Wish List: Routing

[Graeme Dice]

Gandalf Parker said:
That would be alot of thinking on a pbem system. Anything that carries beyond one turn would be pretty involved to put in since its just not setup for multiple turn actions.

Why on earth would you worry about saving path information between turns? You run the pathfinding algorithm every turn for every unit. Pathfinding in a system like Dominions is simple, since the best path is not affected dynamically by the current position of other units. This is especially true for a sparsely populated graph like a typical Dominions map. I'll use a concrete example to illustrate how you don't understand the issues involved. Civilization 3 & 4 are games which have similar numbers of individual units to Dominions, and which have far more densely populated graphs (8 possible movements for every single square). In a single turn of either of these games (Or just about any other strategy game), every single unit can be told to find a path to any legal destination anywhere on the entire map, with no noticeable slowdown.

Further, the real blow to your claim that pathfinding for human players would somehow add overwhelming computational time, is that the AI already performs these calculations every turn. As any player of Dom3 would be able to tell you, the "AI thinking" phase of turn generation is by far the shortest phase.