Pathfinding really bad

Devs can you take a look at the pathfinding?

The current one is really bad, you can watch videos on youtube if you don’t play the game, e.g. by Survivalist.
The pathing is becoming worse and worse and is now considered even worse than HD Edition pathing.
People are getting more and more annoyed by this.
Specific problems are e.g.

  • especially feudal units going sideways from the expected path
  • regrouping delays units to go back/fwd/sideways

I think it was best on some patches before the India DLC, but i don’t know for sure. I’m certain that everything after India DLC is just bad.

Or maybe you can take a look at pathfinding from the original game AOC 1.0c and use this if it’s compatible with the netcode etc. I would say that 1.0c is better than what was ever reached in DE.

edit: YouTube channel with a clips of pathing mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/@AgeofPathing/videos

Good luck!

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Lost whole armies in feudal multiple times last night in team games. Feels bad when you’re winning then loose 6 archers to a TC. Or your knights won’t attack because they freeze before attacking and stand still.

I’ve got all the new expansions, my online friends and I play this game every other day. It’s the go to.

It’s ruined now, uncontrollable. It’s to the point where we talk about not playing anymore because it doesn’t feel good to play anymore.

Please enough with the new crap, no new content, no tournaments. Pathing, unit control, that’s all we want.

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really bad? its terrible, its the worse

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they could start by for example, not having archers run forward towards the enemy when u send them 180 degrees away from the enemy.

100% of the time. They dont see it?

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then u wait 1 second when u have already lost 1/5th of ur army, and they finally go to the direction u wanted but by now u have lost the fight

and this is just 1 of 5 bugs that happen EVERY SINGLE GAME

ive gotten kinda used to it and click way more, and automate less the gameplay instincts. but it sucks for everyone involved

another one: vils take the longest possible path instead of the shortest when there is a building in between, too often, causing u to not quick wall in time / repair in time / build buildings in time / vils go out of the base to die.

another one: units start sometimes going in a tangential direction and decide to go to towards the target just at the end, running into pike men or arrow fire at their own will with the unpredictable direction

another one: just try moving a group of CA in a square formation lol, they wont go anywhere of military use, unless u click far, they will all just run into each other staying in the same location and get eaten up by enemy mele.

another one: every game u will have 2-5 straggler units loose formation forever and u will have to move them by hand one by one or they will refuse any orders. Sometimes they will get stuck attacking a farm until the farm is dead not responding. Entire groups of 5 scouts will do this.

another one: try making a lightcav attack a monk when its close to it, if u click the lightcav again to task it again to attack, will forget its target and stand still for 1 second (animation reset + forget target) so u quickly fix it by pressing stop and hope for the best, because thats faster than repeating the same input that will or will not result in another stopped animation
thats actually how i micro a lot of the times these days, press stop near enemy units and sitationally, u win more fights than right click or attack move, because attack starts right away and they dont loose focus on enemy units

another one: try making KTs run away from a monk, they will first run towards it for 1 second (as units go opposite towards they are tasked for the first second), ensuring the monks will convert something

another one: villagers will walk 1 tile east left, 1 tile west up, (to the center of the tile each time, instead of just 1 north move) and u might miss a quick wall, a repair etc

another one: groups of units will dinamically act as WALLS for the pathing algo, making the unit tasked to go somewhere think the path is forever blocked, except it was just a group of vils passing by in front of the path etc, so ur units will think they need to go all the way around

all these things were almost non existant in the old c++ code, just taking a look at their functions and incorporating again some of that removed complex logic, would be really helpful to the gaming experience

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Regrouping is horrible, but it’s not only that. It’s also just plain pathing like here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD4sET0gvt0

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I’ve also found that knights/cavalry often outright refuse to attack the goal i assigned. Felt like playing majesty, my troops seem to become so smart they’ve developed a will of their own

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gotta move them 1 by 1 if stuck, but if simply loosing will to fight for 1 second but still movable, i use STOP to make them be agressive again instantly

yeah, they don’t attack the unit they target.
another issue is, many units seem to lock onto a signle enemy unit, and if this one is used to run away is lures your entire army.

I aff frozen monk warriors too

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My impression was the pathing become considerably worse not after the India DLC, but after the Xbox version which seemed to have messed up things…

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This is a really good channel, I didn’t know about this one!

https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/18clih5/pathfinding_went_backwards_due_to_update_81058/

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Kudos to him doing the work the devs should be doing.

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Maybe the pathing is being intentionally left broken to push people onto AOE4

I wouldn’t be surprised if the pathing is sabotaged by someone, considering that it’s a thing since DE release and it was better at some point.

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Any updates? Any word from the devs? Any word from other officials?

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It’s ridiculous how a basic feature like this can get worse as time progresses instead of getting better

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image

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