Allied units: to surround or not to surround

[shevegen]

I am currently playing aria of the ... something something campaign. Dragonslayer.

In one scenario we have to kill a lich. The lich runs in the corner; then allied units swarm
him, without ever attacking him because he would deal too much damage. So I can not
kill the lich. (I can reload an older save and try to avoid have him run into a corner.)

My problem here is that the allied units actively work against me and the objective of
the mission by surrounding the lich. Like friendly bodyguards.

Now I do understand that this can be a feature too - allied units prevent enemy units
from fleeing or escaping and they may be killed on a later turn. But just moving in
and doing nothing, against a very strong opponent, isn't that useful, even more so
when no other allied unit can actually deal enough damage. Something in the calculation
seems wrong to me.

I would propose that the algorithm that checks for these conditions, is re-evaluated.
Either allied units should potentially suicide if they damage the enemy boss; or
they should not block path and leave one hex as distance between themselves
and the enemy unit. This may not be trivial to code, so a simpler alternative would
be if I could give behaviour-instructions to my allied "compagnion". Ideally this
can be done globally rather than on a per-scenario or per-campaign setting, because
otherwise it requires campaign creators to add that stuff; instead it could perhaps
be an advanced setting or so, "AI behaviour of allied units" or something like that,
like a sub-tab of "combat" or so. In the options.

I actually could kill the lich if my main level 3 units could weaken him, before the
final blow. But I can't do much when allied units surround the guy and then do
nothing other than block space.

[ChaosRider]

Sounds like a good reason to create mode that allows to swap places between units that are not enemies and still have attack left greater than 0 (which is they didnt attack any unit in own side turn). Who wants to make it?
Maybe Ravana or someone else ?

[beetlenaut]

I hate allied AIs. Losing because the AI is dumber than a box of rocks is aggravating. The solution is not to change core mechanics of the whole game, but to allow the player to have more influence over the allied AI's behavior. If shevegen could have increased his ally's aggressiveness, the AI would have attacked (and probably died) allowing his units to get to the leader. I wrote a macro to command an AI leader's behavior so it didn't jump my line and suicide against the enemy, but it doesn't change the side behavior. A macro that does that used to exist, but it was removed because its effect was too subtle to notice most of the time. It could have been improved instead of removed, but scenario designers would still need to implement it. Maybe something like that could be added with a mod.