Author Topic: Pathfinding and perma mines  (Read 1666 times)

Offline Kjara

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Pathfinding and perma mines
« on: September 28, 2009, 03:02:41 am »
Any chance of (possibly as an option) to get units to avoid perma mines when possible(and when they are aware of them) or to be able to somehow flag a wormhole as "off" in some way to make your units avoid it?  Was thinking back to a game a bit ago when I had 3 worlds in a triangle
A  -  B
  \   /
    C

A and C were border worlds(aka saw alot of attacks), but the path between them had perma mines.  Thus every time I had to move units between them I had to make sure I shift clicked on B first, otherwise my units would kill themselves trying to move between the two worlds(and I managed to forget a few times when things were busy, lost a couple of groups).

Offline liq3

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Re: Pathfinding and perma mines
« Reply #1 on: September 28, 2009, 01:40:32 pm »
I imagine flagging a wormhole as "no-go" is possible, but avoiding them by "pathfinding" ain't gonna happen, since this game doesn't have any pathfinding anyway (which wormholes to take is the extent of it).

Offline ldlework

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Re: Pathfinding and perma mines
« Reply #2 on: September 28, 2009, 02:01:34 pm »
Quote
I imagine flagging a wormhole as "no-go" is possible, but avoiding them by "pathfinding" ain't gonna happen, since this game doesn't have any pathfinding anyway (which wormholes to take is the extent of it).

You should probably take a second read over that.

Offline liq3

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Re: Pathfinding and perma mines
« Reply #3 on: September 28, 2009, 02:35:14 pm »
Quote
I imagine flagging a wormhole as "no-go" is possible, but avoiding them by "pathfinding" ain't gonna happen, since this game doesn't have any pathfinding anyway (which wormholes to take is the extent of it).

You should probably take a second read over that.
It made sense in my head. <3

Offline Kjara

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Re: Pathfinding and perma mines
« Reply #4 on: September 28, 2009, 06:01:32 pm »
Yeah,
The more I think about it, I don't see auto avoidance working.  However, I would love the ability to tell my ships to not choose to use a wormhole(or even better, the ability to add a high "weight" to the wormhole, so they would still use it if theres no other options, but it would look much worse when there are other reasonable options.

This would also be useful when I go around a IV planet at the start and have something like:

A - B(IV) -  C
  \  /     \   /
  D    -   E

At times, when the wormholes are close enough in B, you are forced to manually tell them to first to go D, then go to E, then go to C(since skipping any of these steps will make them choose to cut through B and die).  If we could assign weights like:
   6         6
A - B(IV) -    C
  \  /6     \6   /
  D      -     E
Then, unless you told units specifically to go into B, they would avoid it, but when you gave them an order to go to B, they would take the shortest route(as all routes into B incur the extra 6 "cost").    I only suggest the edge weight over a node weight as it allows one to solve both this problem and the perma-mines problem.

However, even the ability to say, don't use this edge unless you have no other choice(aka to set edge weight to either 1 or something large enough, say 1k), would be enough for most of the problems, without turning the game into something where you have to mentally solve a weighted shortest path problem to figure out the optimal way to assign edge weights to get your ships to take the routes you want :).

Offline Oewyn

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Re: Pathfinding and perma mines
« Reply #5 on: September 30, 2009, 01:13:39 pm »
Probably the simplest implementation would be some key combination to "close" a warpgate to friendly ships... This means that no ship will attempt to take the warpgate (from either end) when making cross-planet movements.

I tend to accidently slaughter my fleets when playing in games with permamines.  It's just habit to fire-and forget fleets when they are moving through friendly territory.

I'd really love a way to destroy/reclaim permamines(heh, destroy permamines).  They are a barrier when they are on an enemy planet, but usually just a nuisance when on a friendly planet.

Offline Revenantus

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Re: Pathfinding and perma mines
« Reply #6 on: October 03, 2009, 01:21:57 pm »
The ability to prevent units from using specific wormholes is already listed for future DLC - http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,277.0.html

Offline Kjara

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Re: Pathfinding and perma mines
« Reply #7 on: October 03, 2009, 02:29:38 pm »
That would solve the problem, didn't notice it :).

Offline Revenantus

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Re: Pathfinding and perma mines
« Reply #8 on: October 03, 2009, 02:30:13 pm »
That would solve the problem, didn't notice it :).

Great! I'm really looking forward to seeing that implemented too. :)