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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers, only reveals a bug.
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The biggest problem with followers is them running recklessly into melee combat which not only puts them in great danger of getting killed, it also prevents you from shooting at the enemies (unless you are prepared to take the risk of hitting your followers).
As everyone with some experience with Skyrim is bound to have noticed, ranged weapons are far superior to melee weapons. (That is as long as you have a mod such as Skyrim Realistic Archery to correct vanilla Skyrim's most outrageous feature – automatic deflection of your arrows from where you're aiming.) Unfortunately, your followers don't know it, even though they are supposed to be seasoned warriors created specifically for the Skyrim universe.
This article tells you how to correct that.
Of course, the first thing to do with a new follower is to change her combat behavior from "attack whenever you see an enemy" (most incredulously, the Bethesda insectbrains have made this default!!) to "don't attack until I have started combat". This keeps your followers from fucking up all your attempts of covert approach, but it still doesn't prevent them from charging at the enemy as soon as you have fired your first arrow.
Going into the follower menu and setting her to be "Archer" doesn't seem to affect anything at all.
It was only after a thousand hours of Skyrim that I found out what to do about the followers unspeakably detrimental combat behavior:
Do not give them any melee weapons!
That's the only thing I've found that actually makes your followers keep proper distance from the enemy. It's incredible how much easier fighting became, as well as safer for the followers.
There's one caveat: at least one follower (Ghorbash) is unable to use ranged weapons, so he actually attacks the enemy with his bare fists rather than use a bow or a staff. Still, such swordmorons are rare, so going without using them or even putting up with them occasionally is nowhere near as infuriating as being unable to fight properly ever.
