Game AI
The AI in the game is pretty good but has some very annoying traits. Pathfinding is still a problem and I know that it must be a hugely difficult task to accomplish decent pathfinding when everything else is moving too. But sometimes you want to ram your keyboard through the screen in frustration as you tank trundles off half way round the map so it can move to a space a few feet in front of where it started. On it’s way it gets attacked by a horde of Chaos Marines and if it doesn’t get blown to bits it eventually arrives back with the rest of your troops so banged up it needs some serious repairing. This is all the more annoying when the gap you made for it to go through was clearly big enough… and then, when you order the tank to retreat back to base for repairs, it drives straight through that gap!
It looks like Relic have tried to solve this problem in a way by stopping units moving if they can’t immediately get to a location. Instead of having the unit run back and forth continuously, they so stop after a short while and take up post wherever they are. Which is fine of you’re moving a skirmish line forwards but not so helpful if you’re trudging an army right across the map. I was caught out a couple of times when my Force Commander got stuck with a Dreadnought and a Predator, all of them blocking each others way. I had to manually select the Force Commander and move him back out of the way so the mech and the tank could sort themselves out and head off. The only problem was that by selecting my commander, I told his whole squad to move to his location too, leaving a hole in my front line that had no armour support anyway. I know that programming this kind of behaviour out is very difficult and I have to say that Relic’s pathfinding is among the best I’ve seen and tries a sensible and logical solution to the problems that most games have with it.
Once you’ve got your troops where you want them, you can set how aggressive they are to several different levels. The handiest is the ‘attack and hold’ command where your troops will pursue nearby attackers for a short distance before returning to their original positions. That said, sometimes your units will get it into their heads to chase off after an enemy and then hold position wherever they end up. This can be a problem if they do this while you are occupied elsewhere on the map, as you suddenly find one of your Dreadnoughts has wandered into range of the enemy’s turrets and is getting wasted. It’s not a major problem but does spoil things slightly if your troops can’t be trusted to do what they’re told.
