Just wanted a clarification on what this new feature accomplishes. Does this mean that you can have an aircraft randomly scouting nearby territory? Would this also work in a situation where an air unit was stationed on an island and the player needed to scout for approaching enemy ships?
Yes. I added 'fogbusting' functionality for the AI.
In order to test it with aircraft, I enabled exploration with aircraft, and then it just seemed to make sense leave it in. All this does is cause an aircraft to automatically do a recon mission, it does not give you an ability you did not have before, it just does it automatically rather than you having to manually tell each play to recon.
If there is a good choice of totally unexplored territory, that will be chosen first. (Give yourself 2 carriers with 3 planes each at turn 0 and put them both on explore, watch them map the whole world real fast). If a carrier is put on explore, all the planes on it are automatically put on explore.
In a more normal situtation, if there is nothing to explore, then units will fogbust. This works for land, sea and air units. You can put your ships on explore, and as long as you have explored the world, they will stand in the ocean off your cities watching for invasions. They should wake up if an
enemy unit is sighted. (Only the unit that sees it, not all units, you may need to use the wake all key if you want to stop all recon missions). Neutral units that are a threat will not cause automation to be canceled.
Put a carrier on explore once you have explored the world and you will see its planes keep a large area of fog busted.
AIs should be doing the same thing, their ships should be much less likely to just be sitting in port doing nothing.
Note, there is no memory from turn to turn here. In the case of aircraft, it should be slightly random which of a few good choices it picks, but if you want to get full coverage, you will need more than one plane. Do not expect it to check each direction in sequence. Each turn, it looks at a few choices and picks the best one, with a random factor, ignoring what it did the previous turn.
-Iustus