I'm finding my missions to be a little more barren than some of the others I've played by other people. I realize there's quite a few factors for what causes civilians to spawn, and that I can add as many placement modules as I want, but first I'd like to understand the terminology of the module better.

In the wiki, it says this: "If you want very highly populated areas, keep the TAORs small and turn filtering off.
For full map civilian ambiance, filter to Ignore Small+Medium locations and put all other settings to Low. Use a combination of techniques to get your desired effect."

I'd like to slightly increase the number of civilians spawning in civilian towns. And the first line I quoted makes sense. But I can't really make heads or tails out of what "For full map ambience, filter to ignore small+medium locations and put all other settings to low" means. It sounds like the wiki is telling you how to increase civilian ambience by decreasing civilian ambience.

Could someone explain this module better for me? I currently use "extreme" yet there's oftentimes while playing I'll only see one or two civilians in an entire nights session.

"For full map ambience, filter to ignore small+medium locations and put all other settings to low"

- this is for when you want the entire map populated without using TAOR markers. It's just suggesting you ignore small locations (ones with only a house or two vs a town) to keep performance optimal.

For what you are trying to do I would try this:

• create separate TAORs for each med-large town and have the civ module set to medium-ish... don't filter anything. Be sure to set the civ limiter to something reasonable to prevent too many from spawning in
• try adding another civ module to handle everything not covered by the civ TAORs - set to low spawns and filter out small objectives
• make sure you have the civ debug turned on so you can see where they are spawning

Also note some maps don't do well with civilians - ones like Chernarus where there are not a lot of enter-able house positions to spawn them in

Ok. So if I'm understanding you correctly, one way to go about this instead of having one module set to extreme, I would have two instead. One set to medium with no filter to cover the new TAORs for cities/towns, the other set to low to cover the rest of the map. Does that sound right?

I guess another question is about Assymetric recruitment. I'm assuming not but does ALiVE care which factions are used for OPFOR and civilians for the situations in which civilians are turned into enemies? Let's say I want to use an OPFOR faction that has no civilians, such as IWAR. But I want my civilians to look like Middle Easterns before they get recruited so I use CAF Aggressors for the civilian faction name.

Will CAF civilians become IWAR OPFOR when they are turned into terrorists?

@Heroes - yes that's what I was trying to say :)

Create a bunch of 'town' TAORs and have one civ module covering those areas, then a second one to handle the less populated areas between towns.

Lol, I usually chuck 2-3 placement modules down with the extreme setting. I like me some civies.

I'm wondering, can civilians ever spawn in an area without civilian objects? The reason I ask is because just south of the most northwest base (I'm using as a FOB) on Reshmaan is a HUGE city. But when I debug the civ and mil modules it doesn't show up with mil or civ objects.

I've tried placing a marker just for this city and its own population module but it's always empty. Will that area get populated over time or should I just manually place some civs there?

There were some indexing issues with Reshmaan and it was released as is, that was probably one of the troublesome cities. There isn't any way to place civilians there using a module as it depends on pre-analyzed data.

Is there any downside that you could think of if I decided to manually place 10-15 civs in each of the troublesome areas?

I'm thinking I'll just place them manually and sync them to the Virtual AI module. I've never seen anyone do this and didn't know if there was a reason for that.

Won't work. Civilians work off a separate system.

They would pretty much just stand there and run when you shot at them.

That sucks. Thanks Spyder.

LOL! So oddly, I switched over from A3MP to AiA with Reshmaan and for some reason, the defined objects are more plentiful. That one specific city is not but quite a few others now are. Strange. Anyway, much more playable now. Thanks guys.