Terrible pathfinding in towns

[Ignopotens]

Just something that always bugged me about RTW in general. What is the deal with the absurdly bad unit pathfinding inside towns? Why do the groups of buildings have invisible barriers extending outside their rings of walls? Why are my troops trying to march all the way around the block when there's a 100 yard gap between the lone hut, and the next group of buildings?

Especially annoying when fighting for town centers, the units don't fully engage, just sending 1 or 2 men to fight while the rest mill around, or even running out of the city center and then running back in when you order them to attack a different unit they're 10 feet from. This is most evident in towns where the center is bracketed on 2 sides by buildings.

Lastly, is there anything that can be done about this?

*edit: Also, I've never seen soldiers who were so good at running in only right angles around street corners, even if the street is just a dirt path and there aren't any buildings in the way.

[I of the Storm]

AFAIK, this is a hardcoded issue and there is nothing that can be done about it. It's always quite malfunctioning, no matter if it's vanilla RTW or a mod.

[Lovejoy]

Yeah I hate the pathfinding.

Attacking cities is actually quite fun, but the pathfinding too often get on my nerves. :/ Especially phalanxs sucks in towns.

[Danest]

I've seen bugs and bad pathfinding before, but I really have to wonder what would make CA program pathfinding *that* strange. I've seen units make moves in the town square that aren't even *close* to a straight line. I'd think it would take some really strange programming to make them ignore their normal tendency to move in a relatively straight line.

[bovi]

I'm somewhat confident that they place "navigation nodes" at roads throughout the city to make sure they'll walk around buildings rather than bang into the walls, and reduce time spent for calculating their path. When the unit or the destination is inside the walls when the order is given, traverse along all the different node routes and compare their length to find the shortest one. Then let the unit go from node to node along the path until they have no nodes between themselves and the destination. Finally move in a straight line.

You can see this especially clearly when entering the town square. They will walk along the town square, PAST the natural point of entry to the node it decides is closest to the destination, then turn around and walk in.

[Ignopotens]

that seems most likely the case, it just makes me wonder how they just let that kind of stuff slide in testing (having been a tester myself for a retail game, I know someone must've brought it up), how'd that thought process go?

"Hey man what's with the pathfinding when they fight in cities, are there traffic police or something?"
"Dude, don't you know all those reports of pillaging are BS? The troops always followed all road signs, even to the point of death."