> I don't see why units need pathfinding anyway.

I'm sorry but huh? It's a RTS game, aren't moving units around on the map kind of a fundamental part of the genre and this game?

> Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best

If you implement unit movements in a RTS like this, they'll get stuck half the time you ask them to move anywhere, unless you want micromanagement of unit movement to be 90% of the game, which I don't think anyone would find fun.

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card_zero an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, but if you were that unit, would you get stuck in a corner, or would you persist in trying to find your destination? I suppose if you make it all the way to the target, you've accomplished pathfinding of some kind, by definition, sure. But an algorithm to avoid getting stuck doesn't have to be "pathfinding" as in an expensive algorithm to find a complete path right away.

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embedding-shape an hour ago | parent [-]

Well, depending on how you implement it, there might not be any way of getting unstuck, imagine a wall that is 3/4 circle for example, with a small opening, could it escape with that sort of naive algorithm? Players tend to be kind of sensitive to "stupid unit movements", and not having pathfinding is a great way of triggering that feeling in every play session.

	▲	card_zero an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There certainly are naive ways, although whatever I suggest here will be poorly thought out and will lead to the next problem. But OK, I suggest a scent trail. Each unit paints where it's been and prefers not to go that way again. Then of course it could paint itself into a corner, so it needs a local-maximum-busting strategy too, which probably means marching off in an arbitrary direction to see if it gets unstuck. This would be behaving like a caged animal, and in a game, that's good, and better than a smarter algorithm. You don't want them to be idiots, but you don't want them to be magic, either. The old "follow the left-hand wall" maze-solving strategy is another naive way to get out of a trap. It's not fun gameplay, but it's naive and it exists, so better naive strategies do too.
	▲	jhbadger 32 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		When you get stuck, try random directions. That's what my robot vacuum does.