AI oddities for scouts, infantry and during defence

[NIN3]

Hello, I've played about 5-10 generated missions since release and I noticed some weird behaviour for AI when using scouts and infantry during the battle or in the after action report (AAR).

1. Scouts placed on roads or open fields
1. AI seems to prioritize vision a lot for scouts. Often this works fine and dismounted scouts end up in high buildings with a "no engage" in their SOP. So they are quite hard to find. But this doesnt always work
2. In areas with few buildings scouts might end up in the middle of an open the field, instead of the treeline surrounding it
3. Non-dismounted scouts end up staying in the middle of the road right at the edge of my deployment zone, and being torn to shreds in the first few seconds of the battle

2. AI doesnt seem to judge distances correctly
1. It seems like AI totally overestimated the distances infantry can traverse. Often times it expects infantry to walk across tree filled mountain valley, miles from the objectives
2. Often in after action reports, I saw the backlines being filled with up to 10 infrantry units in the middle of huge forests. In the replay I could see that they have dismounted very early on and where just tracking around for the whole mission
3. Also I think AI doesnt mount up again? Once engaged AI dismounts most of the times. Which is a good thing. But its very exploitable, if you use a scout (for example) to trigger this in an open field or very far from objectives, basically all of those dismounted troops become irrelevant for the rest of the mission.

AI distributes troops weirdly if they have a huge area of command
1. I set up the AI to defend a vast area, with 3 (1 dummy) objectives. Those objectives all ended up very close to the front line
2. I had minimal resistance taking these objectives
3. In the AAR I was shocked to see that the "Hinterland" (so the area behind the objecvtives) was filled with dismounted infantry, manpads, but also tanks and apc's, that were stationary for the whole mission
4. They were very equally spread around "strategical locations", as in they had good cover, view etc. but were miles from the frontlines and objectives. So they played no role in the fight at all.
5. I feel like in the deployment phase AI could do a better job in prioritizing unit distribution depending on where the objectives are.
6. I get that you dont want all AI cluttered around the objectives, but if they all happen to be close to the front line, locations far away from any of them should be deprioritized.

[der_butschi]

I think your 2. goes in the direction of my pet peeve. Defending objectives in forests often feels like waiting for some time with nothing happening and then a steady, never ending, trickle infantry infiltrating from all sides. The AI seems to buy an awefull lot of infantry, too.

[Veitikka]

When analyzing the AI, screenshots are usually helpful in finding out why the AI does what it does.