You could make a west unit with a higher rank than all the civs, with probabilty of presence = 0% , then group all the civs with the west soldier.
East will shoot the civs so to do what you want... for each civ do
unit setcaptive true
in a script so east dont shoot them.. when you want east to shoot them change from true to false... then vice versa to stop them shooting.
About the crates... civs should be able to take crates like other units. Is the script to add weapons running on all computers?