Soldiers don't follow orders.

[hoom]

All these are RTW game engine bugs/design choices & EB can't fix them.

The circle/swirly unit is a game engine buggy/odd way of getting units to re-form.
If they take casualties before completing the re-form, they start over again.
Most of the time if left alone they'll work their way out of it eventually.
Sometimes a new command can snap them out of it but other times it just starts the spiral afresh...

Buggy one or two guys locked in combat seems to be again a game engine bug where sometimes that guy in your unit doesn't realise that he killed the guy he was fighting & gets locked in unwinnable combat (& renders his entire unit all but unusable for the rest of the battle)
It seems to particularly occur with bridges/building corners/on walls & in other locations where unit pathing gets weird.

Grouped units attacking whatever is nearest to each of the grouped units is I think intentional design.
Sometimes its really handy (eg for cleaning up routers) but most of the time something of a pain.
To bypass, either give the attack orders to each unit in the group one at a time or ungroup before giving the order.

Alt+attack forces skirmisher units to attack in melee (& disables skirmish mode so they'll actually close)

[Thaatu]

I'm too lazy to check if this has been mentioned already, but switching guard mode on prevents the enemy from "snagging" your units into melee. In fact there's an exploit, which some of you are probably (accidentally or not) using, in which units that are defending against an attack with guard mode on suffer no exhaustion.

[Xehh II]

Units in guard mode do suffer exhaustion, it's just very, very slow.

[pezhetairoi]

I notice some units die faster on guard mode, though. Notably, my Neitos and other sword infantry.

[Xehh II]

I'd expect that guard mode would best best for Def. units, swordsmen aren't really that defensive.