jks_AsPac wrote: ↑Jul 09 2018
Hi guys! I know this issue has been somewhat fixed already but I wanted to report that in my current Cold War game, the UK sends merchant marines through the Russian Arctic and Siberia to "help out" South Korea. Only, they never really get to South Korea before it gets beaten by the North. The UK is not at war with the USSR and only has a mutual defense treaty with South Korea so I think it's more of a proxy war. Now they got over 3 dozen units stuck up there looking for a new passage to Asia.
I've gotten a lot of that as well, Merchant Marines stuck here and there because they could not path to a distant, or even a near location(because they could not cross a river).
Merchant Marines help a lot in invading other regions across water hexes, creating unexpected developments such as Turkey successfully invading occupied France, stealing Paris from the Germans while they were busy in the USSR, however, Merchant Marine do get stuck a lot and end up "pinwheeling," that is unable to path to where they want to go their ships spinning endlessly.
RUGE made a ferry improvement in his SR2020 map fix, an invisible bridge on the map which is text edited into the map file and functions as a bridge to allow units to cross rivers and other areas that the AI was commonly known to get stuck in.
I thought about using that "ferry" improvement consecutively to create a "shipping lane" connecting continents together RISK style in SR2020 and in theory ground units would use them as "roads" to get from one continent to another without having to hand load ships. The visual effect is a stream of tanks, artillery and infantry on the ocean waters, bizarre yes, hover the mouse over them and they are on an invisible improvement labeled 'shipping lane."
In SRU, the ship visuals already exist in the form of the Merchant Marine, it remains that they would have to be coded by devs to use a "shipping lane" improvement like units use a road to get from the west to the east side of the globe (as well as elsewhere) across several predetermined routes and avoid being stuck.