I am going through EJ’s tutorial on triggering animation using fields, and he demonstrates that simulations have to be baked into point level animations before they can be controlled with effectors. Does that also apply to tag-driven animations (i.e. align to spline)?
Here’s my model: https://adobe.ly/2Q4BVcd
I set it up with a plain effector to trigger an Align to Spline animation 132 frames long. It looks like nothing happens, which makes me think that I need to bake it. However, if I bake it then the sequence will become a mass of keyframes with no hope of modifying anything forever after. So before I do that, I just want to be sure that I’m not missing something fundamental that makes it all push-button simple 
In a perfect world I would like to rotate the splines with fields also - that is, control the angle that the blocks bounce in so they don’t cross in front of the camera. I have done this on smaller assemblies by making the clones editable and adjusting each spline manually, but with so many clones and splines, it would be super-cool if I could shift the incoming angle of those clones closest to the camera using automation. I imagine a radial field might do it, or or gradient. But maybe I’m fantasizing again…
Cinema always finds a way.