Ok, so we know about showing commands for units (every unit displaying their command queue), how about this: When you give units an order that requires them to move somewhere, and you select a unit, their intended path shows up as a line on the ground. Instead of just a straight connecting the unit to the order target, draw a line on the ground that says "I intend to move here!" This immediately lets a player see if his units will take the pass nearby or if they're going to run off somewhere else. It could be useful if you were running around defensive tower ranges, so you can immediately adjust the order queue to move the unit a bit further out if the intended line crosses the range ring.
The possibility of this depends entirely on the pathfinding algorithm. It may be that it does not know the full path that it will take. Also the path will change based on obstructions eg buildings that it did not know about.
If they include it (its a usefull feature so why not) i suggest adding a button that must be held down (Like shift for example) to show the planned paths. If those paths allways showes up when a unit is selected or when you give a move order, it would be annoying. But if they add it option with a button (a hold button or a toggle button or something) it would be very usefull.
There's a problem when pathing through FoW. You can't accidentally show that you want to path around a few buildings that you haven't seen, otherwise you're giving away free intel. Also, if that happened, you'd have psychic robots. I know "shooting for awesome" and all, but psychic robots is a no-go.
That kind of fog of war is SO 2000. Really. I think the "invisible where you don't have units" is fine enough for me...
That's what he means. Your enemy may have buildings somewhere that you can't see. However, I'd suggest simply finding a path from what you can see. So if there's enemy buildings you don't know are there, the pathfinder will ignore them and recalculate if they come into vision.
I wouldn't be surprised if this would tear your computer in half. Especially when done with a large swarm of units. Calculating the path once, while they move, is quite different from continuously showing the path as you drag the cursor around.
This isn't really technically feasible due to a number of a reasons. The biggest one being we have no idea which path the unit is going to take until it takes it. Also the client doesn't have this information and we would have to replicate it over the network.
