I’m surprised there hasn’t been a proposal focusing on the recon line yet, so I’ll make one.
Motivation: As anyone who lurks in the community probably knows, superscouts—scouts that gain many promotions from early exploration, especially Survivalism III and Trailblazer III—are a problem. A properly promoted superscout can ignore terrain costs and ZoC, use enemy roads, reach 5 movement (with Scouting II), heal every turn, and stack substantial defensive bonuses.
On standard speed, it’s possible to get a superscout with some of these promotions by the Classical era, or even earlier if you get the reveal map ruin and the pathfinder promotion ruin. This happens at a time when unit supply is still very limited (~10), most units have only 2 movement, and even horsemen are heavily slowed by terrain due to the lack of roads (which also can’t cross rivers yet). As a result, a superscout often becomes the strongest unit you can field early on, both for pillaging and for combat.
This is frustrating to counter for both players and the AI, and it also feels unthematic: a unit intended for exploration ends up acting as a solo wrecking ball. It also indirectly hurts the scout line as a whole, since all scout units and promotions must be balanced around the existence of a few superscouts, and it disproportionately favors the player over the AI, which is better at protecting and exploiting them.
Fully addressing this would likely require a broader overhaul of the scout promotion tree, which is outside the scope of this proposal. Instead, this proposal aims to do two things: rein in the power of early superscouts, and encourage the use of a wider array of less-promoted scouts, with more experience coming from combat rather than pure exploration. By distributing power away from a few extreme units, this would also create more room to buff the recon line and its promotions in the future without being constrained by superscout balance.
Current behavior: all scouts gain 1/10 XP per tile revealed (see this commit—credit to Daedalus on Discord for pointing me to the code). Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding the implementation.
Proposal:
Motivation: As anyone who lurks in the community probably knows, superscouts—scouts that gain many promotions from early exploration, especially Survivalism III and Trailblazer III—are a problem. A properly promoted superscout can ignore terrain costs and ZoC, use enemy roads, reach 5 movement (with Scouting II), heal every turn, and stack substantial defensive bonuses.
On standard speed, it’s possible to get a superscout with some of these promotions by the Classical era, or even earlier if you get the reveal map ruin and the pathfinder promotion ruin. This happens at a time when unit supply is still very limited (~10), most units have only 2 movement, and even horsemen are heavily slowed by terrain due to the lack of roads (which also can’t cross rivers yet). As a result, a superscout often becomes the strongest unit you can field early on, both for pillaging and for combat.
This is frustrating to counter for both players and the AI, and it also feels unthematic: a unit intended for exploration ends up acting as a solo wrecking ball. It also indirectly hurts the scout line as a whole, since all scout units and promotions must be balanced around the existence of a few superscouts, and it disproportionately favors the player over the AI, which is better at protecting and exploiting them.
Fully addressing this would likely require a broader overhaul of the scout promotion tree, which is outside the scope of this proposal. Instead, this proposal aims to do two things: rein in the power of early superscouts, and encourage the use of a wider array of less-promoted scouts, with more experience coming from combat rather than pure exploration. By distributing power away from a few extreme units, this would also create more room to buff the recon line and its promotions in the future without being constrained by superscout balance.
Current behavior: all scouts gain 1/10 XP per tile revealed (see this commit—credit to Daedalus on Discord for pointing me to the code). Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding the implementation.
- Effectively, this translates to roughly 100 tiles revealed for level 1, 200 tiles for level 2, 300 tiles for level 3, 400 tiles for level 4, etc., assuming exploration-only XP.
Proposal:
- Add a soft cap to scout exploration XP. Gaining 1 XP at level X would require revealing 10 * (X+1) tiles.
- Effectively, this means 100 tiles for 1 level, 400 for 2 levels, 900 for 3 levels, 1600 for 4 levels, etc.
- This significantly limits how high a scout’s level can grow from exploration alone, especially in the early game, and offers diminishing return to exploration XP.
- The exact formula is tentative and open to adjustment.
- Give all units in the pathfinder line +1 combat strength.
- This is intended as a compensatory buff to the scout line to offset the reduced presence of superscouts. The exact value and distribution are tentative and open to adjustment.
