Movement Questions

[michammer]

Situation: In a scenario I am currently playing, I highlighted the unit I wanted to move and then used the "Reachable Hexes" button to see where I could move to. I selected the hex to move to, but the unit simply moved one hex to the right and stopped - 4 hexes short of the allegedly reachable hex!! The unit did not have enough action points to move any further. It started the turn with a full 100 action points.

Questions:

1. How reliable is the "Reachable Hex" button?

2. I always believed that the AI took the easiest route to the objective spending, the least number of action points. Is this true?

[Gnrl Confusion]

Try clicking the "toggle fire cost set aside" button and see if you can move farther. Except for that one issue, I've never had a problem with the reachable hexes button.

[John Given]

If in doubt, move the unit manually, one hex at a time. This is especially important if the units survival depends on it being in a certain hex that turn and you need to be sure.

Move than once, I've gotten lazy, thought I could select a unit, right-click a distant hex some distance down the road, (10+ hexes away) and it never fails: the unit merely moves into an adjacent woods hex or block. Grrr!

This is much more likely to happen if the unit has to turn a few times to get to the desired hex. (poor pathfinding ai in the CS)

Later, gents! :TRUCE:

[michammer]

Move than once, I've gotten lazy, thought I could select a unit, right-click a distant hex some distance down the road, (10+ hexes away) and it never fails: the unit merely moves into an adjacent woods hex or block. Grrr!

Later, gents! :TRUCE:

This is exactly what happened to me - twice! Guess I'll have to start moving hex by hex in these situatios.

[Krink]

Sometimes I find it's just a case that the unit has run into a hex that would require to many action points to move over a wall or whatever to get to the hex you want, but for some reason the reachable hex option missed the path points needed.

I'm sure thats not the problem here....but it's my 2 cents just the same.

Cheers,
Ray

[Abatis]

Also, if you move more than one hex at a time- you increase your chances of receiving op fire (also moving more than one unit at a time). Or so it seems- and I have read that on the internet too- though not in the manual...so I suppose it could be urban legend...but it does seem to happen more often under those circumstances.

One hex at a time is the safest method of locomotion ;)

[ER_Chaser]

Situation: In a scenario I am currently playing, I highlighted the unit I wanted to move and then used the "Reachable Hexes" button to see where I could move to. I selected the hex to move to, but the unit simply moved one hex to the right and stopped - 4 hexes short of the allegedly reachable hex!! The unit did not have enough action points to move any further. It started the turn with a full 100 action points.

Questions:

1. How reliable is the "Reachable Hex" button?

2. I always believed that the AI took the easiest route to the objective spending, the least number of action points. Is this true?

This happens all the time. Put it simple: there is a bug in the algorithm to EXECUTE the movements. The reachable hex highlighting algorithm is actually correct and very accurate. However, when you click on your "destination" directly under certain situation, the AI may do stupid things trying to execute that order. It is an understandable bug though, because it is a very common error in programming.

A typical situation would be: the hex next to your left is a forest hex, and then to your front is another forest, but to your right there is a road, which actually winds up around those two forest hexes and reaches the hex to your further left which is a slightly difficult terrain costing something like 40MP to get in. Now, you can reach that terrain to your further left through the road indeed , so it is highlighted. However, when you directly click on to that hex, what happens is that stupid AI would choose in this case, the "nearest" path ---- seemingly only ---- through the left forest hex and then stuck there ---- it would cost you 65MP at the first step and then it figures it cannot enter that target hex any more and would highlight you another smaller area that is reachable to you (which is still accurate by the time.). However, you could not undo this anyway. The way to avoid this is just ot be careful.

This is a kinda "forgivable" mistake in the code, because for a lazy programmer, he would not be willing to build a backward recursive method to walk the path. (To highlight the area, you only need a forward iteration, which is far easier.)

[John Given]

I'd also like to add a few things:

1. As I'm sure you all know, you can have up to 12 sp's in a hex and move at the road movement speed. Wrecks count against that limit. This could be one reason the units stop short of where you expected - a single overstacked roads-forest hex will sharply curtail your movement through the hex. And,

2. there is no way to tell the exact number of wrecks in a hex. It is also possible to have so many wrecks in a hex that the road is effectively unusable/non-existant.

3. As Gen. Confusion already mentioned, having the "fire cost set aside" will cause the unit to stop early, because the program is saving points to op-fire (but you already knew that).

4. ALWAYS click the F2 key to see the exact movement costs for that unit. A mistake I always used to make was not looking at the 'up elevation, hedge, and stream' movement point costs.

5. If you really need to be sure, use the 'rotate map' command to see if that hill you are about to climb or descend has an embankment hexside or stream. Using the 2d zoom-in view (map size #4) could also help on this one. More than once, I've had tanks destroyed when that unit paid a huge cost to move downhill - and that was the reason it couldn't get away - it used all it's action points to cross the embankment hex-side and became trapped. The 'rotate map' command is also a good way to find fiords (sp?) in streams that run behind hills.

That's all for now! :)

[michammer]

Thanks for all the tips, guys.

[Gnrl Confusion]

Or you can use the "I don't want to think this hard" programming algorithm and just dig in. Works for me.

[Jason Petho]

2. there is no way to tell the exact number of wrecks in a hex. It is also possible to have so many wrecks in a hex that the road is effectively unusable/non-existant.

This is incorrect. You can tell the number of wrecks in any given hex by merely selecting (left-clicking) the hex in question and pressing the U key. A sidebar opens and provides and assortment of details, including the number of wrecks.

Hope that helps
Take care and good luck
Jason Petho

[Cheech Marin]

I think if you hit F1 in any of the CS games, a help window pops up and one of the options on the menu is an explanation of the movement algorithms used by the game. Apparently the game uses three different algorithms. One is used when you just select a unit and tell it to move somewhere, the second is used when the reachable hexes are highlighted, and the third is used when you hold down a certain, I think it's either shift or alt. You might want to look into that.

[John Given]

This is incorrect. You can tell the number of wrecks in any given hex by merely selecting (left-clicking) the hex in question and pressing the U key. A sidebar opens and provides and assortment of details, including the number of wrecks

Whoa... THAT was a new one on me...thanx for the info Jason!

Hmm, I also don't ever remember reading that in the manual; I learn something about the CS every week it seems.

Later, people. :smoke: