Well, sometimes they don't do anything to start of. Sometimes they do. And sometimes they are doing and stop doing. And sometimes they are not doing and start doing. This costed me 20k XP, I was killing Bassianus and his Salamanders, and I placed around the Salamanders 4 spirit weapons, one giant brown bear (I used that spell that double a animal in size), a giant black widow, a jinni, and a wolf. The brown bear was a animal companion, the rest summoned. Early in the fight, every time the salamanders tried to cast anything, they would get pounded, and also the spiritual weapons gave them a good bashing, when suddenly... They stopped. The salamanders were sick, but I expected that when they stopped being sick, the sickned allies of mine would use AoO, and the spiritual hammers cannot get sick anyway, but... The animals stopped, the only thing they did was block the salamanders movement (That got really bizarre, since they would spend their entire turn trying to find a path and failed). Until the salamanders stopped being sick, and lobbed fireballs galore at my team, and all my allies around the salamanders ust stood there doing nothing, no AoO, and no normal attacks, they only watched as a couple of people died (ie: I had to raise dead, and lose lots of XP after the fight). This does not have a fix? I think the animals doing nothing is worse than when they are suicidal.
I don't know about the animals - as I haven't used them a lot for summons (no druid in my current playthrough) - I too have encountered that "bug" a few times. Although, I can't really can't call it a bug, as I found out what is causing their lazyness. From the moment my cleric (ie, the summoner) is too far away from where the battle is taking place, the summons stop fighting. Inch him a bit closer, and the summons do their things again. It could get explained that the summoner must keep a minimum distance to be able to issue the mental commands. Not in the basic rulebook as far as I know, but it's not that bad once you know what to do.
No, it does not need a LOS, purely distance that matters. Noticed that with several fights that you can actually give "orders" to an anemy just around the corner. Maximum distance is +-100 ft
That make spiritual hammer much less interesting :/ I used to think it as interesting because of its immunity to cloudkill and disease cloud, so I could spam those with the mage, and put a spiritual hammer on the middle of the cloud, and watch the mayhem. The problem is that those spells have some pretty big areas, and sometmies this results in my cleric being far enough to it stop working