" @Khann: Personally (playing on nightmare) I always give orders on all my melee on who to attack and when to use stuns, while directly controlling Morrigan who I heal and crowd control with. "

Agreed. I love the game, but I thought the combat system was going to be a more advanced version of the gambit system in FFXII. Instead we have a system which requires you to invest points to get more slots, and in the end doesn't really add much to it at all. On top of that the AI does require babysitting. I found it much more manageable to play as a ranged character, but I like playing as my tank. I just wish my ranged folks especially would be able to manage themselves a bit better. It's also a shame that I never seem to have enough tactics slots available because I can never fully utilize all their skills unless I'm constantly hopping around to each character.  I still love the game, I'm just bummed that one of the features that I was most excited about, seems to be less than ideal. Despite all it's faults, in FFXII, I almost never had to switch characters during combat. I enjoy the whole gambit/tactics combat idea. It makes it feel more like you're playing with a group of other players, but without the proper depth, it seems useful for little more than keeping buffs up, and potion chugging/healing. "  

" @Teran: Uh, dude, in case you haven't noticed, combat in this game is REAL TIME, not turn-based, and on the console, at least, no online play, so no random idiots dropping in to wreak mayhem. Other than that, you're comments make perfect sense. "

" There I said it.   I realize a lot of folks like that this game is hard, but when that hardness comes from AI so dumb that they chase enemies into flame, and then just stand there drinking health potions in the flame, that's not "hard", that's bad AI.   And of course, I could go on, like characters with bows standing toe to toe with enemies, but really, the fight against the zombies in red cliff, where they gave you the option to set a fire with lamp oil, apparently so that your party would have some fire to run into, was really the point at which I realized the AI in this game is just bad.  "

The one thing which pisses me off about the tactics is that there is no option for:
 
"When you are being attacked, have low health and you have no potions : run the fuck away."

I'm playing through on normal and have found the A.I to be fairly competent in most situations. Sure they are less efficient than if i was micromanaging and in novel situations flaws are more obvious (such as the two fire wall parts i've came across), but these problems are few and far between so i over look them. 
 
Plus, if i wanted to make their A.I more robust i have the ability to do that in the expansive tactics list. i don't see this as being lazy on Bioware's part because if they set up a character like i would, that character would probably be too smart for the A.I, its much more rewarding tinkering away and discovering a great combination of rules. 
 
And too the people complaining about the micromanaging in this game, you wouldn't play Street Fighter and complain that it's too complex because thats the sort of game it is, and Dragon Age: Origins rewards micromanaging, Bioware has said from the start it's that sort of old school game. It isn't their fault that the game isn't up to your standards because it is appealing to a whole different type of gamer.

 
The AI is as good as you make it, setting your teams tactics up to suit your style of play is part of the game. There are so many different ways to play and ways to set up your character Bioware couldn't possibly cover them all properly. I wonder sometimes why those who want everything done for them bother playing games at all, why not give up and watch a movie.

" The one thing which pisses me off about the tactics is that there is no option for:  "When you are being attacked, have low health and you have no potions : run the fuck away." "

Ok, so having started this thread around the time of the Redcliffe quest, which I had done right after Ostragar, I will now amend my original statement. 
 
The AI in this game does not suck. 
 
Dragon Age does however, have an EXTREMELY deep learning curve, during which it provides little in the way of tutorials and is pretty unforgiving during that process.  
 
I've tweaked the tactics some, learned when to intervene and learned not to wait "a few more seconds" when things go bad. 

They operate entirely on user-defined priority lists and their pathfinding is as good as the enemy's pathfinding, so what seems to be "bad AI" on the part of your party members may actually just be the player's fault. Just saying.

" I think this is why under the difficulty settings it says to use Easy mode if you're the type of person who doesn't like to pause and just let the AI do its thing. The game is pretty much meant to be played giving direct orders to everyone. If that isn't the style of game you like, then you're going to have to deal with the AI.
 
I do agree, though. Especially in the case of NPC characters charging in to area-effect spells, the AI is downright dumb. Too bad the enemy doesn't seem to do it nearly as much.
 
Edit: I noticed the mention of changing AI behavior, which I didn't really think of, but that doesn't account for other characters that you don't have direct control over.
 
One particular example:

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

The defense of Redcliffe. I really hate to see all these characters I'm trying to keep alive run off into the defense firewall and die. I reloaded trying to keep the enemies out of the fire, so that the rest of the idiots wouldn't charge into it and die.

"

I think our comic says it all: 
 
http://toblender.com/comic/dragon-age-ai/    

" I think our comic says it all:   

I just wish my team members wouldn't walk into traps when they know they are there. And I wish I could trigger those traps on enemies who also blunder past them.

2 things that will help you with this issue is to set all your ranged class's to attack the "target of alistair" or shale if hes your main tank. Also in the tactics menu at the top right there is an option to have them be aggressive, passive, defensive, etc etc, and it explains in the tooltip which ones will cause your guy to run out of AOE's or eat them. That may not work on the defensive fire in redcliffe, but that goes back to the hold position command and just manually controlling the tank while the ranged automatically attack your target as per the tactics you have set for them. Theres a ton of ways to do it, its all at your command, and i would commend the a.i in this game because controlling there behaviors and changing/molding them to my style has been great. "

wow It appears Teran is on her period, or is he always argumentative and if you have a problem with a game you're just an imbecile? 
 
Anyways I'm playing mostly on the Third Person Camera on the pc and isometric for hard encounters, this is my first playtrough on nightmare+, and the AI just plain sucks, they do not apply the abilities smartly enough, maybe on normal its less noticeable but on Nightmare+(the plus stands for a mod that makes nightmare a little harder, since regular was a cakewalk, the game is still too easy but meh, and the reason is that I micromanage all the npc's most of the time and no I do not have multiple mages) their stupidity is annoying on occasions where I need them to behave the most, I had less problems in BG2, and I heard for consoles there difficulty is easier(though you don't get the isometric camera so maybe not really much easier) for all the hype the AI was getting they sure failed.  
 
On such amusing occasion is on the deserted building in denerim and I had the AI on, there's tar everywhere, I have shale on aggressive, there is a mage with 5 archers and casts fireball, it knocks back my tank into the tar, light the tar with the fire, the mage litterally walks toward him near the flaming tar and the tank starts fighting while inside the tar and then the mage moves back after like 4 seconds of getting hit by shale(and shale still getting 24 or so damage the whole time) shale follows him after having half the life taking out by the tar fire and eventually dies thanks to the archers =/.
 
Setting it up yourself is usually the way to go except for some cases like for Alistair, where a defender is good enough but you can only make it better by adding more commands, one problem is that they are missing a lot of AI commands I would find useful, like running away(I really expected to have the ability to have my archers AI stun an enemy, run a certain amount of distance and keep attacking, hell just lure the enemy away and run a marathon until my fighter gets there, cautious fails miserably here), changing the behavious, use skills when an enemy has just fallen in battle or making skills work when a certain npc has a certain number of enemies surrounding him(for the walking bomb, which I actually forgot I had until now).
 
Overall pretty good game but nowhere near perfect.

i just had them all hold position and the zombies would come to me...pretty easy lol

I noticed it was a little rough AI. That and the fact that the autosave sucks are the only two bad things I could find about it.

" @Chrion said:

2 things that will help you with this issue is to set all your ranged class's to attack the "target of alistair" or shale if hes your main tank. Also in the tactics menu at the top right there is an option to have them be aggressive, passive, defensive, etc etc, and it explains in the tooltip which ones will cause your guy to run out of AOE's or eat them. That may not work on the defensive fire in redcliffe, but that goes back to the hold position command and just manually controlling the tank while the ranged automatically attack your target as per the tactics you have set for them. Theres a ton of ways to do it, its all at your command, and i would commend the a.i in this game because controlling there behaviors and changing/molding them to my style has been great. "

I totally realized  the tactic of messing with AI settings, and I pretty much always have my party on the hold position because most of the time, I'm sneaking around with my main character to scope things out. My problem was with the NPCs you couldn't control. The whole rest of the villiagers. I'd really have liked to have kept as many of them as I could alive, but on my first attempt, a whole bunch of them ran straight into the fire and wouldn't leave it even after the ememies were defeated, thus, they all died. That means you can't go back and talk to them after the battle, and get whatever information or rewards or what have you from them, because they're retarded, and dead.  They could have just put in some scripting to make sure the characters don't cross that certain threshold around the firey entrance, should you choose to use the fire, at all. If I ever play through Dragon Age again, next time I'll just decide to forgo using the oil.  Also, the only ranged character ever in my party would be Morrigan, usually flinging spells. I have Allistair and Sten, because if I didn't, my rogue would get massacred in every battle. And I play my main character almost entirely as an "assassin" (even though I don't yet have the kit for it), backstabbing and using poisons. Using ranged weapons for anything other than drawing out enemy stragglers is pretty much worthless, since you don't have the specializations to make yourself effective in the slightest. "

" @AndrewB said:

that 2nd point you had leads me to a question, I noticed that it says the enemies will be attracted to your higher geared teammate, but I notice mobs running right past alistair to attack my mage that hasnt even touched them yet. So does having more than 1 guy in heavy plate raise the seemingly random chance that mobs will avoid your lightly geared toons? "  

yeah.  A lot of times i'll hold the position on my party in a hallway, then take my main guy and slowly walk towards the enemies.  When only one or two enemies see me I'll run back to my party and we will easily kill those one or two guys.  I'll keep doing that until everyone is dead.

?..i haven't had any problems with the AI yet.
 
I'm most of the way through and playing with two mages, a rogue(the red haired chick) and a warrior on normal and had absolutely no problems.
 
I didn't even tinker with the tactics options

I find the some of the behaviours are terrible. Everytime I put Wynne to Passive, for some reason she runs up to enemies and heals party members from there instead of standing away and healing, which is what the behaviour description says. She can heal them perfectly from a distance but she wants to run up to the enemy and get hit for some reason even though she's PASSIVE! 

" @Vigilance: From what I understand, archery built right on the console version is probably the best spec.  I've heard people claiming that with rapid fire their archer was hitting for 80+ damage a shot.  By itself that may not out dps a dagger rogue however when you factor in archery's great stun, the ability to crit on command, and that their damage is projected over a great distance you have something a lot more versatile.  I know that when the next patch is released fixing archery I'll be giving it a shot. "

" @xyzygy: There's rarely a disadvantage for being close to enemies, in fact most of the time it is advantageous.
   

I've found they give you enough options for your tactics to offset a lot of the AI problems. Granted, you shouldn't have to do this. I suppose it's easier to take in games that are so large scale, such as this and Mass Effect.
 
I'm really looking forward to ME2 to see if Bioware managed to approve this type of problem though. I also hope that since Dragon Age is doing well, that they support it and fix some of these issues.

The AI is as bad as you let them be. The point of this game is to micromanage...

@xyzygy: