Having a chain of followers with their own followers has strange effects when leaving the current tile.

[LadLad]

I’m unsure if this is somehow intended but I couldn’t find anything that explained this behavior anywhere in the wiki so I thought I’d at least report it.

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The most noticeable one I’ve come across is that non-direct followers sometimes just become hostile or neutral upon leaving tiles. These followers often end up being left behind, seemingly no longer following their original leader in your party. From there I believe player reputation takes over to make them hostile. I am unsure of the trigger condition for these, but after experimenting a bit with a beguiled Jotun I believe it has to do with how much room there is in the target tile.

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e.g. Player reputation in this case causes Jotun to be Hostile by default. Troll foals follow Jotun who is beguiled by player. So when player leaves tile something checks where all their followers go in the new tile, but they always arrive on the other side. Not so for follower followers; if a Jotun produced 18 foals in a tile and the player moves to a cramped tile Jotun arrives safely as well as as many foals can fit (at least that’s what I think happens). The rest stay behind in the previous tile. These foals now follow reputation to determine allegiance so here they will all be hostile as soon as player returns. I’ve had it happen with a legendary goatfolk’s retinue as well, with proselytize and beguile so it’s not limited to beguile.

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Another strange effect I found was with dominating followers to use their beguile on a specific hostile pawn. Despite beguile being a status effect it seems even these creatures can sometimes stay behind and never arrive on a new tile when the player moves, if this happens it seems that just like in the above case they will follow faction reputation. However their beguile buff will not be removed(!), they still have it despite being hostile. After beguiling them with the leader they should be following they will have 2 instances of the beguile status, giving them the bonus twice. It appears this can happen any number of times, right now I have a Jotun with 4 stacks of beguile from a dominated follower. This at least I’m fairly sure is not intended.

Also all of this appears to happen more often when the affected pawns are engaged with enemies, particularly espers. I’ve thought of the possibility that they’d been beguiled before the esper died and their allegiance reset. But it appears to happen with the foals every single tile and I’m fairly sure most of the times with non foals there were no espers around.

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I think the rules for followers of followers are what’s causing it, they don’t immediately follow the player, so they sometimes get stuck or don’t follow while under status effects such as confused, causing them to reset.

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[Mawootad]

I’ve encountered this a number of times and I would suspect that this is not entirely due to being unable to place all of the units, as I lost control of a unit when transitioning from a completely empty salt dune tile to a fungus patch with no blocking tiles anywhere near the screen transition. I’d suspect instead it’s a function of the distance at which followers of followers trail behind and the lack of extremely aggressive pulling of them from the previous screen to the next screen that is performed with normal followers.

[LadLad]

Also appears to make proselytized followers that are left behind not count as followers anymore just like beguiled followers.

With beguiled followers you can just beguile them again (which gives them more and more health each time you do).

Proselytized followers keep the proselytized buff just like beguiled followers which means you can’t proselytize them again (!).

I’m struggling trying to think of a way to work around it.

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[LadLad]

Found a workaround using wishes.

If I can take control of the body of the ex-follower for example with dominate, I can wish for “cleaneffects” which removes all their buffs/debuffs and more importantly Proselytized/Beguiled effects. Doing this ends the dominate effect as well but afterwards the follower will be neutral without effects and can be beguiled/proselytized anew.

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[LadLad]

Followers of followers also sometimes just disappear with no message log or popup

How:

Step 1 Tell a companion of a follower to stay in a given tile

Step 2 Leave said tile for a while, traversing multiple new tiles, advancing time etc. I believe the tile has to freeze for this to happen but maybe that’s not enough

Step 3 Return to the tile and tell your companion’s follower to come with you, at this point they should just disappear/despawn

[Armithaig]

Fixed in next feature arc