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Arralen said:
This is not a bug - at least, not in the conventional way.
Why do you order melee troops to fire at closest? They can't fire anything and therefore advance to go into melee.
One may argue that the archers should stay put ... but the game cannot split up squads on its own and give those units individual orders, at least in general.
In short: If you want missile troops to fire at enemies, set up a missile squad and order it to fire.
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Anything that acts in an unintended manner, even if only erratically, is a bug. This must be a bug, because this behavior has not happened to me yet. When I set my chariot archers with charioteers and tell them to hold and attack, the archers fire for two turns and then they rush forwards together. If I set them to no orders, then they split up and do different things. I will check to see what setting them to "fire at X" will do, but if they can handle all those other complicated situations fine, I don't see why they can't consistently just stay put and fire, too.
Even if this turns out to be non-buggy and completely consistent, then I will say that it would be nice for it to be altered in a patch, because the ability to place standard bearers and high morale units into archer squads is useful.
[Update]: I just tested it quickly, and it does look like consistent behavior. I guess archers are just supposed to be units that rout easily, unless a nation has a particular archer type that comes with high morale. I'm glad this doesn't affect my chariot use, because I never set them to just fire anyway. I can think of a way to exploit this behavior. Put archers and melee units in a squad with no orders. The melee units will charge forward and attack, but since a large portion of their squad is safely in the back and not taking casualties, the chance they'll rout is GREATLY reduced. An example would be something like War elephants which tend to rout easily when left on their own. Also, I can imagine if you have more melee units in a squad than archers, then opposing players who set orders to "fire archers" or "attack archers" will ignore those archer squads and possible go for another decoy archer squad that you set up.
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