Difficulties in best-path assessment

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alleryn
Space Dragon
Posts: 259
Joined: Sun Nov 19, 2017 6:32 pm

Difficulties in best-path assessment

#1 Post by alleryn »

Sometimes one path can be faster, while another takes less fuel. Currently the default pathing is shortest time (i believe).

I was just wondering if anyone had had any thoughts about this. Of course nothing needs to be done about this; it's easy to choose our own path via waypoints (by the way, whoever implemented this, thank you!, makes things a million times easier).

Just a passing thought, i was curious if anyone might have come up with any ideas about tickboxes in the UI or something like that. I don't think calculating both paths should be a tremendous strain on the processor or whatever, but i suppose it should be addressed if that's somehow prohibitive.

My brief musings would indicate that the AI (or a human's go-to default behavior) would be to select best fuel when choosing an unknown (?) destination, and shortest time (if possible, and if not better fuel) in other situations.

dbenage-cx
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Re: Difficulties in best-path assessment

#2 Post by dbenage-cx »

Assuming only in regard to manual fleet movement, might be simple to add an option to use LeastJumpsPath instead of ShortestPath. (Not sure I would use such an option, but no objections)

For the AI, there were some recent improvements in PR 1761, which has a nice description covering the topic.

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alleryn
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Re: Difficulties in best-path assessment

#3 Post by alleryn »

dbenage-cx wrote:For the AI, there were some recent improvements in PR 1761, which has a nice description covering the topic.
Very nice, thank you for the link.

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As far as an implementation for humans is concerned, in terms of some sort of toggle, i'm caught between thinking this would just be unnecessary clutter for the UI and thinking it might just provide enough utility to be worth it. It's not a function i would use very often, but occasionally on high-starlane maps i find myself overlooking paths that can get ships back into supply, etc.

I guess the fleet window isn't particularly cluttered right now, but there might be higher priority items to use the space down the road. I'll recommend keeping this on the backburner for the time being.

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What about the notion of changing the default pathing behavior for humans? Is the thought of using LeastJumpsPath for travel to unknown destinations a bad idea? Generally when scouting, saving fuel is superior to moving quickly, in my experience.

Of course, then there are added complications of "ShortestPath until out of supply, then LeastJumpsPath". I don't know, it's probably more trouble than it's worth, still just brainstorming here.

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