Perhaps the recently increased effect of obstacles (50% -> 75%) on ranged combat should help with this to some extent.
From my experience this is actually one of the main problems. From my testing, and I deliberately tested this, if the ‘obstacle hit’ is triggered, and the obstacle happens to be one of your brothers, he is automatically hit no matter what his ranged defense. This makes my strategy of having a front line of kite shield guys with pikemen behind them completely ineffective, as whenever an enemy ranged unit shoots at me it’s basically a guaranteed hit. If the obstacle hit triggers, one of my kite shield guys takes damage. If it doesn’t, chances are the low ranged defense of the pikemen means he gets hit. Against regular bows this isn’t a huge deal. It is pretty dangerous early game (but I don’t use pikes early game), but after that it’s just negligible armor damage. The real problem I experience is with crossbows, particularly heavy crossbows and the goblin crossbows. Those basically ignore armor and are guaranteed to hit one of my brothers on turn 1, so if the enemy has 2-3 crossbowmen I’m practically guaranteed to lose a guy unless the AI fails to press the ‘shoot crossbow’ button, which is common enough that my party hasn’t been wiped yet.
