Is the Sortie Defection mission just our routinely reminder of how bad NPC AI is at this point? [+video]

[Kmykzy]

Activated the defectors the moment they got in range of the life suport to move on to A (at 0:07)

Waited around for all of them to finish leaving, last one left at 0:28 after 20 sec of running around like headless chickens while trying to select a basic path to A

On the way to A escorting the last one I met another one stuck running in place 0:33

He finally escaped his sisyphean torment and found a way to move forward 1:29, and yes, that's a minute of just running in place (even more if you consider the time he was running in place before I found him while we were waiting for the other one to finally leave C life suport)

 

A few suggestions here:

-If they can't plan a proper path while taking into account the broken physics momentum conservation of running in place in the game then just removing that momentum conservation from them would help them stop getting stuck in weird places

-If they are on the move and haven't progressed ,for eg. 10m in 10 sec, then they are obviously stuck somewhere so having their position changed to somewhere along the path from their starting position to the end position would fix these long hangs in movement. (with the tile set being known and not that many variations, how about each room having a few points along the route like breadcrumbs and when an NPC gets stuck like this then reposition them to the next breadcrumb marker closest to his stuck position for that room)

-Just make them try to backtrack 10m towards their spawn point when they are detected to have gotten stuck like this

 

Edit: after watching it again, a funny thing I realized about how broken this is:

The first defector NPC arrives at A life suport circle before the last defector NPC from his own squad finally finds a way to even leave C life suport circle.

[maaleru]

At least he didn't get stuck like usual.