No doubt this is a shock to all of you, but my intense research suggests that the BAI, in its current form, may not always maintain perfect cohesion within its army! Shocking, I know – but do bear with me. What follows is a tale of a siege assault against the BAI in Custom Battle – with glorious illustrative screenshots!
Assaulting the Ottoman Artillery Fort; my Prussian default army prepares to start shooting at walls with cannons, like cannons tend to do. The BAI starts freaking out ever so gently, and as I move my camera over to the Ottoman-held courtyard, I am treated to the following glorious sight:
Yes, the BAI has, for some reason beyond the capabilities of my feeble, primitive, meaty human brain to fully comprehend, decided to somehow clump about six units together in the center, On the same spot. Literally. From the screenshot, it might look like one, big, multicoloured unit, but it's actually six, standing on top of each other. 
As the battle goes on, and things start happening, I have a look over the fort walls once again, and I see this:
Keep in mind; in the picture, they're not moving around, or anything – they're mostly stationary. (With the exception of some of the cavalry plus the odd infantry moving a few paces back and forth.) For the most part, this is just how they stand!
A little later, I manage to fight my way into the courtyard with very little intelligent or even half-assed opposition. I was curious if it was simply the “urban” unit pathfinding itself that was bugged and as such not technically the BAI's fault alone. This turned out not to be the case, unfortunately.
As you can see, my troops in the upper part of the screenshot are forming largely coherent lines and are generally performing like they're supposed to. The BAI, however, does not seem to grasp this concept and its individual soldiers are scattered everywhere, an enemy unit even deciding to melee-charge my unit for little or no rhyme and reason. (Front of pic.)
In the end, I won, of course, although with greater casualties than I usually do - though this was mostly both because I had to assault a fort, and because I didn't really try very hard to actually play.
So my question to all you folks is this - what experiences have you had with the siege BAI? Is this sort of thing a regular occurrence, or was I just being unlucky? There are already lots of threads about the field BAI, so I thought it would make some sense to make one for siege BAI as well.
Breaking news: the BAI might have some trouble with its cohesion! *Pics*.
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