Hi

Im doing a turn-based, tile-based strategy game (in that sense similar to civilization).

I use A* pathfinding. What is the best way to deal with land-units "boarding" transport ships? My idea is to make tile with friendly transport-ships (with free transport slots) mark their tile as a terrain type which both land and sea-units may enter.

When switching to the next players turn, the old players ships must mark their tiles as non-walkable for land-units again. Then the new player marks his/hers ship-tiles as walkable. Also when a ship moves it must check the tile it just left if it's still capable of accepting friendly land-units.

Good idea? Any better ideas?
Thanks

Erik

sounds good to me

But I need to check all tiles with friendly ships before letting the land-unit do pathfinding, so what's the difference from my solution?

I also dont want to throw in game-specific checks inside the pathfinding itself, that will get messy.

Maybe I misunderstand you, but the sea-unit has never a problem in my first solution either.

This is sort of a non-answer, but have you thought about changing the gameplay? Loading units on ships, depending on the game, is usually an incredibly tedious affair. One way to get around that is to remove the concept of transport ships as playable units. All land units can take X turns to become a landing craft / transport ship containing the land unit. This simulates having the land craft come and pick up the unit, but functionally means the player no longer has to fiddle with building enough transports, or ferrying empty transports back and forth between units, and/or dealing with a bunch of empty idle transport ships clogging up the map and the UI.

Yeah i know ferrous but its a historical game and the ships are central so it must be like this:) They run all cargo and sometimes transport military units as well. In another setting I would do as you suggest.

Your algorithm will fail when the ship is bellow a unit and the unit wants to move upwards by the sea.

This doesn't look like a situation that can/should be handled by pathfinding. I think some kind of hierarchical pathfinding that stores connectivity between lands (do we need to use sea transport at all? Will it be more effective to use sea transport here?) and some kind of strategic planning algorithm (sea transports allocation and unit coordination) are needed here. Human player doesn't transport his units over seas in a random fashion. He packs them at some area and then boards them on a ship. He would expect something similar from AI.

But I need to check all tiles with friendly ships before letting the land-unit do pathfinding, so what's the difference from my solution?

I also dont want to throw in game-specific checks inside the pathfinding itself, that will get messy.

Your algorithm will fail when the ship is bellow a unit and the unit wants to move upwards by the sea.

Why would that fail? The land-unit can not move unto a SEA_TILE. It can only leave the ship like this: from a BOTH_TILE to a LAND_TILE (disembark).

Only when a ship moves away from a BOTH_TILE do I need to check the former tile if it should be switched back to a regular SEA_TILE (if no other friendly transports are still there).

I already have a system for temporary tiles (used in games where units block units, allowing only one unit per tile). This can be used for transports in games with several units per tile I think.