Side Relations
The game consists of 8 Sides: West, East, Civilian, Resistance, sideLogic, Friendly, Enemy or Unknown. You can determine which Side a unit is on by using the side command.
Sometimes you may want to use the faction command. Factions are slightly different to Sides. A US vehicle driven by a Russian will respond as belonging to the East Side, but the USMC faction.
You can set which sides Resistance is friendly to in the mission editor (click on the Intel box). However, it is not possible to change the Resistance side relationship during a game.
Everyone is friendly toward Civilians. This means an armed Civilian will be able to slaughter unfriendly AI troops with impunity.
Hostile Civilians
You can arm Civilians by inserting code like the following in their initialisation field:
this addWeapon "Colt1911"; this addMagazine "7Rnd_45ACP_1911";
One way hostility
You can make Civilians hostile to other sides by using the setFriend command:
civilian setFriend [west , 0]; // Will cause civilians to shoot at West, but not West and Civilians
Not true anymore for Arma 2: Armed civilians will automatically shoot at anybody who is not friendly to Resistance.
You can make other sides hostile to a civilian by making the civilian renegade. Place this code in the civilian unit's init field:
this AddRating -10000; // Will cause sides to shoot civilian, but not civilian to shoot back
(When a unit’s rating is below -2000, the unit is considered "renegade" and other units will attack it.)
Two way hostility
To enable hostility both ways - civilians shooting at a side and the side shooting back, you need to move the civilian unit to a hostile side.
Example:
To shoot at West, you can make Resistance unfriendly to West and group the civilian unit with Resistance, or you could group them to East side.
- Group your civilians with an East officer of higher rank than the civilians.
- put: deletevehicle this in the officer’s initialisation field (this will cause the officer not to appear)
- When you start the mission, the officer won't be there as he is deleted, but the civvies think they are East, will take over command and follow all waypoints, and fire on anyone on the opposite side
Undercover hostile civilians
Place this code in the civilian unit's init field:
this AddRating -2000;
2000 is the threshold value for a unit being considered renegade. Now, if the civilian is to shoot any other units, it will be considered an enemy by EAST and WEST (but not armed CIVILIANS)