As you may know, NPC archers in the game have been quite careless about accidentally shooting to their own party members.
This has been especially problematic, sometimes even frightening, when having eager archers as companions.
Now NPC archery checks to avoid hitting unintended friendly targets has been adjusted as follows.
Before shooting an arrow NPCs can now consider the risk and possibilities of hitting an unintended friendly target, ie. members of their own party. Depending on their risk assesment the shooting NPCs may then choose to take or not to take a shot. The higher the risk, the less often you'll see the NPCs using their bows.
These improvements will change NPCs archery behaviour to quite an extent, especially if there are several NPCs being engaged in a fight or hunt, and moving within the risky zone. In general you will see NPCs being more careful with archery than before.
Now you can also feel more relieved about your own archer companion's behaviour. They won't be taking seriously foolhardy shots which might put you, your dogs or anyone else in your party at risk of being wounded by an unintended arrow hit. This will also sometimes make hunting with companions to proceed differently than before. See, if there's is a pack of dogs, or melee armed companions, running in front of capable archers it might be that they have difficulties to find a spot to make a safe shots to the target. Many new scenarios may arise, and occasionally you may need to build new tactics based on the new NPC behaviour.
Lastly, in the heat of the archery combat accidents can still happen. That possibility hasn't been excluded, but now these things should happen way, way more rarely than before.
These are future features - not yet functional yet in the current stable 3.71 or beta 3.72
Topic: NPC archery AI tuning (Read 5913 times)