Awakening Rescue Priority - A Better Understanding

[Vormanax]

Most players that are somewhat familiar with this game's mechanics know that when you rescue another unit they get put below you, then right if below is blocked, then left, then up. Somewhat more advanced players will also know how rescuing works if all adjacent tiles are blocked, and will know that rescue will try to avoid terrain. However from what I can tell there hasn't really been an understanding of how exactly it avoids the terrain. There may be some individuals who have figured this out before (although I've talked with other good Awakening players about this), but at the very least I couldn't find a place that actually explains this, so this knowledge is somewhere between undiscovered and whispered folklore.

I will state that this has been the result of testing and observation rather than reverse engineering and hacking. As such there's a chance that there are mistakes or weird edge cases I failed to test for. The biggest (and most unintuitive) revelation here is that rescue positioning is decided based on the movement of the person to be rescued (from here on rescuee), rather than the actual tile distance. The reason terrain is usually avoided is (as far as I understand) because it takes most classes more movement to enter them. This has some different implications. Most simply if you rescue a flier or a unit with Acrobat it doesn't care about terrain at all. More relevantly though, it means rescuing cavs and rescuing infantry has different results when the only adjacent tiles have terrain on them. In a typical situation where the space below, right, and left of the rescuer are blocked and the tile above has a woods on it, a regular infantry class will be rescued into the woods, while a cav will be rescued two tiles down. This is because the woods are "further away" from the rescuer than the tile two spaces down (assuming everything else is plains). Furthermore, rescuing takes pathing into account. Assuming everything is planes, if all four adjacent tiles are blocked it will rescue the rescuee two tiles down. However, if all four tiles are blocked and the tile below the rescuer is woods, it will rescue a (non-flying) unit one tile down and one tile right instead even though the tile two spaces down does not have terrain. This is because there is a 2-move path from the rescuer to the down right tile, but only a 3-move path from the rescuer to the down down tile. An important thing to note here is that if you rescue a non-moving unit (such as Tiki in her paralogue) they are not considered to incur terrain penalty (so they will be treated the same as fliers). A last note (that was technically already mentioned) is that actual-tile-distance is a stronger tie breaker than directionality. This is why in the three-tiles-blocked-and-the-above-space-has-woods example earlier put the infantry in the woods despite having to put them upwards.

To conclude, the algorithm for deciding which tile the rescuee is put in works like this (to my knowledge):

1) Pick the tiles that take the least movement for the rescuee to travel to from the position of the rescuer.
2) Of those tiles, pick the ones that have the least actual-tile-distance to the rescuer.
3) Of those tiles, pick the ones that's furthest south.
4) Of those tiles, pick the one that's furthest east.