and vice versa if you wish.

Also your map sounds a lot of fun, I am CRAZY for details and realism can't wait to see this map of yours.

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I'll have to let you beta-test it once it's further along. I really ought to let you play my mod of a certain map from the original Generals. 😎

I am hoping to expand the variety of civilians present. More models (which is to say, reskins of certain existing ones). Mostly reskins of GenericMale02, GenericFemale02 (no headscarf), MogadishuFemaleCivilian02 (headscarf), and MogadishuFemaleCivilian01 (headscarf, elderly). I wouldn't say no if anyone wanted to help, I'm sure this isn't the only mod they'd be useful for and I've had terrible luck with modeling.

Different shirt colors, different hair colors, and since they're selectable in this map, I plan to add icon images for them which show up when selected. Actual Syrians, in this case. Faces on the street. Show that they're human, something desperately missing from a lot of our media in the west - I know good people still living there. If I can get the player to think twice before nonchalantly bowling over a dozen pedestrians with a tank, I'll have achieved what I'm hoping for.

Not to go on for too long, but this was something fun  shared by a friend of mine over there, shot on the streets of Damascus. She's living in Turkey now.