"Oh, you mean walk through the forest?"

Agreed.

Please fix the optimum path algorithm Stardock. Equally bad things happen around settlements where my troops will often walk multiple squares in the open beside the city when they could just step into the city and step out the otherside for way less movement.

Please also fix all forest squares so that it is clearer that they are forest, some only have a few stumps which doesn't look like it would slow anyone.

Agree

I've noticed this as well.

The only thing I notice now while walking through the forest is the lack of monster scenery. 

/agree

Pathfinding needs logic and movement point weighting of the various solutions to find the "Best" solution not just the first solution.  With movement point the quickest path is not always the shortest path...

Yep. I reported this during beta as well.

That is an annoyance and I find myself constantly zooming out to the cloth map to find forest edges so I can avoid them.

I play almost the entire game with the cloth map. It is the only way to be aware of what is going on in your empire. (Most other games warn you when an enemy is spotted in your territory.)

Exactly, I've played every game on the cloth map. I think it's much more clear to see what's going on at a glance & with the grid enabled I don't have a problem seeing what terrain is in which square. The graphics map might be more realistic, but the cloth map is more functional & fun in my opinion.

"Please fix the optimum path algorithm Stardock. Equally bad things happen around settlements where my troops will often walk multiple squares in the open beside the city when they could just step into the city and step out the otherside for way less movement."

I thought that it would be easy to have my armies take a shortcut through cities, but that seems to eat all of my movement points.  Does anyone know if there is a movement penalty for going through a city?  It seems like when I enter a city it either takes all the remaining points or triggers an 'end turn' which can be irritating when I'm not expecting it.

well if you were going to walk on a long trek you would like some shade too, right?

If it's triggering an 'end turn' turn off the 'auto end turn' thing in the options.  In my experience entering a city costs 1 movement and then costs nothing when you leave the city.  So it should indeed act as a shortcut I often use long cities to travel 6+ squares in a single turn.

Dude, Within 5 turns of dropping a pioneer I have already got roads coming out of every city.  Sometimes I even place cities just so I can build roads through a forest.

Entering a city costs the same movement point as any other move off the terrain you started on.  Exiting a city costs nothing as long as you exit to a square directly outside the city.  I think there might be a bug with the movement if you right click more than one square away from the city.  As I am exiting the city  I think I am using more movement points under that one condition, but I never tested it.

Not to highjack the thread, but I find the close map more fun because I can get a panoramic view of the kingdom while doing something mundane like trying to get my units out of the damn invisiforests. Sometimes I build an outpost just to define where the edge of the forest is.

agree that my guys are going into the forest more than they should.  I once campaigned for a movement trail like they do in HOMM.  wouldn't that be nice?

Yes it would.

I talked about it in Alpha Beta too but...nothing. That reminds me of that motto we had while I was an instructor in the military:

"You talk to them, they don't listen.

If they listen, they don't understand.

If they understand, they just don't care!"

0MP is really silly, cities are already a shortcut since you can enter from one side and exit from the other one, having spent just one move. I believe ENTERING a city should cost 1/2 MP and walking out of it should cost differently according to the tile you walk to. Wargames work like that.

As it is now if I walk out of a city by ONE tile I pay the price of that tile, if I walk out by two tiles the first one is free, the second I pay = Dumb.

With Elemental you have to imagine each city tile as quantumly magnified relative to the rest of the map.

Obviously the distance covered by one map tile is farther than walking across a city marketplace. This is where you imagine that your city is small but appears larger to attain the medieval cartographic aesthetic. It doesn't significantly nerf any strategy I have unless I choose to snake my cities for the benefit of warping the strategic map. I don't.