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Comment by latimer | Hacker News Reader

Really interesting read. He mentioned that he'd talk more about the pathing in another post. I hope it will explain something I've always wondered about which is why the dragoon pathing/AI was not so good compared to other units.

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I think the explanation is actually pretty simple: because of the combination of how they had to break the tiles up into smaller tiles and the dragoon's relatively large size. The AI imagines it can get through spaces it can't, or a gap turns out to be filled with other units, or similar.

(disclaimer: I'm just guessing, no inside knowledge. certainly feels right though)

[note: I wrote the StarCraft article]

You're right -- it was related to the size of the units. Because they were larger they needed to find wider paths that weren't obstructed by terrain or other game units.

Thanks for the countless hours of SC fun over the years. Amazing how far things have come, but really how little has actually changed when it comes to what makes the game fun and engrossing.

Did you guys have any idea what sort of an impact it would have in Asia (more specifically with the Korean players)?

Nope. We thought we would sell about 4000 copies in Korea, to the extent that anyone on the team was thinking about it at all. Timing is everything - we just happened to hit the Korean market when everyone lost their jobs and started playing in PC Bang. Kinda lucked out and sold a copy to every man, woman and child in Korea.

I always felt that Goliaths were significantly dumber. There was also a funny glitch we discovered with friends - they could shoot from a greater distance than they thought they could, ie. at some point[1] if you ordered them to attack enemy Sunken Colony, they would come within it's attack range, but if you stopped them (via button Stop, or Hold Position) just outside Sunken Colony's firing range, they would start shooting to it anyway. I abused this quite a lot on my friend back then ;).

PS. I'll never forgive the patch 1.13e. It removed the most amazing bug ever, that allowed to turn StarCraft upside down via specially prepared maps (think units changing weapons on demand, or terrain morphing at realtime). People were doing amazing things with it... for about two weeks that went between discovery and the beforementioned patch.

[1] - this was long time ago, I think around patch 1.11.

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