[FE 1.0 Bug] Path Finding goes crazy

I tried patching the game and the same bug occurs.

Agreed.

There are several pathfinding bugs. The most annoying one, because it occurs frequently, is when you order units in a city to go to an easily accessible location (eg along a road a few squares) and the pathfinder decides to exit the city from completely the wrong square and walk through a few squares of forest first.

I've also, much more rarely, had localised areas of a map where the pathfinding is completely screwed up like you describe and ordering units to go just a couple of easy squares will cause them to plan a 15 square diversion to get there.

Both should be fixed. Both have been reported before though, frequently in the former case, and I've seen no action so I'm beginning to lose faith I must admit.

I have to confess, this one really annoyed me when I was playing my last game.  I really am enjoying the game, but having to micromanage exactly where an army leaves a city by clicking on the exact exit square instead of clicking on the road down the road a ways really got tiring.

It seems that pathfinding prefers to send you far away, instead of crossing through a dominion of an AI.

I find this one quite annoying too but at least it is semi-justifiable from Stardock's point of view. The other bugs reported in this thread are not.

Considering that my unit is locked there unable to get back into the city, I'll have to wait for further updates before continuing the game. I could try moving units one at a time to see if it solve the problem (instead of as a group).

Originally, I moved units square by square when the path finding was bad. But now moving a single square makes the game buggy, so I don't have any alternate method to avoid the bug.

I installed the 1.1 patch and still no improvement on this bug.

Seems like the attack of the "auto explore"... Have you tried turning that off, besides auto explore there is nothing I can do to help you

PS. you have to be pretty stubborn, and inventive to actually get the auto-explore turned off, its rather persistent.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I have experienced these strange pathfinding issues also, and I have never had auto-explore turned on.  And I've also had issues with a Pioneer, going from point-A to point-B, trying to go right through a monster lair and getting killed.

Well I did not mean to imply it WAS the auto explore, just seems very similar to when I hit the mysterious keyboard shortcut for the button (Is there one or am I just that clumsy? ;))

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Hmm! Auto-Explore, where is it activated, is it in the option menu, or it's a unit command.

I could have set up auto-explore accidentally. I'll eventually check it out.

Bottom left, the button is called "Explore" and doesn't change visuals depending on whether its turned on or off.
You will see it turned on by the unit always finding a new random path towards the darkness each turn.

To make it simpler, I grabbed your picture and made a small red arrow to point you towards it.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I was having the same issue, toggling the "explore" button worked for me to fix it though.

I made some test, If I click explore it follow the same exact path. So for some reason auto explore gets activated.

Explore does not seems to be a toggle button. Instead it simply changes the final destination. So there is no way to "disable" explore. The only thing I can do is ask to move the unit in another direction. But after the unit has finished movement, it automatically push explore if it has movement points left.

It is a toggle button, but it is very poorly shown to the player.
Click it until the unit have no path (don't click anything else, ONLY the explore button, and click it to see a new path, then click it again to TOGGLE the auto-explore for that particular unit OFF)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I tested again, it seem to have solved the problem. Since it's a toggle button, they should have highlighted the button when toggled.

They really should have

Sincerely
~ Kongdej