Sorry. I think I can only help with the first one.

AI players are typically selected during the player selection screen before the mission is started and "continued." This would be the easiest way to do it, IMO. Go into the editor and make sure the AI are grouped to your player (click on the groups tab. Hover over your player, left click, drag over the AI player, and release). On mission start or continue, you should then have the option to select which ones you want to start and continue the mission with you. If you want to disable the AI for that particular session, login in as admin at the player selection screen and click "disable AI." You can also just select a handful to take with you if you want.

Make sure you have disabledAI = 0; in your description.ext if you set the AI units to "playable" in the editor.

Now, with persistence, AI will never spawn at your saved location. They will spawn where your respawn_west marker is. You have two choices at this point. Either go into the commander tablet/Admin Actions and teleport units or do what I do, and use this script in this thread:

http://alivemod.com/forum/1613-ai-teammates-location-persistence

This is a script that does a one time check at mission start the teleport the AI to your persisted location. Also in the thread is an amendment to have them teleport to the respawn location with you when you die.

Sorry to bump this. I figured the title would be suitable for the question.

While waiting for all the 1.60 issues to get resolved, I started reworking one of my persistent conventional battles into a persistent conventional battle, with 4 manually created tasks the players can choose to tackle, or not. The tasks are created with the task state modules, which are synced to another task state module (complete. Which is "succeeded" via a trigger).

The tasks involve assassinating non-virtualized units and destroying manually placed objects from the editor, which are checked with triggers looking for !alive objectname.

Are task state, non-virtualized units and manually placed objects persistent? Does the database check for any of these when saving? Does it remember trigger states at all either?

I'm assuming not but figured it would be worth asking. I know I could try it, but with the mystery thing of where my Workshop mods are now stored, and their names being all messed up with numbers rather than words, I'm planning on switching back to manual downloads before trying persistence again.