Removing characters from a custom group

[DrMike2000]

I had a fiddle around with Mission Architect the other day, and couldn't find any way of removing a character type from a custom group.

eg you make a group with 2 types of minion, 2 lieutenants and 2 bosses, then discover that the file is oversized. How do you remove one of the minion types from the group?

The only way I could get it happening was to delete them from the local text files. There must be an easier way.

[Viking]

I've found a few tricks when it comes to manipulating custom groups.  I imagine the problem that you're facing derives from the fact that when you create a custom critter, the final creation screen (with the ID card) asks that you state what custom group it is in.  Subsequently, if you tried to "remove" one of those custom critters by editing the custom group itself, it would otherwise leave the game asking, "So what group is this minion supposed to belong to, then?"

You can deal with this issue by editing the minion in question, instead of trying to attack this from the custom group angle.  Simply deleting the minion will remove it from the group.  Or, if you go back to that final ID card page, you can assign the minion to a new or different custom group.

Another trick involves the creation of a new custom group.  Let's say I've made a group of custom minions, each of which I've assigned to a group called "Test" in their Group ID field.  I can then create a new custom group, like "Test Subjects", and then freely add or remove custom critters from the "Test" group.

Hope that answers your question.

[BlueBard]

Yes, it's really a question of either deleting the character outright (which you can do from the 'My Characters' tab) or reassigning the character to a different group by editing the character.

Hopefully they'll come up with a more user-friendly way to do this.

Reading some tips and tricks, it looks like you can have a custom character belong to a base group and add a copy of that character to yet another group.  I haven't played around with that yet, though.

[Viking]

As it turns out, I have played around with putting the same characters in multiple groups.  The results can be seen in my arc, "Fog of War," ID 138914.

Specifically, I made a bunch of custom enemies that are a spoof of characters from the World of Warcraft game.  I originally called this group "PoWs", which was short for "Planet of Warfare" while simultaneously punning the "Prisoner of War" acronym.

However, I wanted subsets of this large, encompassing group to appear in the arc before merging the two.  So I created two custom groups, called the "Federation of Allied Stereotypes" and the "Dominion of Dastardly Deviants", and assigned the appropriate half of the PoWs to each.  After several missions involving only one or the other, the final mission uses the original PoW group.

[BlueBard]

Viking, how did that affect file size?

I tried to add two distinct custom groups of about 10 characters each to a single arc and it blew my file size limit.  I know adding built-ins to a custom group uses less space because it doesn't have to keep track of all the extra information.  How did you do it?

[Viking]

I'm not entirely certain how it affected filesize, but "Fog of War" had the following set-up:

The "PoWs" group had six minions, four lieutenants, and two bosses.

The "Federation of Allied Stereotypes" and "Dominion of Dastardly Deviants" each used half of the "PoWs" group, with three minions, two lieutenants, and one boss in each.

Ultimately, I was able to tweak things so that I had five missions in the arc, though I was still butting up against the filesize limit.

[Bugbear]

If a specific custom character is in two different custom groups within an arc, it will not repeat the character info.  All custom characters are listed and numbered at the bottom of the file, and the groups refer to those numbers.  It's a relatively efficient system.

[BlueBard]

I'm not entirely certain how it affected filesize, but "Fog of War" had the following set-up:

The "PoWs" group had six minions, four lieutenants, and two bosses.

The "Federation of Allied Stereotypes" and "Dominion of Dastardly Deviants" each used half of the "PoWs" group, with three minions, two lieutenants, and one boss in each.

Ultimately, I was able to tweak things so that I had five missions in the arc, though I was still butting up against the filesize limit.

Thanks, Viking and Bugbear!  That gives me an idea on how to solve an issue I had crafting the arc I wanted to do.  I can get away with duplicating some of the minions and lts between the two groups and drop the total number of custom characters.