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.
Before that change, though, I could reliably fire into a group of enemies with a target hit chance well below 50% but hit one of the enemies more than 50% of the time. Since that change, equivalent shots almost always hit nothing. So maybe the nature of the change was really more complex than stated in the changelog.
Or maybe how it goes is that, with a 50% penalty and a 50% raw hit chance, the hit chance against the target goes down to 25% but there’s also a ?12.5%? chance to hit either of the two obstructing troops (making a ?50%? hit chance overall), whereas with a 75% penalty for the same shot the hit chance against the target goes down to 12.5% and there’s just a ?6.25%? chance to hit either of the two obstructing troops (making a ?25%? hit chance overall). So that would reduce (but not eliminate) the chance of kite shieldwall troops getting hit by accident.
