the game I'm working on at the moment is a real-time rpg.
I'll have a lot of NPCs walking around a town, and I've pre-calculated the paths for these, but for the enemy soldiers, and the occassional NPC who I want to walk up to the hero, they will need to find paths. (so up to 5 or 6 pathfinders at once - or is this just too many?)

different terrain types won't be important, but I don't want to have a non-realistic path.

would a sequence of breadth-first searches over small areas be more efficient do you think?