Hate For The Pathing Algorithm

It is likely considered to be working as intended. Do you have any examples of turn-based strategy games that handles this differently?

It wouldn't be that hard (from purely a software angle) to evaluate the risk of equally fast routes to a point for some fairly simple definition of risk and choose the least risky one. It's already checking the distance for lots of alternative paths, and if it just accumulated a fractional score for each danger it passed by it could be nudged away from the bad paths if everything else was equal.

That said, it's probably not the kind of thing they are going to prioritize to work on in a shipping game like this one.

The lack of a preview of the route a long path and this blindness to risk to make long paths generally not a good idea in FE, which is annoying.

I believe in the Civilization series, when a 'pathed' unit is about to encounter an enemy, it drops out and gives the player a chance to deal with the problem.

I know the Devs are aware of the pathing problems, and I hope that this item is high on their list for an early fix/redesign.

If a monster moves into an adjacent tile, or if your unit does, the path gets cancelled currently. I'm not sure of the details when this gets activated, but it's there.

When this happened to me, the next thing I was told was that my unit (Pioneer) was under attack - and it was gone. 

What needs to happen is for the 'path' to be terminated as soon as the enemy units come into view.

I sort of like the pathing algorithm -- it teaches me things about the game.  But I do not like its user interface and I usually regret using it.

When I am feeling experimental, though, I try using it for my first movement in the turn.  If I do not like what it does, I reload my last autosave.

Details:  I have autosaves set for 0 turns between autosaves, so I get an autosave at the end of every turn.  Note, however, that when I reload an autosave and then hit end of turn, my "previousautosave" and my "autosave" will be for the same turn, and this might bother some people - personally, though, this does not bother me because I do not like changing history, though I will make an exception with the UI does something "irreversiable" that I did not intend.

I don't believe this is true.  The mob will just attack, instead of giving the player the opportunity to act first.

I 'm pretty sure both Civ IV and V drop the path and activates the unit when a mob moves into threat range.

If that does bother you, set it for 1 instead of 0.  Although it might be worded poorly on the options screen, the meaning of the setting is "do an autosave every X turns", so 1 will autosave every turn.  Apparently 0 causes it to autosave twice every turn (overwriting both autosave and previousautosave), which is a bit of a surprise to me - I assumed that setting it to 0 would turn autosaves off.

In my experience 1 means every other turn.

But the behavior I get from 0 does not bother me, either.

Odd.  I just double-checked and I have it set for "Turns Until Auto Save: 1", my AutoSave is season 172, and PreviousAutoSave is season 171.  Not sure why setting it to 1 wouldn't save every turn for you, unless it was an old version and it's been changed (fixed?) since then.

It always worked the way you described it. I set it to 4 turns and the game auto-saves every 4 seasons. It really is strange, if it works differently for dihir.

I have not been loading autosaves to check turn numbers.  I only have been loading autosaves to recover from UI difficulties.  And I remember that there was a time when I lost a full turn when I had it set to 1 instead of to 0.

Perhaps the issue is not what I described, but instead there is an occasional bug where 1 skips a turn? (That would probably have been 1.01 or 1.02.)  I suppose I could change it back to 1 to see if the problem recurs, but I do not see that I would gain anything useful from 1.

So I will merely stop advocating the use of 0, and let other people worry about this, if they care.

Just one final note before letting this die a peaceful death, but you don't have to load the autosaves to check the turn number.  Just mouseover in the list of saved games and the tooltip lists the turn number ("Season X") along with the game version and surviving players.

The issues with path-finding caused me to take some break from FE ... Especially on the roads and coming out of a city.