> Where this needs more consideration is the experimental ruleset.
> If the defender is on a tile that the attacker could not enter
> except via road, then totally negating the road will make the
> defender unreachable.

I don't think this applies to the current experimental ruleset; if attacker is Big Land (e.g. Cannon) and defender is e.g. on a hill, either there's no road on the hill (in which case attack is impossible) or there is one (in which case attack direction doesn't matter; pathfinding will necessarily arrange that the source tile has a road).

I don't think it's possible to set things up so that the attacker can only attack the defender from a certain direction.

However, we'd certainly like that to become possible (see for instance bug #16383). Will the committed fix need adjusting once cardinal-move-only roads/rivers exist?

Path-finding: Consider the last move of the path as a constant single move when
attacking and entering foreigner cities to establish trade route. We would get
straighter paths on these cases.

The old behaviour (often prefering move + action) is still possible using
goto waypoints.

Reported by Silas Brill

See gna bug #20361

(Browse SVN revision 22379)

Attaching better version: consider the last move of the path as a constant single move when attacking and entering foreigner cities to establish trade route for getting straighter paths.

In the savegame example, the old behaviour is still possible using waypoints.

(file #17236)

This patch should solve your problem.

(file #17180)

That could be done by treating the final step (onto the enemy-occupied tile) as having the same movement cost regardless of direction - basically, ignore roads and rivers on enemy-occupied tiles.

I just found a workaround: Using the arrow keys doesn't trigger pathfinding, so it's good for controlled single steps.

Does the pathfinding take into account whether the move is an attack or not at all? It seems as though most similar situations would be covered by the ZOC rules. In this situation, the dragoon's two-step movement wouldn't be possible if the city were not there.

I have a dragoon in a city on a hill, and I want to use that dragoon to attack a cannon on a diagonally adjacent hill. However, the target hill has a river, which seems to be throwing off the pathfinding.

+---------------------+---------------------+
| Hill+River (Cannon) | Plains |
| Grassland+River | Hill+City (Dragoon) |
+---------------------+---------------------+

When I try to attack the cannon, the dragoon opts to move through the Grassland+River tile, which would surely by the right move if the other hill were not occupied. However, in this case such a move results in my dragoon stepping outside the safety of the city into a relatively hard-to-defend grassland tile, and throwing one of my cities into disorder for a turn because I'm running a democracy in the civ2 ruleset.

(I also have a musketeer in that city, which is able to attack without triggering this bug, but when I do that the cannon wins the fight. I'm not sure whether that's another bug or there's some rule I'm missing that would make that make sense.)

I've attached a savegame - the city in question is "Mixcoac".