Again, many thanks for the reply. All of this is really insightful.
About my questions, the context is this:
I have made a Template Anim BP which contains this state machine.
We want this template to cater to 80% + of all our NPCs in the game.
When the designers creates a new NPC, they create a child of this template and they get to slot in various animations for, say, Idle1, Idle2, idle3, and a bunch of other contextual animations. We want to be able to tell a story with this template.
An example of this would be:
NPC_A starts on idle1 when the game is launched. He sticks to Idle1 (say, just standing there and looking around) until it has looped 8 times and then proceeds to Idle2.
In Idle2, NPC_A will be playing a “cheering” animation until it has looped 5 times and he then proceeds to Idle3.
Idle3 will on play a single time and will have NPC_A exiting themselves and walking out of player’s sight.
So, in a nutshell, what I am trying to do is simply to give the control of how many times each animation plays to the designers of the NPCs so that they can control the flow of that story.
Hopefully that makes sense?