The ignoreSelf flag is intended to allow the current actor to be ignored when checking for blocking actors. This check worked correctly for cells occupied by a single actor. When a cell was occupied by multiple actors, the check was only working if the current actor happened to be the first actor. This is incorrect, if the current actor is anywhere in the cell then this flag should apply.
This flag failing to be as effective as intended meant that checks in methods such as PathFinder.FindPathToTargetCells would consider the source cell inaccessible, when it should have considered the cell accessible. This is a disaster for performance as an inaccessible cell requires a slow fallback path that performs a local path search. This means pathfinding was unexpectedly slow when this occurred. One scenario is force attacking with a group of infantry sharing the same cell. They should benefit from this check to do a fast path search, but failed to benefit from this check and the search would be slow instead.
Applying the flag correctly resolves the performance impact.
When handling the Nodes collection in MiniYaml, individual nodes are located via one of two methods:
// Lookup a single key with linear search.
var node = yaml.Nodes.FirstOrDefault(n => n.Key == "SomeKey");
// Convert to dictionary, expecting many key lookups.
var dict = nodes.ToDictionary();
// Lookup a single key in the dictionary.
var node = dict["SomeKey"];
To simplify lookup of individual keys via linear search, provide helper methods NodeWithKeyOrDefault and NodeWithKey. These helpers do the equivalent of Single{OrDefault} searches. Whilst this requires checking the whole list, it provides a useful correctness check. Two duplicated keys in TS yaml are fixed as a result. We can also optimize the helpers to not use LINQ, avoiding allocation of the delegate to search for a key.
Adjust existing code to use either lnear searches or dictionary lookups based on whether it will be resolving many keys. Resolving few keys can be done with linear searches to avoid building a dictionary. Resolving many keys should be done with a dictionary to avoid quaradtic runtime from repeated linear searches.
Ensure the target location can be pathed to by all units in the squad, so the squad won't get stuck if some units can't make it. Improve the choice of leader for the squad. We attempt to a choose a leader whose locomotor is the most restrictive in terms of passable terrain. This maximises the chance that the squad will be able to follow the leader along the path to the target. We also keep this choice of leader as the squad advances, this avoids the squad constantly switching leaders and regrouping backwards in some cases.
