It wouldn't be that hard (from purely a software angle) to evaluate the risk of equally fast routes to a point for some fairly simple definition of risk and choose the least risky one. It's already checking the distance for lots of alternative paths, and if it just accumulated a fractional score for each danger it passed by it could be nudged away from the bad paths if everything else was equal.

That said, it's probably not the kind of thing they are going to prioritize to work on in a shipping game like this one.

The lack of a preview of the route a long path and this blindness to risk to make long paths generally not a good idea in FE, which is annoying.

If a monster moves into an adjacent tile, or if your unit does, the path gets cancelled currently. I'm not sure of the details when this gets activated, but it's there.

I sort of like the pathing algorithm -- it teaches me things about the game.  But I do not like its user interface and I usually regret using it.

When I am feeling experimental, though, I try using it for my first movement in the turn.  If I do not like what it does, I reload my last autosave.

Details:  I have autosaves set for 0 turns between autosaves, so I get an autosave at the end of every turn.  Note, however, that when I reload an autosave and then hit end of turn, my "previousautosave" and my "autosave" will be for the same turn, and this might bother some people - personally, though, this does not bother me because I do not like changing history, though I will make an exception with the UI does something "irreversiable" that I did not intend.

If that does bother you, set it for 1 instead of 0.  Although it might be worded poorly on the options screen, the meaning of the setting is "do an autosave every X turns", so 1 will autosave every turn.  Apparently 0 causes it to autosave twice every turn (overwriting both autosave and previousautosave), which is a bit of a surprise to me - I assumed that setting it to 0 would turn autosaves off.

Odd.  I just double-checked and I have it set for "Turns Until Auto Save: 1", my AutoSave is season 172, and PreviousAutoSave is season 171.  Not sure why setting it to 1 wouldn't save every turn for you, unless it was an old version and it's been changed (fixed?) since then.

I have not been loading autosaves to check turn numbers.  I only have been loading autosaves to recover from UI difficulties.  And I remember that there was a time when I lost a full turn when I had it set to 1 instead of to 0.

Perhaps the issue is not what I described, but instead there is an occasional bug where 1 skips a turn? (That would probably have been 1.01 or 1.02.)  I suppose I could change it back to 1 to see if the problem recurs, but I do not see that I would gain anything useful from 1.

So I will merely stop advocating the use of 0, and let other people worry about this, if they care.

The issues with path-finding caused me to take some break from FE ... Especially on the roads and coming out of a city.