I think I understand what ertony is asking.
Black Star: transmitting Gotenna
Black circle: range of transmitting gotenna
Green Star: desired recipient Gotenna
Green circle: range of recipient Gotenna
Red Stars: relays or other paired Gotennas
He is asking if the “network” is intelligent enough to “choose” the yellow route, thus only consuming 2 hops to transmit the desired message. Do the other relay nodes play a part in sending the message or do they remain quiet since there is a shorter route to the desired recipient. Is the network aware of how many hops it is away from each other node or does the message bleed through the network and branch-off/propagate through each node until all the hopes are “consumed”.
Bleeding the message through the rest of the network would still guarantee that a copy of the message would reach the farthest as each node would treat even the same message received from different nodes as a separate message. For example, would relay number 5 re-transmit a copy of the message to the recipient? It would receive a copy from relay 2 having only used up 2 hops but would also receive a copy of the message from relay 4 having used up 4 hops.
That’s my take on the question anyway.