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I played this game so much when it came out. Really great strategy game. I tried playing through a campaign using the open-sourced engine a while ago but it fe

I played this game so much when it came out. Really great strategy game. I tried playing through a campaign using the open-sourced engine a while ago but it felt like the pathfinding had taken several steps backwards since the original game. You really start to feel it in the later missions, where the pathfinding becomes the biggest hurdle - your units get stuck while retreating and so get destroyed before they manage to return to a repair station. Never did manage to finish it because of this. Too bad, because in all other respects it's great. But the pathfinding makes it unplayable for me once a decent number of units are involved in fighting.

DanBC 10y ago
Total Annihilation also suffers from really bad path finding when you get above a certain number of units. Luckily, for TA, it's a really simple patch to increase the number of pathfinding cycles. http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42529 http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42529 What's the problem with pathfinding in Warzone?
- throwaway7767 10y ago
  > What's the problem with pathfinding in Warzone? I haven't looked at the algorithm so can't explain what's going wrong from that side. But essentially, a lot of warzone maps have tight corridors that only barely fit 2-3 units side by side. A big part of the game is the tactical squadrons where you have a commander and assign armies to them, and then you can configure the army so units automatically retreat to repair at a certain damage threshold. So it's normal to have a huge army advancing and at the same time have a smaller number of units automatically retreating through the same corridor. When a unit's calculated path is blocked by another unit, they'll both sort of wiggle around turning a bit in any direction and advancing, doing this dance until they break free. This takes a long enough time that your damaged retreating units are dead by the time the gridlock is resolved. This was also a problem in the original codebase, but it feels like it's a lot worse with the current wz2100 code.
sliken 10y ago
The pathing seems pretty reasonable to me. But sure if you have 2 flows of units through the same narrow canyon it's going to block. I've played the game through several times, with a little forethought it's pretty straight forward to just setup things so you only have one flow from a canyon. Sure sometimes you have to build a new repair station to change the direction the units go to repair, or attack from a different side. The occasional particularly narrow bottleneck is, er, a bottleneck. So either attack with enough force to avoid needing an immediate retreat, or soften up the enemy with artillery or air attacks before hand. Once accomplished just build a repair station and avoid the bottleneck except for the occasional reinforcement.

DanBC 10y ago

Total Annihilation also suffers from really bad path finding when you get above a certain number of units. Luckily, for TA, it's a really simple patch to increase the number of pathfinding cycles. http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42529 http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42529 What's the problem with pathfinding in Warzone?

throwaway7767 10y ago
> What's the problem with pathfinding in Warzone? I haven't looked at the algorithm so can't explain what's going wrong from that side. But essentially, a lot of warzone maps have tight corridors that only barely fit 2-3 units side by side. A big part of the game is the tactical squadrons where you have a commander and assign armies to them, and then you can configure the army so units automatically retreat to repair at a certain damage threshold. So it's normal to have a huge army advancing and at the same time have a smaller number of units automatically retreating through the same corridor. When a unit's calculated path is blocked by another unit, they'll both sort of wiggle around turning a bit in any direction and advancing, doing this dance until they break free. This takes a long enough time that your damaged retreating units are dead by the time the gridlock is resolved. This was also a problem in the original codebase, but it feels like it's a lot worse with the current wz2100 code.

sliken 10y ago

The pathing seems pretty reasonable to me. But sure if you have 2 flows of units through the same narrow canyon it's going to block. I've played the game through several times, with a little forethought it's pretty straight forward to just setup things so you only have one flow from a canyon. Sure sometimes you have to build a new repair station to change the direction the units go to repair, or attack from a different side. The occasional particularly narrow bottleneck is, er, a bottleneck. So either attack with enough force to avoid needing an immediate retreat, or soften up the enemy with artillery or air attacks before hand. Once accomplished just build a repair station and avoid the bottleneck except for the occasional reinforcement.