Hello all!

As I was putting together a faction via the ORBATron (a derivative of the Project Opfor Middle Eastern Militia), I realized that I wanted to pad out their relatively weak equipment and lack of armored vehicles with some static weapon positions. I added a variety of static weapons to their available units (DShKMs, ZU-23-2s, etc.) and then was kind of stuck. I wasn't sure where I was supposed to put my static weapon positions/teams, insofar as I didn't want them to be as far back as most artillery, especially the machine guns and anti-tank weapons. After some deliberation with a friend, I build their squads within the Support Infantry subheading, however- after extensive testing and scouring the map several times over, my OpCom has only spawned normal infantry and motorized forces, as well as the non-static AA team I put under Support Infantry.

tl;dr- does static equipment have to go into artillery to be brought out by an ALiVE OpCom, or is it simply a problem with one of my OpCom's attributes?

Project OPFOR is a broken mess when it comes to getting units to function properly within ALiVE. There are all sorts of config errors and problems with getting them to spawn in the right manner. It requires a significant amount of line by line recoding. There is a thread in here that specifically talks about the way to work on turrets for vehicles which I believe is how static weapons are listed as well.

For simplicity sake just do a search in this forums for "Project OPFOR" and you will get all sorts of great information on it.

Project Opfor nonwithstanding, though, what's the proper place to put static weapons under the ALiVE groups? Should they spawn in any of them, provided I use a less broken set of assets, or do I need to set them exclusively as artillery?

Static weapons wont typically be seen. Exceptions would be Arty support module, AA spawned by Aur Controller, and static weapons by CQB module.

A few options of carying complexity:
-can manually place some in the editor, and virtualize or not as you see fit

-you can place empty ones set to respawn w/ vehicle respaw module and VCOM AI so Inf groups in yhe area will man them

-you can define some groups via description.ext that include static weapons. These will be luck of the draw as far as where they spawn and are thus stuck.

-define some units carrying static weapons components, groups including theae units, a replacement config so desired static MGs, AT etc replace vanilla ones (if not wanting vanilla ones of course), and use VCOM. This will have roving AI that will deploy HMGs, recoiless rifles, mortars etc.