I have designed a small addition for my mod which makes all guards of my newly created town march out to a farm at noon on wednesdays. Then they get into Order of Battle and after a couple of hours, they march on an enemy "army" which also stands in battle formation down south and fight a real pitched battle with these Bandits. It's quite a sight to see. When it works.

The problem is that some of the guards won't leave the barracks and get out in the field! They just stay in, and only if the Player goes inside the barracks in person are they activated and march out. This is really tiresome since they leave their buddies who actually show up for the event to fight the battle alone and when they do so without that needed support, they are most often just massacred by the enemy. I've tried sending them out from their barracks into the streets before the time of battle, but to no avail. They just stay in.

Sometimes when testing the battle works perfectly well and all troops show up, and sometimes I get this annoying Stay-Inside-Bug. Any suggestions? Is there a way to force the AI to do the right thing?

Some screenies of the event (When it works as intended!):

[IMG]http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac96/Antiscamp/BattleFormation2.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac96/Antiscamp/BattleFormation.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac96/Antiscamp/TheBattle.jpg[/IMG]

Have you set the (iirc) "No Low Level Processing" flag on the NPC's? That might be the reason they sometimes stay inside (when they're in mid- or low-level processing) and get out when the player goes inside (and they go into high-level processing).

Thanks! I'll try this at once and report back.

From my playtesting right now, I can only see that it helped a lot turning No Low Level Processing off. Thanks a bunch for this!

You activating them probably just forces them to evaluate their package. When the battle is initiated, call the function "EVP" on the NPC's reference which will automatically force them to evaluate their AI package (immediately pick the next package) through script and see if that helps.