Followers not casting spells

Hey all. So, as per the subject title, my followers are not casting spells. Oh sure, Virgil is healing, but Geoffrey doesn't cast spells (he just melees) and neither does Jormund. What can I do to remedy this?

I'm using the latest unofficial patch.

 

This sure can be annoying. Followers AI in Arcanum is far from brilliant and Geoffrey is probably the most useless fighter ever (BUT I actually saw him cast harm a few times). I guess there's something wrong with AI scripts but I also suppose that if there was a remedy it would've already been applied.

 

You may have a point there. Followers just seem to avoid dealing damage with magick but perform less powerful forms of magick (i.e. healing, body of fire/water) easily.

 

Dark Elf, you're probably right.

Take Perriman Smythe, for example. He should be a game changer since he can cast spells like Blur Sight and Fire Flash. Instead, he usually uses other spells that don't help much (especially once he learns Body of Fire) or he tries to fight hand-to-hand. So, really, except on the rare occasions when he actually injures somebody with his Fire spells he's not good for much other than occasionally healing people.

Jormund should be fairly dangerous in a fight even with his racial penalty, but instead he mostly does ill-advised things like summoning a Fire Elemental (that probably won't even attack anybody if you're in turn-based mode) or casting Lightning a couple of times and knocking himself unconscious.

... even though he could be doing things that would make more sense, such as casting Jolt instead of casting Lightning at point-blank range...

Some of the AI issues could be chalked up to trying to give NPCs stronger personalities (Dante's a coward so it makes sense that he's kind of useless unless you keep him around a lot longer than you're supposed to, Raven is too easily intimidated by creatures she can't kill right away with her bow, etc.).

But it still makes no sense that Geoffrey doesn't cast Harm more often. Except from a "it might break the game if he was going around scoring a bunch of one-hit kills" perspective.