Noticing a pathfinding bug which just cost me dearly...



Imagine 3 systems, named A, B and C all connected together in a triangle.



I own system A.

B is directly south from me (speaking in cardinal position with respect to me view of the map on the screen)

B is owned by my ally, and is currently being sieged by an enemy with lots and lots of fleets

C is directly east from me, and is owned by the enemy and I currently have a fleet there who locked it down and activated invasion.



The links between A & C and B & C are wormholes.



I have a fleet of planet invasion ships at A stocked with troops ready to capture C



I give the order to move them to C, which should be just one wormhole hop directly east.



What does the pathfinding do? It sends that fleet south along the regular string connection to system B and then intends to take the other wormhole from B to C.... WTF!!!



So it just sent my fleet of planet invaders into a hornets nest of enemy anti ship fleets.

BRILLIANT!

It's not actually a bug, per se. It's just trying to use up the least amount of movement points to get to the destination. Using a wormhole eats up all movement points and going a regular string can leave some movement on the fleets. Unfortunately, pathfinding ignores the enemy fleets in your way. I've seen this when wanting to attack one destination, only to be diverted into a hornet's nest of enemies as well.



The workaround is to hold the CTRL key and then right clicking in your destination. The fleet will then move directly to the destination.

Thanks I will try the workaround you suggest, sounds like that should do it.



I would definitely say it is a bug, no question about it. There is no need to spend some movement points moving to a 2nd system in order to take another distant wormhole when the fleet could have made just one hop using the wormhole directly connecting their current position to the destination. It makes no sense no matter what.

You have a good point. Yes, that would be a bug.

Note: You also hold ctrl when selecting a system if you want to force the fleet to go "off-roading" once you have researched the tech that allows it if there isn't a string or wormhole directly connecting the departure and destination systems.



You can also hold shift then select multiple systems to make the fleet follow a specific path. You can even combine this with the ctrl to force a fleet to first follow the strings/wormholes to a specific system then go "off-road" to the next system.

Awesome info, Monthar. Thanks!

In the early game if I don't have knowledge gathering and/or dust recyclers traits, I'll have my scout(s) set to patrol the systems on my side of the wormhole by holding shift and selecting the systems I want patrolled. This way there's less chance of pirates spawning and eating my colony ships.



Of course if I have knowledge gathering and/or dust recyclers I won't do this because I want the pirates to spawn so my combat fleet can kill them for the free science and dust. I never pick dust recyclers without having also picked knowledge gathering. I always take both levels of both unless I'm playing a custom Harmony who don't use dust and can't take that trait.



Sure 40 science and 20 dust per CP doesn't sound like much, but in the higher difficulty levels where the AI spams a lot of ships, that adds up quickly. If you're facing a 24 CP fleet, that's 960 science and 480 dust. If you're playing as the Sherydon and have researched their +20 dust per cp killed tech, that's 960 dust from both the tech and 2 levels of dust recyclers. Add an Adventurer/Pilot hero with the appropriate skills and now we're talking 20+20+20+50 dust per cp destroyed or 110 dust per cp, so a 24 cp fleet killed is 2640 dust.