The Problem

I made this mod due to a frequent situation I have faced. The situation is this. You are leading an army chasing an enemy party, but they are quicker than you. While you aren't fast enough to catch them, one of the parties in your army might be. Unfortunately that party is stuck following you around and can't detach to chase them down. But you are the general, so why can't you tell the lazy fool to chase down the enemy!?

The Solution

Let's make those parties earn their keep! This mod allows you to order parties in your army to chase down visible enemy lord parties and armies (bandits aren't worth the time or effort when there are more important targets around). Here's how it works:

• Take a look around on the campaign map and find a valid target
• Talk to the leader of a party in your army
• Select the "As general of this army..." option
• Follow the dialog options to choose a target and give them conditions for chasing it
• The party leaves your army and begins to chase the target
  

The dialog gives two options for how far you want the selected party to chase the target. First is until the target is defeated (not necessarily by the selected party), second is until the selected party goes out of sight. Whichever you choose the party will return to your army once the condition is met. You can send multiple parties to chase down a single target, however you won't be able to send the last party in your army besides your own since doing so would cause the army to disband.

If you have one or more parties out on orders and want them to return before completing their mission, talk to any party leader in your army or to a companion in your party. You can give the recall order to one or all of the detached parties.

In short the party will return to your army when:

• The target is defeated
• The party has gone out of sight but was ordered to stay in sight
• The party receives the order to return to the army
• The target enters a walled settlement
  

There are several mods now that give you more command over AI parties than vanilla, but as far as I could tell none allow you to order non-clan parties to chase an enemy. For the sake of compatibility with these other mods I used PARTY AI OVERHAUL AND COMMANDS REBUILD and KingdomStrategiesCommand and haven't noticed any problems so far.

For save games

If you want to stop using this mod after making a save, but you still have some detached parties out, go to the mod options menu when in campaign, go to the section for this mod, and click the "Reset Advanced Parties" button. This will automatically recall all detached parties to your army and reset their AI to work as normal. If you have some detached parties out chasing down their targets, save, forget to load this mod, then reload the save, the AI of the detached parties will remain disabled (or at least it will remain so until something else enables their AI).


The source code here