I am personally allergic to NavMesh so I don’t fool with it. This is one of those questions like to be or not to be…er…“to move or not to move”. So you need a method of propulsion for the NPC. There seems to be a few methods and there are caveats to them all. For example some need a character bp (hence the capsule component), some need a pawn.
One of the easiest ways to get something to move I have found is the method that uses set actor location in this thread SHIPSCROLLER (Side) - General Movement Theory.
In my Beat Em Up template, I needed a way to propel the camera actor along parallel to the player(s) and smoothly, not too fast or slow. not herky jerky. What seemed to work there was “Add actor world offset”. I’m currently experimenting with that to move the NPCs.
I’m finding with game development you really have to break down what exactly you are trying to do and then work out a way to achieve that. You say it is a top down hockey esque game. SO, you want those “players” or “opponents” to obviously try to score and get into a “goal”.
So the pandoras box that you have opened here is “enemy movement behavior”. What do they do? It would be like playing Mortal Kombat 2 against a cpu controlled Liu Kang. As soon as the fight begins, he may come at me with a bicycle kick. That is a possibility…and perhaps it is a 1-10 chance…1-20 chance…who knows.
I am not sure what to tell you for enemy movement behavior here. EMB is such a complex thing. I have been working on this BEU template off an on for years and am just now starting to wrap my mind around EMB. If there is no projectile or “puck” in this game and rather the character scores by just being in a goal zone or just beyond it. Then perhaps have the npc go straight for that goal at begin play, and if the third person character can block them for a certain amount of time then have them retreat and regroup and try again. I have no idea.