OK, so I have a radiant quest made for each of my 6 guards where the player goes and gets one of them to follow them to a radiant location with a boss. It's designed to be an evaluation of their skills. Anyway, all of that works perfectly, however, I want a little better performance from them in terms of Combat. So, here are a few things I need help tweaking:

I want them to sneak when I sneak. Right now, they never sneak.

I want them to be hostile to anyone who is hostile to the player. Right now, they are only hostile to enemies who are hostile towards them. I have noticed there are times when others are NOT hostile to them, but hostile to player. (I assume this is probably set by a faction added to their alias? Which faction(s)?

The other problem related to combat is they sometimes have to be almost on top of an enemy to realize he's a bad guy. I think maybe their AI radius needs tweaking or something.

I'm trying not to use the vanilla setup because I don't want them counted as an official follower to the player. More like when Delphine follows you to that dragon mound.

Balok, take a look at http://www.creationkit.com/SetPlayerTeammate_-_Actor. It should take care of sneaking and probably the other combat issues. If not, also take a look at http://www.creationkit.com/SetRelationshipRank_-_Actor. I use both of those for my follower and I don't have the issues you are seeing.

That's awesome Sollar! Looks like exactly what I need. Now for dumb question # 2, that needs to be run on the ActorRef, not an Alias, right? IE:
MyNPCRef.SetPlayerTeammate() NOT Alias_MyNPCRef.SetPlayerTeammate(), and the same with the relationship? Also, setting relationship to ally should make anyone hostile to me also hostile to them, right?

Oh yeah, what settings do you use for min/max follow distance and speed so they don't lag too far behind? Ive seen somewhere where somebody said to bump their speed a tad.

I've only used those functions on the actor, not an Alias ref, and looking at the function, they extend from Actor so you'd probably have to. But, since you are probably using an Alias Ref, you could probably get the actor using http://www.creationkit.com/GetActorReference_-_ReferenceAlias.

As far as the distance, I give the player two options: "Close" and "Distant'. IIRC, close is 500 units and Distant is 1000 (or 2000, I don't remember). People have commented that they love the option, but personally, I prefer the closer but sometimes the follower DOES bump me. If you don't want to give an option, I would probably suggest starting at 750 and seeing how it works for you. I also bumped the speed up to 125%, since I figure animals should be faster than humans anyway. They don't keep up like I was expecting, but then I realized, they always have to "follow", so I think that explains why they are always behind.

Baaazzzziinnnngggg! That worked like a charm! Took about 8 seconds to make an actor ref, plugged in the fragment and we're off to the races! You guys are awesome around here, did I ever tell you that?!

Isn't it great when something actually just works?

I had that happen once, and I got really worried

OK, I've hit a tiny bug in my NPC's combat behavior. I have 2 NPC's that absolutely REFUSE to use their melee weapons and always start casting flames at the bad guys. I have them set as follows:

My 1H guy:
Under stats> Class: CombatWarrior1H
Under AI Data: csHumanBoss1H

My 2H guy:
Under stats> Class: CombatWarrior2H
Under AI Data: csHumanBoss2H

I double and triple checked the FollowPlayer package and the Combat Style is set to Default. I've even equipped them with high level enchanted weapons that should be much more powerful that the silly flames - especially at level 1. But they refuse to use the melee weapons. Any suggestions?

Oh yeah, if I give them LItemWeaponXX they should somewhat keep up with the game in terms of their weaponry, right? They're set essential so I suppose it don't really matter that much, but I'd like them to have a fighting chance as things get tougher.

Thanks again!