No offense guys, but am I speaking Yiddish?

Please explain to me, if it can be explained, what''s wrong with a modified Follow-The-Leader? Does shepherd flocking not work like I think it ought to?

My thoughts are by pathing ONLY the shepherd from Point A (near) to Point B (far), then pathing the flockers from Point C (their previous position relative to the shepherd) to Point D (SAME relative position to the shepherd), is simply performing translation based on the Delta-position of the shepherd. This does a bunch of optimization right up front by reducing the length of path and number of pathing runs for all the units. The sheep make short little hops with some cheap Delta-pos plus collision detection, and the shepherds get long, cost-effective paths. Sure, if a sheep is going to run into an asteroid, it should be handed to the pathing thread and made to go around the obstacle assuming it''s a relatively smart sheep. Dumb (or unshepherded?) sheep would just crater!!

I would love to know why this isn''t going to work, because from here it looks really sweet...

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-WarMage
...you can lead a horse to water, and then lead him away, I guess.