I remembered I used to have these set up when I was little and it worked great, however now I can't for the life of me figure out how to get them to work. I have my spell casters scripts set to cast defensive spells then start casting offensive, however, during combat they just either stand there being retarded or they go up and start poking them with daggers.

I've tried having them unselected figuring the game would see I'm not controling them now and let the AI take over, that didn't work. I tried hitting "A" on and off to see if that changed anything and all that did was let them attack with melee or not. The spells are memorized and ready to be cast but they simply won't do it. I'm ok with mico managing when I need to but for simple fights I'd rather the AI just get it done and over with.

I usually just set the caster's scripts to basic ranged and manually cast spells when I feel it's necessary....

Have you tried MPrilla's SuperScripts? :-)

never heard of it. I'm not generally trying to change the game too much, want it as vanilla as possible

Poor noobs who haven't heard of the legendary MPrilla and his SuperScripts. He was the Tiax of IE modding.

Silly question, but you do have the AI turned on, right? (The left button on the lower right corner should be highlighted)

Not sure what else could be wrong. Some specific scripts (like the eSeries) can be turned off per- character, so you might accidentally disable them if you fumble the keys, but not for the vanilla game.

I tend to not bother with spell-casting scripts anyway, because I think they just end up wasting valuable spells before they are needed. :)

I generally prefer to just use the Custom-Default script (which has about four lines of code in it) and do everything manually. There are a few decent third-party spellcasting scripts, but they're still not as good as doing it yourself. The built-in scripts also have a tendency to cast AOE spells at the wrong time, which can be either irritating or deadly.