Smaller bounding boxes on siege engines

[causative]

Siege engines are kind of a pain to use, and most of that is their poor pathing, which is a result of their large bounding box.  They have trouble fitting through areas that normal units can fit fine, and as a result will often randomly turn around and go the opposite direction from what you want.  Imagine siege engines appear the same size they do now, but have a small bounding box, similar to chariots or other cavalry.  That way you could just send them in with the rest of your units and they would find targets by themselves.  The case against doing this is that it would look somewhat less realistic - but we don't consider that a problem for chariots or cavalry, so I think we'd just get used to it.

[sanderd17]

The size of siege engines is determined by their clearance in the pathfinder.xml. Sieges fall under the "large" category.

So if you want, you can experiment a bit with the value and propose a better value. You can also open the "obstruction overlay" in the dev console to get a visual clue of how big the obstruction is.

[FeXoR]

Beeing large is only part of the problem AFAIK. Another is their rectangular obstruction IMO.

[sanderd17]

They're not always rectangular. Their actual definition is a circle, but at some places in the code, it's approximated by an axis-aligned square to speed up computation.

[causative]

A clearance of 0.8 for large units - same as for default units - looks OK and solves the pathfinding issues.  I mean, 0.8 works for babylonian scythed chariots which appear larger than most siege engines or elephants.

A value of 2 is a middle ground and also looks OK.

[Stan`]

What is the current value ?

[causative]

4