Anyone ever have an explorer built in time to visit native villages?

Explorers are good for scouting out the AI's territory with open borders agreements. You can get a valuable world map and keep up to date on how they're doing and where their cities are. Then when you go to conquer them you don't have to search around for their cities hehe.

True, but any leftover scouts you have will do the job just as well. No wasted production on them then. I think the only time I ever used the explorer unit in CivIII was in the Conquests AoD scenario.

Try the Terra map. I found Explorers quite useful exploring the second continent. But yeah, for most games, they come kind of late for their barbarian hut bonuses.