to developers : might be because the game doesn't consider "throwing" weapon as "ranged" when deciding wheter a formation is "melee" or "ranged".
class FormationQuerySystem -> has field for "isRanged", and for "isMelee", however the "count" of units that falls into the "isRanged" category doesn't include throwing weapons (class QueryLibrary "isRanged" method only checks for hasRangedCached on the agent, not hasThrownCached, method GatherInformationFromEquipemetn in Agent class). It **might** be a case of confusion because on other parts of the code the way programmers made a differene between throwing & bow's is by checking the "isConsumable" (true for throwing, false for bows. I.E. method OnAgentShootMissile in class Mission)
So the "archer" (not throwingWeapons) receive the weights for "BehaviorSkirmish"'s (because of bows) while throwing weapons (i.e woodrunners) receive the weight for "BehaviorAdvance".
This makes throwing weapons units much more vulnerable than they need to be : if ordered to "advance" they go into a fight with their throwing weapon equipped and don't throw them, if ordered to "charge" too close from the enemy they may throw a weapon "once" and then get caught in the same situation.
I.E. custom battle, player is "defender", both team are 200 "veteran flaxmen" (have both a polearm & throwing weapons).
Order your men to "hold fire" (they switch from the throwing axe to the big polearm) then charge and notice that the AI veteran flax have their axe in hand and not their polearm during the initial clash (resulting in a massive death toll).
might be relevant for :
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/1-6-3-ranged-ai-bug.446871/ (because the videos shows that the missile cav is added to a formation of throwing cav, which **might** trigger the AI to apply a "melee cav" behavior to the archer cavalry (I use "might" because I haven't looked deeply into the conditions under which those "cache" are recalculated, purely hypothetical)
