Hi, I'm working on my first mission and I can't seem to figure out how to have a friendly ship follow you around. Is this possible at all? Also how do I reskin them in a custom ship costume?

No, you can't have them follow you around. Hopefully it will be added in the future.

To have the ship have a custom costume you need to click on each actor in the NPC group list. Then you'll see an area to select the costume for the ship.

Ok, so how do I get an allied NPC's help in a fight? Do I just have them placed within combat range of the enemy group at the start of the mission? There a way to make sure they're not blown up before the player gets there?

Yes you do have to spawn them close to each other to get them to fight. Set either the enemy npc group, the friendly npc group or both to spawn right when you want them to. Use the "states" tab and set them to go from invisible to visible when the player reaches a certain point (using a reach marker), or when they activate a console or talk to a contact.

Thank you for the quick answers, just one more question: When I set the costumes on the enemy npcs tied to a kill enemies objective, am I locking in what they will be or will level scaling override this? Is there a way to limit how many ships can spawn in one group no matter the level of the player?

The number of ships doesn't scale with level, it scales with how many players are grouped doing the mission. See here for details:

http://starbaseugc.com/index.php/tra...ling-for-npcs/

Outstanding! Thanks so much this will help a lot for what I want to do.

Just realized I can't set Federation ships as part of a Kill Enemy objective in a Fed mission? Anyway to do this or do I have to use Terran Empire?

You have to use Terran Empire. But you can still reskin them as normal Federation ships if you want them to be rouge Federation elements or something along those lines.

For the most part, Terran Empire pretty much acts like Federation anyway. Their ground forces are a little different, but their ships are pretty close.

Yea figured it out. also realized i need to use NPC groups for my ally as well. Individual NPC ships are strictly non combat correct?