system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] Why is the engagement range so incredibly small?

I mean, sure, during a fight in a hallway you can only shoot from one side to the other, and if both parties have swords they need to get melee to hurt each other, but even in major battles with regular armies we often see two forces slowly advancing on each other until they are only a few meters apart.

How exactly is it possible for groups of slow droids moving over an open field to get that close in the first place? Shouldn't the automatic weapons the clones have easily destroy anybody foolish enough to employ such a tactic? And why do they do that? Couldn't they shoot at the clones from further away, where they can actually use cover?
gpt
Most large scale ground battles in Star Wars are to reach or protect a shield generator which will allow the side with superior space forces to simply bombard the enemy. In the Clone Wars in particular both sides are using entirely disposable armies, droids and clones, and so their combat doctrine is not likely to factor loss of life in decisions. Droids are more disposable than clones, and droids are usually not able to use advanced tactics in the same way that organics are, so wave tactics are probably the best you're going to do with them unless you've got an IG-series or something like that. On the Republic side Jedi are the battlefield commanders and while they're great warriors they're not students of war. Their idea of a fight is to get in close and reach the objective, spending a long time thinking about troop movements, casualties, this is all "not the Jedi way." It's one of the reasons Palpatine wanted them involved in the war in the first place, they fight it well and they die in it well, but they're ill equipped to actually win it. All of this adds up to a situation where both sides have incentive to be very aggressive in their combat tactics so charging at each other or marching around in infantry blocs makes sense.