Scouting. IMHO, it's "broken" (as in: Why bother?).

[Axiom]

Hey all.

Let's get right to the point: I am putting forth the theory that scouting, as well as investing into scouting tech, is a waste of time and energy.

Let's face it: MK I scouts are useless for all but the most underdeveloped planets; any decent MK III or IV with even one decloaker waiting at the warphole means certain death even for a 10er lot of MK I scouts, let alone making it through that system and into the next, or even one more..accordingly, the sole function of the scout, i.e. SCOUTING ahead without being seen/heard/destroyed, is just not there.


And what's more, even IF scouts would do what they are supposed to without dying, their only difference to ANY other ship entering a system is simply that they have been developer-made "special" so as to enter what they see into the planet screen.

Every other ship CAN SEE ALL OF THE SYSTEM AS WELL ONCE THEY ENTER.
They just weren't priviledged with being allowed to print it into the planet summary. But if you just look at the system yourself, you will clearly see all the symbols for guard / train / datacenter / warp station and you could just as well tag it into that system's description yourself(the subtle hint given even by interface itself is that you can tag a planet 0-9 to begin with...if I am going to do this manually anyhow, well..you know, you get what I'm getting at).

The difference being that if you are already there with some decent ships instead of scouts, you can actually already DO something about it, too.
Found a datacenter? Blow it off the map while you're there. Special Forces? Dito! Seeing an Adv. Factory or Research? Call in the cavalry while already bruising the place up a bit or, if already there with the main force, just proceed to smash the place up.



Why have scouts?
There is only "worth to capture" / "not worth to capture"; and you will need to move your main force through to whereever you need to go anyhow eventually. Plus you will move "shooters" instead of scouts there either way, as you will want to exploit any and all supplied systems for research-raiding.
Why delay, waste scout resources that can't do jack except get blown up while they are there and not just go to whereever with your main fleet or "armed forces" in the first place?

Also: Every single knowledge point into scouts is wasted, as it could unlock turrets, ships and starships instead(1000+2000 knowledge costs for scouts - that's either the warp warning and a nice turret, or 6 butt-kicking, station annihilating raid starhips vs 10 pathetic do-nothings).

This is a game of fighting and survival.
Are you going to invest into muskets or binoculars if you already KNOW the enemy is going to come and attempt to storm your fort?

I find my main explore-and-conquer armada going to systems first more and more, while the weaklings aka scouts HAD to be left behind(since they'd be insta-killed after warping in anyhow).


So I had to ask:
Why have scouts?

[x4000]

You must be playing on quite small maps if you feel this way, or playing below your true difficulty level. The point of scouting is to identify targets so that you can decide which targets are worth your time.  If you play "blind" and simply take whatever you find along the way, again, you're either playing below your true skill level or on very small maps.  Especially in the expansion, but going forward even more, scouting is becoming increasingly important even beyond how critical it already was.

This is something that I'm going to emphasize to an ever-increasing degree over time.  In my opinion, too many RTS games simply rely on bluntly running around and smashing whatever you find, rather than making informed choices and going after targets of value only.  Given that most of our reviews and fans have commented on how much they like the "grand strategic" aspects of the game, this is in keeping with what the community seems to want.

Regarding using scouts on offensive raids with the main fleet: yes, I tend not to do that either, and just play blind as far as the planetary summary goes.  But that's when I'm arriving at a planet that I've already identified for capture.

Also: in the expansion, if you don't scout beyond the planets you are currently at, you'll likely die repeatedly from Alarm Posts, Raid Engines, Interplanetary Munitions Boosters, and similar.  Those are just a few of the AI weapons that have been added to make scouting even more important than it already was, but expect more in the future.  Situational Awareness: it's the backbone of real warfare.

[raptor331]

MK IV Scouts are imune to tachyon beam emissions, they are the ultimate scout, but first you have to find an advanced factory, which requires some scouting, plus if you use the stealth boost system to your advantage, you can bypass any wormhole security, i often send in a duo of scouts, this works for most lower leveled planets.

[x4000]

I usually send scouts in batches of 10 or more, actually.  Just out along various paths into the galaxy, cataloging as they go, and then sending more back along the paths that were stopped short of where I wanted them to get to.  Very unattended.

[I-KP]

Axiom, me thinks thou hast missed the point somewhat but we all play the game the way we want to.

Scouting isn't a fine art: you send them en masse along a chain of planets and take a look at what's found when you get a minute (as above).  It's not rocket surgery.  Even a group of ten MkIs can hop through at least one MikIII planet.

Are they a waste?  Only if you don't know how to use them in which case you'll be paying for that in other (far more expensive) ways later on.

[Spikey00]

I personally never construct scouts beyond the T1--I see your point, though.  However, being in some situations, scouts are rather useful in accordance with their low price and fast construction speed.

EDIT:  Minor idea!
http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2738.0.html
In-Planet Fog of War.

[Lancefighter]

I agree, scouting is certainly required. I never attack a planet without a scout (planetary summary is INCREDIBLY useful for me.. seriously. Especially when I use starships a lot, i need to know how many anti-starship thingies there are.

[Echo35]

Reason 1) So you don't go and run your fleet into an Ion Cannon, or into a fleet full of ships 100% against you.

Reason 2) So you can find a good path to take through the galaxy. You can't take nearly all of the planets (Or even half in larger maps) so figuring out prime planets to take, capturables, etc. is very worth it.

Reason 3) If you play with Fog of War on all the way, you need them to see enemy ships on the mini-map.

[Lancefighter]

oddly - the minimap suddenly becomes very useless when you spend the entire time looking at the giant circles made by fleet starships and dreadnoughts.

[I-KP]

The minimap is a bit bugged anyway.  Some ships appear about 10 pixels to the right of where they actually are.  If you blob a mixed bag of units you can see on the minimap that you appear to have two smaller blobs side-by-side.  I've not yet experimented to see which ships are offset but I will one day.

[Axiom]

You must be playing on quite small maps if you feel this way, or playing below your true difficulty level.

Currently it's an 80 planet map, AI level 7. AI however is random easy-intermediate.

The point of scouting is to identify targets so that you can decide which targets are worth your time. 

My point, which I elaborated on lengthily, was/is that I can see this/do this just as well by jumping in with 5 leech starships, taking the warppoints defenses over and then deciding whether I want to just move through or take out some stuff, guard stations etc pp.
No scouts required.

To also reply to another post: starships are also immune to ion cannons, as are colony ships AND colony ships are super-cheap. Take 5-12 starships + 10-20 colony ships and you can make it VERY far across the map AND still take a far, far into enemy territory planet and build it up.
"Normal" ships that would suffer from the cannon I mostly stuff into planet defense, so they're only exposed to the surroundings of friendly, captured ion cannons.


Inner-planet-fog-of-wars as another post mentions would be the classic RTS workaround for justifying otherwise useless scouts, but quite honestly I am actually glad I don't have this here.
I just feel I'm forced to micro some more units with the old "scouts are far sighted, tough units near sighted" approach. Surely a high-end ship(or as for any RTS, unit) design that puts an endless amount of guns and equipment and people onto a huge ship wouldn't scrimp on something that would actually allow it to SEE THE ENEMY?

If you play "blind" and simply take whatever you find along the way

I never said that I did. Actually not using scouts makes it less necessary to often take planets as a starship mini-armada can get a lot further / deeper into planets than a couple of scouts(assuming non MK IV scouts which in turn would lead into the investment sense argument) therefore letting you plan ahead better rather than forcing you to take something where to place a base because you can't go any further just by using scouts. 3 hops and back are not a problem usually. Even if this just gives you 1 extra hop of info, that's already a double digit chance that you'll find something more worthwhile than a "compromise" planet you are taking just to get supply and a base and re-scout chances again.

In the current game I took 3 advanced research stations + 1 advanced factory + some resource / axis planets, totalling 9 planets for around the first third of the galaxy. Estimating that there is at most 1 adv. res. left and there are only 2 basically pretty isolated "branches"/galaxy arms left, at the end of which the enemy home is usually placed, I could just push as far towards the end of each branch as possible(which I plan to) before running low on starship hitpoints and then colonzie, repeat 2-3 times and voila, endgame.
I am actually going to see if I feel like trying to find the maximum hops I can go before having to build a base..could be interesting.

beyond how critical it already was.

I still feel this is misleading. "Scouting", yes, scouts, no.

In my opinion, too many RTS games simply rely on bluntly running around and smashing whatever you find

Works extremely well for me as long as I don't smash the warp station+command station for AI progress. If it weren't for the "keeping tabs" AI progress(i.e. punishment for destruction), it WOULD just be that very thing.
I am planning on trying this the next game where I will simply make the capture-or-not-criteria that both resources need to be > 2.

rather than making informed choices and going after targets of value only. 

Which you can still do WHILE smashing everything along the way as you can see the systems value as you jump in(see original post).
This is not an either-or situation as you are implying. The whole point I am putting forward is that one can do all of this without losing knowledge or material investment into scouts.

to make scouting even more important than it already was, but expect more in the future.  Situational Awareness: it's the backbone of real warfare.

Again the posit here is that scouts are not important, not scouting per se. It's just that I can "scout" without scouts..

As for the backbone, I have found that here it's the BFG, the starships, that are the true backbone of never needing to "be afraid".
If you warp into anything with
(5+5)*1.3M + 2x7.3M + 2x6.3?M + 3x 2.3M
roughly 13 + 14 + 12 + 6
=>  45 million hitpoints, you are a lot less inclined to feel the need to peek around the corner first.
Add to that the fact that you can end up with an insta-converted pack of several dozen MK III / IVs rather swiftly, that can now sit within a cloud of 3-5x attack boosting ships, well, again, why scout(with scouts), why worry...


And on a last note, obviously all my scout use so far has consisted of churning out all available units and then ferrying them out at once. They are not going to make it to where they'd actually matter, past 2 planets. The planets next to me I already have supply on and will sit in regardless of whether I scout them or not, simply because I will research raid them. So I will know what their content is, scouts or not, due to sending in research and guard.



As for scout IV tech: You are saying in order to get past 2-3 protected warppoints with decloakers you have to invest the equivalent of 170-510+ turrets or several starships or at least a III+IV tier fighting unit. And even even then you will have the misery of having to wait until the scouts are produced at a potentially way, way back sitting advanced factory that you cannot move or build elsewhere for them to shuttle across 10-20 planets to get to the first unexplored one.

WHY?
I can actually USE hundreds of turrets really well vs having 2-3 dozen of can't-do-jack-against-invaders ships. Or 6x1.3M hitpoint starships or several hundred of true damage dealing ships. Etc.

This game pits you against a superior(gets stronger units you won't have), unending resources having enemy, while capping all of your unit counts and limiting what you can unlock from the get go via the 2k per planet knowledge, making every unlock decision imo a question of "How will this best help me defend or destroy as many enemies while leaving me the least vulnerable vs some ship classes".  

Again: Do you want to be holding a gun or the binoculars when the swarm arrives?
And will bombers/starships or scouts blow up the final AI stronghold better?

To me, scouts would have to be a lot cheaper(knowledge price for both unlocks < 500 each, 2k is one planet!) and faster and unit cap higher to be an even remotely attractive investment vs alternatives.

[I-KP]

I hardly ever bother with MkIII+ Scouts, but I also prefer not to blunder around in the dark as you seem to like doing.  In maps over over 80 planets and AI diff 8+ you'll quickly find your style of play much more difficult.  You'll have no choice but to scout in order to find the choice targets and the easiest route of ingress and Scouts are the most cost effective way of getting that info without drawing any heat.  (And with a particularly nasty string of enemy worlds sometimes the Scout MkIIIs have to go in with all the other Scouts in order to get passed - but only sometimes).  There are units that are better at scouting than scouts (Eye-bots for example) but you don't start with those; the core set might be the weakest but they're always there (and cheap).  As a point of interest: Eye-bots with a Scout ball have perhaps the farthest reach of all non-heat attracting assets.  Such a scout mission can, and does, get through several MkIII/IV planets in a row.

Recon by fire is a valid tactic but it ultimately ends up being far more expensive and weakens your capacity to bounce back the inevitable Cross-planet attacks and waves (both of which are still rather easy to repel on diff. 7 BTW).  No-one in their right mind would send their best assets out on a wild Goose chase in the hope that they don't attract too much heat and happen to blunder upon something tasty when a Scout ball of 20-30 or so, that costs almost nothing in the grand scheme, can find your prime targets for you first.  That way your spearhead goes straight for the heart and doesn't try to inflict death by a thousand papercuts (which is a very expensive and slow process).

[x4000]

This is not something that I'm going to endlessly debate, though others are free to. Axiom, I'm quite glad that you've found an unusual playstyle that works well for you.  Really, I love it when people do that.  I'm also quite happy that I-KP is able to get his scouting done with just Marks I and II, for that matter.  Finding and executing differing playstyles is one of the most fun and exciting things about a strategy game, and for me it's exciting seeing others doing the same within my game.  So kudos.

But, that said, that's not a reason to remove scouts, which is just silly.  Fact is, for most players scouts are simpler, cheaper, and more effective.  You can argue about that all day, but it's simply the truth.  The fact that some players may find a more or equally effective way (for them) to circumvent the use of a standard unit does not make the simple standard useless.  The opposite also holds true: I'm not going to remove advanced warp sensors simply because they are typically only useful to newbies; they serve a purpose simply by helping newbies out when they are still getting used to AI War.  If you must, then look at the line of scouts that way.  Either way, they are indispensable to the game as a whole, whether or not any one player uses them.

In general, any ship that is useful for even a tiny fraction of players is never going to be removed unless it is unbalancing.  Supporting a huge variety of ways to play is of course the goal.

[I-KP]

I'm also quite happy that I-KP is able to get his scouting done with just Marks I and II, for that matter.

Not all, by any mean, just most of it.   

[x4000]

I'm also quite happy that I-KP is able to get his scouting done with just Marks I and II, for that matter.

Not all, by any mean, just most of it.   

Fair enough. I like when people test the boundaries of what they can do, and come up with clever or unusual solutions.