commanders ignoring orders and running to a particular spot?
 

funny behavior here.

I have two commanders equiped with spell casting items and set to cast those spells. The items are Staffs of Corrosion. I have the commanders set about a quarter of the way from the very front (so they're in range, I think). I have the set to cast spells, but I've also tried manually scripting Acid Bolt x 5. Either way same thing happens.

They ignor the orders and had for the very back center. WTF.

Is this a bug? Is it because they're out of range? What's going on?

Re: commanders ignoring orders and running to a particular spot?
 

It seems like they're trying to "Stay behind troops", and you have some troops near the center (probably archers). I don't know why they do that instead of casting Acid Bolt, but perhaps the enemies are still out of range.

Try scriptings them for "hold or cast" for the first few turns. If they don't have any innate magic, they only have one spell to cast, and at least they don't run away from their targets and thus out of range.

Re: commanders ignoring orders and running to a particular spot?
 

Yeah they're definitely trying to 'stay behind troops' and the reason is almost certainly that they aren't in range. When a unit can't cast a spell as it's been told to (or won't due to whatever crazy AI reasoning) it will check if it can cast any other spells instead and if it can't do that it will return to another default behaviour, which is stay behind troops. I'm guessing these two commanders can't cast any other spells (probably just indy commanders or something).

If you tell them to hold or cast that'll do the trick. Set their last order to cast spells though, so they hang around and keep going.