Sorry, I try to be brief and sometimes that means my point is lost.
I don't like the failed scouting idea. It just delays things a turn, I'm not really noticing when it happens anyway. I'm certainly not going to do anything about it, plus there isn't really anything I could do about it (except send another scout, which is going to happen next turn anyway).
My point about automated scouting is that exploration in 4x games is boring. And it has been generally accepted that this is the case, and so it is automated.
Your major focus of exploration is finding out where the other races are at, identifying choke points, and finding important resources. Then expanding to kill them all. Currently SBR does this. There is currently a problem with mobility and second city generation, but the fundamentals are there.
I do occasionally direct my scouting personally, when I run into neighbour or when I want to explore in a certain direction for resource or expansion purposes. Otherwise I leave it on auto all game long.
The question is, what would make exploration interesting? And I don't know if anyone has an answer for it. Civ & Co tried the goodie hut strategy, guiding scouts out to find the bonuses. That makes things pretty swingy, but I guess it is interesting. Endless space has such large variability in goodie huts that you can lose the game if you pop one. Sword of the Stars had the same problem.
Perhaps the requirement for Exploration to become interesting lies in Expansion. One of the many highly controversial things I've thought is that we need roads. If we could build a chain of roads quickly across the map to establish new cities next to areas of interest, that would be interesting. We can technically do that will helipads, however there are a couple of problems: helipads are expensive, generate crime, and generate pollution. In general they require a significant investment to become functional. One that I have a hard time making. With roads I would be more willing to pave my way to distant resources. I would also like the ability to make a starter pack for my new city at these distant resources. However, the setup is troublesome. I'd need engineers (lots of pollution and citizens needed for employment), hazmats (to fix the pollution), Riot Police to stop the crime, etc, etc, etc.... Actually, reading all of that... Perhaps what I want is for the Civic Centers to be better than the basic Lander. To actually be as good as a level 3+ lander, instead of the tiny thing it starts with. Or give us the ability to pump resources into the city from our main city. Perhaps when a Civic Center is placed it claims all friendly buildings within 5-10 hexes of itself? That make growing a new city much easier.
Another idea would be to increase the size of the natural wonders. Currently 1 hex, maximum affected tiles is 6. What if the wonders were 1-6 in size. That's suddenly a much larger and significant bonus to explore. I'd probably even go out of my way to do something about them. Perhaps the same for resource clusters? But then resources aren't a functional part of the economy yet.
