I know battle AI is goind to be revamped in the future. There is one particular issue I’m struggling with now. As soon as a footman engages in combat there is no way to retreat. As soon as you order him to attack anything and he gets in range on sight it’s him or this thing. Clicking on “cancel orders” doesn’t actually do anything at this point. You can send him walking (ignoring the fight) across the entire map and as soon as this order gets executed the footman returns to attacking.
Can this be fixed?
Expected behaviour is when you give him a new order (any order, be that attack order or walking order) he forgets about the previous one.
Right now the only working way to stop him is to order him attack another object. This does rewrite his “order stack” - after destroying his new target he calms down. As for me, that’s quite an original way of “retreat” 
@MelOzone, which version are you playing?
I think recently it has been mentioned that they will make it so if you send the footmen far away, they will stop attacking (or some way like that, to be able to retreat - but I think it’s not in the current version).
Other than that, there was a time when the cancel option didn’t work correctly, but that was fixed.
Alpha 15 release 549, the latest one.
My save is not perfect (there’s at least one persistent problem with the removed building - this place is not suitable for building any more), so maybe there are other things somehow influencing the AI. I wonder if anyone else experienced this or I’m the only one.
The “point of no return” for my footmen is getting in line of sight. While they are sufficiently far away cancelling orders works just fine.