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It works really wells for many situations. If I am making a top down strategy game (Think Civilization) then A* is exactly what I need, a fast performance hack that gives me the shortest path without anything weird going on. For different kind of environments, then yes it doesn't work. A* isn't very useful in a racing game.

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It took me 3 hours to implement A* with hex tiles, got it working on first attempt (land tiles only), specifically for Civ type game. It gets complex when you want to group units so that they travel together. Adding water crossings with cargo ships and war ships is a different challenge.

If you want cohesion between entities pathfinding, adjust the cost when you do the pathfinding for tiles that has friendlies on them to be lower than their base cost.

The way to think about water crossing with naval transports, is to consider those things to be conditions. You already have a set of condition when pathfinding. Just add another case for water. Make it so the requirement is that you’re either on a ship or there is a ship on the adjacent tile you checked previously, e.g N-1. If valid, set a flag and now every tile check that is water should be appropriate.

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