From the article: "A* is a good choice for most pathfinding needs." I teach A* in my game AI class, and after having examined dozens of real-world game implem

From the article: "A* is a good choice for most pathfinding needs." I teach A* in my game AI class, and after having examined dozens of real-world game implementations of pathfinding, this is exactly right. While it's true that you shouldn't ALWAYS use A* , most games use A* in most situations, because actually greedy approaches like you are discussing do poorly surprisingly often. My recommendation is to start with A* and only use simpler methods if it isn't giving you the performance you need. For your subdivision comment, the general approach is generally called hierarchical pathfinding. There are lots of ways you can do this, but I like HPA* : http://aigamedev.com/open/review/near-optimal-hierarchical-pathfinding/ http://aigamedev.com/open/review/near-optimal-hierarchical-p... Your comment about two levels is good, because while hierarchical pathfinding can use any number of levels, I've never seen more than two in practice in games.