How does scouting feel in 4.054?

[x4000]

With the change to the hit-when-leaving-planet actually working, I suspect this will really impact scouting.  I'm curious how it feels now.  I do have a few more nerfs planned for upcoming versions (having ion cannons and counterspies ignore radar dampening), so that will actually swing it even more in that direction.  But I'm curious about how it's feeling now, if anyone is scouting with the new one.

[Echo35]

Well I already have every planet on my current game Scouted, so we'll see how it is in the next game.

[Vinraith]

Did some quick testing on this. Set up a 120 planet realistic map, no factions, no plots, no waves, 2 diff 7 vanilla AI's. While still on .053, I ran a cap of mark III's down each of five separate paths on the map to see how far they'd get, ran caps of mark II's and I's down a few of those same paths, made notes, then patched to .054 and precisely repeated the operation. Number of stars successfully scouted in .053 are before the slash, in .054 are after the slash:

Path 1 - III's 9/7, II's 4/4, I's 3/3
Path 2 - III's 6/6, II's 4/4, I's 2/2
Path 3 - III's 8/7, II's 4/4, I's 3/3
Path 4 - III's 10/7
Path 5 - III's 10/8

Averages - III's 8.6/7, II's 4/4, I's 2.7/2.7

So from patch 4.053 to patch 4.054, I show roughly a 19% drop in scouting efficiency for Mark III's, and no discernible effect on the other two marks of scout.

[keith.lamothe]

That seems pretty close to good, then.  It seems right that mkIs get 2-3 hops out, mkIIs get 4-5 hops out, and mkIIIs get 6-7 hops out on diff 7 with no particularly scout-painful things in the game.  Perhaps the mkIIIs could do with a 10% health nerf or something but it doesn't look like it needs anything major.

[Vinraith]

Yeah, I think the ion cannon and counterspy changes Chris mentions above plus maybe a tiny health nerf would definitely get you where you want to be.

[keith.lamothe]

I guess I'd forgotten that ion cannons could hit scouts

I'd really suggest not making them able to do so again (from long range, at least), because ion cannon rate-of-fire scales with unit cap scale to maintain balance against fleet ships, but we don't scale scout caps because there's no real need to and it would massively change the scouting game between caps.  If ion cannons are made again able to shoot at scouts from across the map, they'll be 4x harder to "scout through" on high caps than on low caps, which is a bit beyond the normal minor balance deviation I'd expect from the different settings

[Red Spot]

Cant test it from my current game, but will make sure to keep an eye on it.
I reaaaalllyyy do hope that scouting remains a minor aspect and will not eventually become a part of the game where you have to bend and twist and what else to get the mayority of the map scouted, I'm afraid that would eventually make it rather tiresome .. imo.
(And I really like the minor scouting part of this game

[Wingsofdomain]

Just wanted to say that the auto explore is kind of terrible... Last time I tried it killed all my scouts.... What if the auto explore just went through a unscouted wormhole all selected and leave one scout there and then go on until theres only 1 left or none. Instead of splitting up in pairs and go die. Auto explore with mark 4 scout is awesome though. Playing on a map where you can't even see where the wormholes go... But the mark 4 scout has soon solved that problem without babysitting it.

[keith.lamothe]

I think it was a mistake for me to add auto-explore, I see more complaints about it than anything else. I may just take it out, or rather just relegate it back to auto-exploring totally uncharted wormholes and thus only doing anything when the don't-show-unexplored-planets option is on.

I added it because I frequently find that the dead-simple "just fan out and explore all planets bordering me, and go deeper if you survive" operation was taking an inordinate amount of clicks and time on my part when a simple auto-script could do it quite easily.

But people expect it to do more than that, hence the problem

[wyvern83]

It works as expected for me, I expect most if not all of the initial scouts to die when I use auto-explore so I have no problem that it sometimes sends scouts to their doom, multiple times, before it paths through the 'weaker' areas. Eventually. 

[x4000]

To be fair, most auto-scouting logic in most RTS games I've played is similarly simplistic.  The difference is that the enemy camp is typically much smaller, so they can safely wander awhile before they get into the enemy camp and die.

[wyvern83]

True, but I still like the option for auto-explore even if the enemy-camp is anywhere that isn't home in this game.

Auto-explore as it is may be 'inefficient' compared to what a human could do but it reduces micro you have to do so I like it. Certain spots won't be bypassed without some attention, esp. with the recent change, but that's generally more interesting to handle yourself than the stuff auto-explore does right now for you. Just my 2-cents that I'd like auto-explore to stay in as an option.

[x4000]

Yes, I'd agree with all of that.

[Red Spot]

I like auto-explore for the early game when you are not dealing with tachion emitters on every planet and shipcaps there are still around 50 ships. After that it becomes more: 'build cap of scouts, aim them at, shoot', which is easy enough to do if you dont forget to do it

Scouts die, with or without auto-explore.

[Echo35]

'build cap of scouts, aim them at, shoot'

That's what I do with them. I pick a planet, shoot them all there, if at least one Scout makes it I feel as though my mission is accomplished. Whatever got fragged simply rebuilds at home and I can repeat the process until I have a few dozen planets giving me constant intel.