Issue with melee units pathing?
Hello, just had my first game and I'm quite avid in RTS/MOBA. Having played SC2 and Dota for many many years.
A big gripe of mine, which I am not sure is intentional is the pathing when microing your own units. In for example SC2 you could push your big melee units ahead of the smaller units and they would move out of the way. Is it by design that I have to micro the hell out of my ranged mobs to just get my melee units ahead in the fight?
Since friendly units don't react to friendly collision at all. To me atleast it does not feel quite right because I have to move so many of my units just to make space for the melee units, and due to the nature of this map with all the chokes it was quite the challenge to get everything running up to speed and byt the time by that my ranged units are in the front getting destroyed because I have to move around everything.
Please let me know if it is by design
Comments
As a player I definitely agree on the wonkiness of pathing, but it's also an element that rewards micro and unit control.
I definititely enjoy this "bad" pathfinding micro, SC2 perfect pathfinding was very boring to me.
small complaint : due to the design of the map, during the titans fights, sometimes you just can't do much to place all your units well because all the space is occupied.
Very good aspect of the game for me.
Devs have previously said that the imperfect pathing is intentional and part of the design; it rewards good micro.
Also, units do push idle friendlies out of the way, but they do not push busy friendlies (friendlies already given an attack order, in particular) out of the way. Knowing this can help a bit with positioning (at least for me).
Are you serious? So having an engineer stuck at a wall, or have your hero die because he can't move round 2 critters is good design? Maybe it shouldn't be perfect, but some things are just pure bullshit.
I also believe this imperfect pathing is better design choice. If you need to reorganize units in fight, you are reducing the dps of your army group, which rewards good pre-fight preparation. It also promotes flank attacks to disorganize enemy formation, which is cool.
Theoretically this pathing gives bigger defender advantage than the SC2 pathing. In SC2 it was usually sufficient to just go for attack move with your army and it automatically got into the optimal DPS shape. The micro was mainly about spliting the army against AoE and casting spells, which seems pretty bland, compared to unit control required by this system.
Definitely not these extreme cases; but it's difficult to create rules that except these cases while otherwise getting the desired behavior. Still, we want to alleviate as many of these frustrations as possible, and pathing is always a work in progress.
I like this pathing for resons other people have mentioned in this thred.
I have one complaint thou. Units dont find their way around units they cant push (enemy units, creeps, attacking units). I don´t think this should be incompatible with the desired pathfinding.
Imo units should keep formation (not clump up) to make micro more interesting and, and it should be possible to block and surround units. But if i tell my army to go to the otherside of too rabits who are a little bit to close to each other, they should go around the rabbits, and not get stuck between the rabbits (this often happends if you dont manually move all your units around the rabbits).
If you ask me the pathing in wc3 was very good, for this kind of game i would like the same, exept the units keep should keep formation (not sure if they did that in wc3).