Bikes are crushable, but when?

[Pat_Pas]

Under what circumstances can a bike be crushed with tanks or harvs? It sometimes happens, but you can't do it every time. Do you know why?

[cn2mc]

When? When nobody expects it.

Why? Nobody knows.

Jokes aside, in my experience it happens when both the crusher-unit and the bike try to enter the same cell at the same time, but the direction the crusher-unit moves in also seems to factor in somehow. Diagonal movement appears to be more succesful. Why bikes don't get crushed all the time, as it supposedly should be? Maybe it also has something to do with pathfinding and unit AI, in the sense that units will usually try to fight an enemy standing in their way. Moving your crusher-units with the 'alt' command (force move) also seems to increase your chances of accidentally crushing a bike, as absurd as that sounds. Alt-move makes units less prone to stopping and returning fire at enemies that engage them. F.ex., an APC sent to the enemy's base with alt-move, so as not to stop when engaged, will probably crush any bikes that try to physically block it. That's all I know and it might not be really true, so take it for what it is.

[Messiah]

It does only happen when a crusher hit the bike by the side, never when hitting frontal or from behind.

[ore_truck]

I've read somewhere it can be crushed by its sides (not front or rear) but I tried ALT move on a bike's side a number of times without success so I can't confirm this. But the AI harvesters always seem to get it.

 

Also, like cn2mc said most of my bikes getting squashed is when the two units trying to get on a same square at the same time (but I guess the bikes should know better the bigger vehicle has the right of way).

[Nyerguds]

In practice, bikes are crushable by accident, and by AI-controlled unarmed units

 

But, yeah, everything points to the vehicle-crushing being a poorly implemented feature that simply doesn't work reliably.