Elemental Forums
The picture shows the computer offering a 4 turn path to the city even though moving directly through the river would only take 2 turns.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1973072/path_calc.png
It is a bug. I've seen it before. For some reason, the system will sometimes refuse to path across a river, instead going completely around it, even though it may take many more turns to do so. This problem has been around since before I started playing in January. It's not a frequent problem (although that might be more because I've learned to not use auto-pathing because it keeps getting me killed), but it does happen.
I have the same problem Darxim mentioned. It doesn't matter if there is a road over the river or not, path finding frequently does not let you go over them unless you directly click on the river. I feel like the devs were deciding on whether to make rivers impassible or not, and updated the path finding code without actually making them impassible.
The path is determined by the path that a Pioneer would take instead of what a Scout would take, which is what we want.
That only applies if your unit has the "Master Scout" ability, though, doesn't it? In a lot of cases it *is* quicker to go around the river on a meandering road rather than to try and cross two swamps and a river.
In no case is it better to spend 4 turns going around a river than spending 2 turns to cross it and reach the same tile (which is the situation in the screenshot).
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