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[Star Weaver]

I'm a hybrid player; I like to use the mouse for nav, targeting, and most inventory control, but I usually use the keys A, F, G, V, CEWQ, TMI, F4-F8, and every once in a while I'll use a inventory command on the keyboard for the hell of it (usually for toggling state.)

The most frustrating experience for me with this combination is navigating around friendly robots, especially when e.g. a bunch of engineers are cleaning up after a big fight. If even one robot is adjacent to you that's an entire quadrant of the map view you can't click on without getting a ram confirmation warning.

I haven't used melee enough to know, do you just attack without a warning in this case?

Either way, the obvious (to me anyway) fix is to require holding down whichever key combination lets you melee attack walls and machines, otherwise path around the bots like they're a machine, or if there's no other way (e.g. one-tile hallways and not flying) show "hold blah keys to ram" in place of "invalid move".

This would have the side effects of preventing unintended melee weapon attacks on neutrals and make forgetting to turn off melee before trying to fly over a neutral (which was one of the reasons someone wanted or liked the 'toggle all weapons' button IIRC)

As an aside, I haven't been able to confirm this yet, but I swear there's been times where I click on something, get a ramming confirmation, and then click a different direction and ram a different robot without warning, sometimes even one several tiles away. What are the rules for ramming warnings turning back on, anyway?

[Kyzrati]

The main purpose of the system in its current state is to keep mouse movement simpler overall, and not require key presses where possible.

I decided against using pathfinding around nearby blocking robots because that could put you in a dangerous situation that the game cannot predict, especially in the event that there are hostiles around a corner that you know about and would prefer to be in a certain position to confront.

Pathfinding also introduces a number of other similar quandaries in which the game is making movement decisions for you that may not be ideal for some reason or another. We could say that it shows you the intended path, but not all players will be focusing on it, and choosing an alternative path by forcing the player to click on specific spaces would be more frustrating (especially for those players using smaller cell sizes). It's much easier to allow the player to click in the general direction they want to move, regardless of the specific cursor position.

As an aside, I haven't been able to confirm this yet, but I swear there's been times where I click on something, get a ramming confirmation, and then click a different direction and ram a different robot without warning, sometimes even one several tiles away. What are the rules for ramming warnings turning back on, anyway?

This shouldn't be possible; I'm guessing you thought you were headed in a different direction but were actually confirming to ram the same robot, or (slowly?) double clicked in the new direction to override the second confirmation. Only one robot can be set to allow ramming at a time, and you must have already clicked in that direction once before within the last 3 seconds, then it resets to no ramming allowed. But you cannot ram a robot without waiting at least 500ms between clicks in the same direction (I could increase that value to make accidents less likely, but this might annoy those who more frequently do this intentionally...).

Another possibility is misdirection--I'm pretty sure it's possible to ram another robot accidentally when you're corrupted. At least it used to be. I wonder if that wasn't accounted for after adding the blocking system.