naval ability for units to build bridges spanning water

[andy5995]

What do you think about implementing a feature where units can build bridges across water? They'd have to be built on the shore of one piece of land and connect to the shore of another piece of land. Then they would of course block ship passage, but like other buildings, they can be destroyed by the enemy. The bridges would have to be wide enough for infantry to cross, and not be too narrow as to create a bottleneck that would cause game lag.

 

Perhaps the bridges would contain areas where infantry could be garrisoned and fire arrows.

[Silier]

There have been thoughts about it already. All stopped basically on pathfinder and unitmotion needing quite of work for bridges to function properly.

[rollieoo]

maybe off-topic but in the same league: the ability for troops to dig trenches? 

[Nullus]

Have the recent changes to those components affected the difficulty of adding them at all? Has there been anything that changed since the last time this was proposed that would make this easier or harder?

[Huffman3829]

Oh yes, I like this idea very much. I hate that some areas of the map are inaccessible by troops because of water, and a close-combat, concentrated bridge battle sounds interesting. But it does seem a bit hard for the community to program bridges to be able to be constructed. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, andy5995 said:

What do you think about implementing a feature where units can build bridges across water? They'd have to be built on the shore of one piece of land and connect to the shore of another piece of land. Then they would of course block ship passage, but like other buildings, they can be destroyed by the enemy. The bridges would have to be wide enough for infantry to cross, and not be too narrow as to create a bottleneck that would cause game lag.

 

Perhaps the bridges would contain areas where infantry could be garrisoned and fire arrows.

I could see a drag n drop system nearly identical to building walls. Cost deducted per section. Also, a max length.

[Loki1950]

But all that is not possible till we can allow units to walk/see the bridge mesh also tied to the pathfinder not seeing meshes either.

Enjoy the Choice

[smiley]

8 hours ago, Loki1950 said:

But all that is not possible till we can allow units to walk/see the bridge mesh also tied to the pathfinder not seeing meshes either.

Enjoy the Choice

It gets worse. The pathfinder doesn't see the 3rd dimension, which presents quite a big problem when bridges involve having terrain that cannot be represented as planes. (see shallow water river and bridge above that for simple case).

I guess this can be workaround by having alternate grids. But that sounds like something you should not be doing.

A* itself doesn't care about grids or planes. It traverses weighted graphs. So, the proper solution would probably be implementing full 3D pathfinding. If properly done, this would even allow having non-planar terrain, such as caves, overhanging cliffs and whatnot.

Edited October 28, 2021 by smiley

[davidsrsb]

You should only be able to build bridges in shallow water. Replacing the shallow water pixels with bridge pixels should make the terrain equivalent to dry land.

You really want shallow water to be treated differently to land, slower for people and impassable to siege