The 'Foot Missile Bug' - Again

[simonscales]

First, I think this is the correct place to post this.
Second, apologies if this is repeating/addressing something which is already solved elsewhere.

Having returned to Kingdoms after spending a long time playing other games, I am modding my game, just for my own enjoyment. Nothing major, just changing unit stats in EDU, and hopefully also adding/changing which units are available to various factions in EDB.

My question is, has anyone actually solved the problem where units armed with missile weapons as their primary weapon will, when controlled by the AI versus a human opponent and engaged in melee, 'freeze' whilst reloading (the unit status shows as reloading constantly), and stand still doing nothing whilst the enemy hack them to pieces unopposed, even if they have secondary melee weapons to defend themselves with? Some of the info re this in other posts seems confusing, even contradictory.

I have tried changing the unit charge distance, missile weapon reload times, and firing delay attributes in EDU, but the problem still occurs, even using large values such as -55000 for firing delay as recommended in another post I saw on these forums (I can't remember exactly where).

I also reduced the ammo supply for missile armed units using the PREC attribute to 1, thinking this would result in the unit firing one volley using up all it's ammo, then charging, my reasoning being that the unit would automatically go into melee mode on contact with the enemy, since there would be nothing left to reload, but the problem still occurs even with this.

In the above case, it seems that not every man in the unit fires his missile weapon before charging, meaning that when entering melee, if there are even a couple of men with missile ammo left, the unit still goes into reloading mode.

Thinking of (possible) solutions, I wondered if you could make a unit PREC twice in one charge, and I did edit one unit to have PREC twice in it's primary weapon attribute, hoping this would make it use all it's missile ammo by making sure every man shoots before melee contact. On trying the unit in a custom battle, no difference (But no CTD either, which was a slight surprise).

The 'freeze' doesn't happen every time, maybe once in every three or four, but it is, if not game-breaking, at least game-blighting, when the enemy refuse to defend themselves due to this bug, if you can call it a bug.

I'm playing the 'Peninsula Italica' mod for Kingdoms, I know this mod is quite old now and all of the above refers to that mod.

Is there anything else I could do to fix this, has it been fixed by others, or is it one of those things we just have to put up with?

Thoughts, advice, and suggestions would be very much appreciated.

[Gigantus]

It's unlikely that negative values will work with the firing delay as it can only add a 'blank' period between shooting cycles. Rather leave it at zero.
The charge distance is related to the distance the unit itself requires to 'wind up' when doing a 'running' melee attack
Afaik a prec weapon is only fired during a running\charging attack, else it needs to be done manually.