Why can't commanders follow scripted orders?!

[ArkhanTheBlack]

I'm not sure if this is a bug, but in my games it happens regularly that a commander / pretender doesn't follow his scripted orders. It usually starts with the commander casting astral shield for no obvious reason because it was never scripted. Then it's possible that the right spells follow in various orders or they just attack. I'd say it happens with my pretender in about every 5th battle. Against low or mid strength opponents it's usually not so dramatic, but against large armies with some nasties it's pretty much a death sentence.
The annoying thing is that this problem is the default reason why my pretender dies. And in critical situations against higher difficulty AIs I can loose the whole game because of that. Am I the only one who has this problem?

[moderation]

Hmm, your commander might be casting Astral Shield because he isn't allowed to spend gems on his scripted spell. Sometimes commanders aren't allowed to use gems if the game considers the opposing force too weak. Usually this is the case if you're fighting a few PD. I think it's revealed in debug as mayusegems:0.

And I remember reading that mages will refuse to cast certain spells if you script it in slot #1 for some reason. I'm not sure if that has been fixed though.

[Endoperez]

AI spell casting priorities

Kristoffer O said:
Hi,

Seems like some spells might be too popular.

I've heard about:
Astral Shield
Arrow Fend (recently heard of this, so I'm not sure how bad it is)

Any others since last patch?

Yes, people have problems with it. It's most often due to AI wanting to cast buffs on the first round. See above thread for details.

[thejeff]

There's a known bug with Astral Shield having a higher priority than it should, especially with high Astral mages.
Supposedly there's a fix in the upcoming patch.

You can, to an extent, work around it by looking at the debug log for a battle and figuring out which of your other spells will not be overridden. The bonus for buffs that puts Astral Shield over the top is larger earlier in the fight, so you can sometimes get the desired spells off, if you shift the order around.

Hopefully, after this weekend, it won't be an issue.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Good to hear that it will be fixed soon. It's really annoying...

[sector24]

Another very common reason for the AI to go native is if the spell you script has no valid targets in range. This is very common for me, when I think I'm in range but I'm actually 1 square too far away or something similar.

[sansanjuan]

Today I had a lone mage cast communion slave. I did have him scripted that way (leftover from earlier encounter) but seems that this scenario s/b on the AI's "trump orders" list.
-SSJ

Edit: hard to get it right both ways... I was bark'n about trumped orders last month.