First of all, Fred don't jump, its not bad about the program of your's mor elike about path placing of people before and after your program .
and to the subject:
i recently started to place my path's along new tiles. i always had the thought that placing path's is a delicate and hard work (remember the days before Fred's program of wich we had to use that in a manual way).
anyway when i came to examine previous path placing work of korea and pre desort storm guys i was under shock, it was far from delicate and accurat. what can i say while the boarders of the file goes from 0-3300 in the X scale and to 0-2459 over the Y Scale many guys just placed there roads path where ever they want. won't that hurt the entire texture and prevent it from working as a road over the campaign? how much delicate and accurat work must be?
lets say i got a crossroad of this kind of shape:
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So, to keep the vehicles on the tile roads you need a lot of Objectives. There are Objectives in F4 that do not have a physical structure associated with it. I think there is one for "cross roads".
***Disclaimer: This is solely my understanding of how vehicle movement is controlled in F4. There are other opinions which may be right. :p
I ran a lot of tests in the commercial F4 Korea theater watching armored columns travel along rouds. The effect you mention is correct. Where there are straight roads in Korea, the developers managed to get the nodes/paths pretty close to the pixels for the roads in the texture. In the hilly terrain however, where the roads switchback and curve around, the armored columns cut across country and don't follow the road.
The cool thing to see is the dispersal of ground vehicle units under ROE doctrine. Try setting up two opposing battalions of armor, and send them straight at each other by giving objectives along a road with a bridge at the point of contact. They will fan out as soon as the shells begin to fly, and manuever for firing advantage in a phalanx formation until one or the other side is broken in moral. Then the victor takes the bridge in a breakthrough manuever. Very cool!