I think this might also explain some of the weird things I’ve seen. For example, when doing a “defend against raiding parties” contract and there is more than one party to defend against, there is always a delay of a few seconds before your incessant clicking will result in engaging the second raiding party (even though you’re right next to them the whole time).
There are also several other weird things related to inappropriate fights before/after entering/exiting settlements or before/after attacks on caravans you’re guarding, which seem sometimes to result in settlements/houses reacting as if you’re attacked them (even though you didn’t use the controls that should be necessary to initiate an attack on them).
Plus there are occasions when you join fights between caravans and raiders but get shown only You-vs-Raiders on the pre-battle screen, only for the caravan et al to show up again in the battle (or vice versa: it might look like it’s you and the caravan versus the raiders, but then the caravan is gone and it’s just you outnumbered by raiders). Possibly this inconsistency around which party is/isn’t in the fight is the reason why settlements/houses sometimes think you’ve attacked them (i.e. if the raiders disappear once the battle begins, it’s just you and the caravan and you have to be the opposing sides, and so it gets registered as an attack initiated by you).
I think I’ll try playing in non-ironman mode to see if those problems disappear.
Actually, having re-read what you wrote about environment pausing before auto-saves before battles versus before/after entering/exiting settlements, I think maybe there are certain types of battles (i.e. sudden, complex ones involving more than two parties) for which the environment doesn’t get paused (or for which the environment dynamics are shifting too rapidly within the space of less than a second, so that different data about the battle composition gets saved at different times and/or in different places).
