More in sorrow than in anger: I'm done until pathfinding is sorted

[metalbrew]

Infantry stop at each waypoint for a bit of time. While setting a waypoint directly by each door you want them to use may help a bit with pathfinding your units often end up paying a steep price for stopping in the open.

Regarding pathfinding, the waypoint itself seems to be the only hard-fast thing units care about. The line between waypoints doesn't seem to have any effect on the path. It seems obvious to state that but after you watch vehicles drive 1000m around a large wall instead of driving through the breach the obvious becomes something to no longer take for granted.

[thewood]

Originally posted by Redwolf:

I don't think the pathfinding is any better or worse than in CMBB/CMAK.

But apart from the other factors mentioned, the smaller scale also causes the same deficiencies to have larger impact. Namely, since buildings are not abstracted with just "wall blobs" anymore, but you have doors and can breech, bad pathfinding has more opportunity to get your guys killed.

It also doesn't help, and that's really not necessary, IMHO, that CMx2 removed the feature to show all paths/waypoints, because that made you able to spot crazy auto-generated paths.

I said this earlier, but to repeat, pathfinding seems worse becuase we don't know what the AI is doing. In CM we got, after a bit, the planned path of the AI for your unit. You could then adjust it to keep it out of trouble. In CMSF, no adjustment allowed nor do you get the true path shown.

I also think the level of abstraction in CM hid infantry pathing from us. Now we see why abstraction may not have been a bad thing.

Also, even in early CM, I never saw tanks dancing around like in CM. Yeah we got roads bunched up, but if left to its own, the AI eventually sorted it out. Maybe not the optimum path, but every one got there eventually.

Now in RT in CMSF there is just no time for micromanagement, and in WEGO, the tools are gone.

[thewood]

Originally posted by Blackmuzzle:

One thing I noticed is that when you have waypoints set close to each other, and the unit's movement is set to anything but slow, the unit's turn radius will be too wide for it to reach the waypoint, causing it to "overshoot", stop, then turn towards the waypoint. While I can compensate for that by using a slow advance, it would be far more intuitive for the unit to simply not drive too fast to finish the turn to hit the waypoint.

Similarly, when driving straight a unit should not overshoot the waypoint and then back off. It should start braking early and then just stop on the right spot.

A similar thing goes for the infantry. Clearing the order queue should NOT make them stand up and reverse a few meters. Especially when under fire, they should stay prone. Every single one of my soldiers who stood up without explicit orders, and subsequently got shot, deserved what he got.

This is most notable with Strykers at Fast or Quick because its truning radius seems to be huge. I constantly have M1s at high speed miss waypoints and circle around to get them and end facing backwards.