Pathing Woes

[Oddible]

I've always had a lot of problems getting my armies moved in Civ V and I was really hoping this would be addressed by a patch by now but it doesn't even seem to be on the list.

The problem is that pathing of units breaks down when there is a) another unit in the way, or b) another unit at the destination. The situation is that I'm trying to move 20 units into position to begin a war. The unit seems to define its waypoints that it will take to get to its destination when you first give it the destination. When any other unit ends its turn on one of those waypoints, the first unit fails and asks for new orders. What should happen in the case of an intermediate waypoint is that the unit should find an alternate path.

This also happens when another unit ends its turn on the destination hex. What happens again is that the original unit fails and asks for new orders. What should happen is that the first unit ignores the unit at its destination until it is at its second to last waypoint, when its last move will put it into conflict with the other unit, NOT when it is 10 turns away from its destination.

Is there some workaround for this or some plan in the works to resolve this? It makes going to war with any reasonably sized army a very painful interaction design failure.

 

[FeiLing]

I tend to remember to which hex I've sent a unit and send the next unit to an adjacent tile, not the same. That kinda works. Moving units though is very painful - most noticeable in a lot of the scenarios, where you are forced to field a huge army and usually have long distances too.

A unit taking automatically an alternate path can be a problem too though, for e.g. if a units destination is blocked it could move off a road, effectively slowing it down compared to if it just have waited where it was for the next turn.

I don't think anything is gonna change here any time soon. Maybe they'll come up with something for civ6... like 2upt... who knows...

 

[Thander]

I avoid this problem by not using the pathing hehe. I just manually move every unit. Tedious but the only way to have the whole army move perfectly with no holes in defense.

 

[Oddible]

Prior civ games didn't have this issue

 

[Kilroy Was Here]

Only because they didn't have 1UPT.

Also, yeah this is a horrible thing. At least resources provide a nice landmark so you know what you've moved other units to.

 

[Carassius]

I think Thander has the right idea -- especially across water or other foggy areas. Some of the micromanagement has been reduced from previous versions, while some has been increased.