This is for raw squig mode.

I find that often I will be trying to write the right part of a character a bit more to the left or a bit more to the right than where Skritter expects it. So I think my stroke is correct, except it is not in the right position. Sometimes it may be too high or low even. It will fail to register the new stroke until I redraw it more in the area where it expects it, sometimes having to draw over other parts of the character.

Could this behaviour be made less strict? I find it kind of slows me down.

There is the opposite issue, though, of not being strict with the difference between things like 牛 and 午, for example.

If you increase your stroke order strictness in the practice settings, it will give more of a bonus to the stroke that should come next, making it a little easier to recognize despite being further from the intended location.

Note also that the distance grading happens in two ways: absolute distance from intended location, and relative distance from the last stroke you did. So if you start a character way high or low, the strokes after the first won't all be given a recognition penalty if they're correct relative to their previous stroke.

My strictness is set very loose because I dont want to be slowed down too much. What happens a lot is that there are for example 3 horizontal strokes needed, I write the first and it recognizes it as the second so I should then write the first but I already moved on to the second. Actually this works out fine if the strictness is turned down and I can breeze through. If the strictness is turned way up I find the first stroke does not recognize at all sometimes.

As to relative distance, I usually get this problem mostly when I move on to the second (or third) part of the character. So perhaps the relative distance does not work too well because the last stroke was at the bottom left and the next stroke is at the upper right.

Hope this is making sense.

That makes sense, but according to my estimation of how the recognition is working, it should be easier for you to get characters recognized with the stroke order strictness set higher, writing as you describe, if you are doing correct stroke order.

with the stroke order on maximum strictness, the only problem i occasionally have is certain strokes on certain characters not picking up the First time (like the 5th stroke in 熱 for instance), but its only sometimes and reattempting it always picks it up

you can even write a character 1/4 scale in a corner and it works great!

is stroke order in chinese not as important as in japanese?

i would think everyone would want the stroke order strictness on maximum anyway!