Geneforge pathfinding

[payn]

One thing that's annoying me in the Geneforge demo (both Mac and Windows) is that it seems to do a horrible job with pathfinding.

 

When I'm in combat, and I want to move one character forward, sometimes it'll tell me that I can't get there, even though I can easily do so by clicking halfway there, then clicking the rest of the way.

 

Worse yet, sometimes, rather than moving straight between two characters (when I know there's space to do so, because another character just did it), it'll run all the way around and waste all of its APs and miss a chance to attack. In one case, the character just took two steps backward and stopped!

 

It seems to me that this will get worse later in the game (at least if you play a Shaper, because you'll presumably have more creations, and some of them will be melee-only and need to get around the others). And I could see this also causing serious problems around the minefields.

 

I don't remember the Exile games having a problem like this.

 

Do other people have this problem?

 

If this is a known problem, but there's no easy fix, maybe a decent workaround would be an "undo" button--if you've moved, but haven't yet attacked or done anything else, you could undo the move. (Yes, this would allow people to cheat by looking around corners, but I don't think that's worth worrying about.)

 

A better (but not perfect) fix would be to highlight the proposed path if you let the mouse hover over the destination (or held the mouse button down, or right-clicked, or something).

 

The undo button would also be nice for when you want to get as far forward as you can without going under 5 AP (although it'd be even better if it showed you on the screen how many AP you'd have left at the destination you were hovering over, or something like that, even without showing the path).