As an addon:

Probably safe to ignore the Garrison thing, its tedious and hard to abuse extensively.

Tavern on the other hand is very powerful. 

Make a tavern with at least two cannons and 3-4 tables in between them, preferably a straight line(lets the cannons refill tables faster). 

Use Work-a-lot on a minion, enter possession mode and eat once from each table. If setup properly you should manage 6-8 tables per potion, and reach level 10 fairly quickly(2-4 minutes).

Same thing can be done for Crypt, and there's a secondary bug involved were it rewards work XP if the minion can't have more companions at its current level but the grave has available bodies to draw from. It rewards XP, but the body remains.

Thanks for the response Lee!

Had to ask since I encountered a master AI defender on a core shard map(Silverstorm Siege, the one in Community Spotlight) that I believe had unlimited gold based on the unfathomable amount of gold used to heal its units with only a 16k limit from Core(no treasuries). Might be another late-game-quirk thing or map odity, haven't seen it before so wanted to make sure I hadn't missed an AI change.

Apologies, should have used personality instead of theme.

First of all the AI does not cheat, it is limited to the exact same restrictions you are. 

Can you confirm this is still the case with all themed AI?

Hello Lee!

The map that first made me aware of the issue and seems to produce it most frequently is "Trials of Dark Elder Undergods 2.0" by Green Sliche, at first thought it was a level bug but pin-pointed it down to inhibitors and started noticing the same issue on other equally large levels by other creators.

By beacon I'm assuming OP meant an Arcane Inhibitor. When destroyed its supposed to(and usually does) remove all units attached to it. Guessing something goes wrong in that process, and some units occasionally end up not quite dead but also not quite alive. They randomly walk around but cannot be interacted with or even shot when in possession mode, and they path to nearest friendly Inhibitor or linked shield unit if one is reachable. Also seems like they have no needs, can't recall any vanishing or rebelling.

For the level linked above I'd say 30-45 minutes. Recommend rushing the Inhibitor after linked shield units are killed and leaving as many AI alive as possible, that should yield at least a few not-quite-dead wanderers.

PS: I'm not sure if I've seen it on recently-created levels, or inhibitors that start without a shield.

Can confirm it occurs, and strongly suspect it is related to GC struggling as play time increases. Haven't made a report since I haven't been able to reproduce it in any real capacity, tho Green Slice's custom levels see it often and I am guessing that is because they generally take a long time to complete with large levels and a lot of minions. At least fairly certain it is not an error in the level itself since its rarely the same units that go "incognito" if any do(But huntress is more common for some reason).

A heads up for the reviewer:

I was a bit rash on the absoluteness, assuming there are two different causes:

1) Guessing there is a tag the mapmaker can get wrong as some custom campaign levels consistently return user to Skirmish instead of Custom Campaign. Perhaps to bypass certain limitations, or that they are too old?

2) Guessing the inconsistency in reproducibility on most levels I've tested is related to GC struggling as level playtime increases(usually reaches a "breaking-point" around 45-60 minutes). Reason I made the initial report was playing through Green Slice's "Mystical Journey" and consistently being returned to "Skirmish" screen. 

The common theme in his campaign(and standalone levels for that matter) is that they generally take a long time to complete, hence I often see a lot of various quirks pop up as play time passes 60 minutes(Minion color tags, CTA not clearing for captives/converts, minion pathing refusing to work correctly/getting stuck all the time, even had Impenetrable rock randomly scattered across a level when loading it up). This might be one of those quirks, since even on the same level it sometimes returns to "User Campaigns" screen, and sometimes "Skirmish".

Hello Lee!

Just a heads up, it's not as straight forward as I initially thought. The report was based on two maps I played(I'll try dig up names and see if they were official, pretty sure one of them was) and I was easily able to reproduce the issue on those, however it is just like the other report I posted on spirits. Pathing works in some cases(no constant lag, just a single spike then stops), others not(continuous micro lag) , and I struggle to fully understand the rules behind it.  

I also do not think this is something unique to workers, but all minions, at least the lag is identical with minions on either 

1) Huge levels with an extensive network of corridors, Moongates do not negate the issue.

2) Medium( or larger) levels with either water, lava, gold or caverns separating land/dirtmasses.

I suspect this is (if my terminology is correct) a nesting issue, and that this is related to the worker-issue I've seen previously in that in those two scenarios I managed to reproduced the issue, the workers had 2 or more choices(2 doors) but both were unreachable(locked), causing several(or all) workers to continuously loop through those options to check for a valid path. Likewise with minions they react the same way given the same scenario(for instance a call to arms inside a friendly locked area). 

This behavior is also seen when there are many choices, lets say 10-15 different paths(5-10 corridors plus Moongates at regular intervals), and they are all pretty close in total distance. 

I suspect minions also calculate some extra pathing while under call to arms(Slaughterpen/Tavern?) as the same type of lag occurs on medium or larger levels with liquid or caverns separating landmasses with(in the case of liquids) no solid land connections except bridges and Moongates or thin slices of dirt crossing caverns. The microlag instantly vanish as soon as the call to arms is dismissed, and slowly returns if reenabled, it does not matter if it remains in the same spot.

Workers also struggle with this if the distance to nearest Moongate or Gold Vortex goes above around 20-25 blocks(If there is a solid land connection, as in not a bridge, the distance does not seem to matter), instead of delivering gold as expected the same lag occurs and they start dropping the gold on the ground.  

If its needed I'll try toy around with the issue and see if I can provide better pointers to properly reproduce the issue(s).

This also seems to be the case with enemy-owned locked doors.

Something that has helped for me as well is to instead of jumping directly to next level, go all the way back to main menu. Not sure why this works, some GC that runs for the UI Middleware? Anyways, haven't had the bug since starting to do this.

Possibly relevant addition: I run the game with launch option "-popupwindow"