So, i was finally sieged by some goblins after about 10 hours of play today without anything happening. The joy was of course great as i wanted to try out my little army of 3 squads (1 marksmen, 2 melee) together with some traps here and there. I believe the attack consisted of 2-3 squads of trolls, 1 marksman squad and 2 lasher squads.
When the siege started, i told my civs to go to a "safe zone" burrow about 7 lvls below the entrance level, i did however still lose a couple as they were too close to where enemies spawned (mixed in with some random pathfinding once enemies are close). I also gave my army a move order to wait inside on the same lvl as the entrance to my fortress, about 40 squares from the front entrance. This seems to have been too much for the poor guys, as half of them instead started running outside my entrance even though the goblins were several levels above it and about a quarter of a map away. Good thing one of my smart soldiers also found out he wanted to take a drink on the OTHER side of the river splitting my map in 2 , far away from the water zone i marked (and zone-ordererd everyone to go to). As i pretty quickly realized what he was doing, i rather ordered my units to attack a troll that was now alone nearby after his squad was being taken by cages after crossing the bridge over the river. This is where the so called "fun" begins.
My army split into 2, attacking whatever random enemy squad they wanted to attack except the troll, even though some of the enemies they attacked were relatively far away still. Some even just stood there doing nothing. I tried switching alert and giving them new attack orders and what not, but nothing worked. I had absolutely no control over my units what so ever. The only thing that surprisingly finally worked was giving them a move order to go back inside again, the few who was left. Most managed to follow it, but the ones closest to enemies didn't, which is normal.
My army was set to inactive so they can actually get some training done instead of waiting for eternity for someone to show them how to do god knows what. During battle i put it to active/training to see if that would change anything, but i do not remember if i changed it back again when i ordered the last move order (being the first order working as intended).
So, in the end, what in heavens name made this all go so incredibly wrong? I haven't had problems earlier giving orders to my squads while they were "inactive", but this time their only response was simply "cannot follow order". I'm afraid i do not have a save available as i rather crashed the program instead of having to save a losing game to something like that. By all means, i know it's not a game one can win in the end, but I've used a week on it, and no way I'm gonna lose to bugs or whatever bs that was.