Confused Scouts

[paradigmshift]

I bet this one has already been posted. It has happened to me several times. A Scout is between two equidistant villages, heads towards one, then heads towards the other on the next turn. (Civ IV Warlords).

 

[s.bernbaum]

If you have given your scout the explore command, its movements are random. It does not "choose" to head for the best or any other destination. Each turn the movement is randomly chosen, with no reference to what happened the turn before nor to if there is a priority destination in sight. That is why I always move my scouts (or other units on scouting duty) manually each turn.

 

[paradigmshift]

If you have given your scout the explore command, its movements are random. It does not "choose" to head for the best or any other destination. Each turn the movement is randomly chosen, with no reference to what happened the turn before nor to if there is a priority destination in sight. That is why I always move my scouts (or other units on scouting duty) manually each turn.

Thanks for the reply. If there is a village nearby, scouts in explore mode tend to converge on it. They could not do that if movement was entirely random.

 

[s.bernbaum]

Good point. However, if there are two huts in sight, the Scout will randomly head for one of them. Since the movement on each turn does not take the prior turn into account, the Scout can easily do what you describe - move once or twice towards one and then move towards the other one. This is similar to the behavior of AI workers who will build a farm and then a couple of turns later build a cottage on the same tile, then a few turns after that build a farm there again. There is no plan that takes prior actions into account.

 

[Dman4civ]

I have seen once a similar situation.... I had a scout on auto explore. at first there was a lot of open territory to explore upon, as the game progressed, more and more land being claimed, my scout litterally got stuck within only 3 tiles, between an ocean on one side, a large mountain 3 tiles away, and unfortunately, newly developed culture borders belonging to 2 diff empires, that I did not have open borders with. He was stuck in a 1x3 tiled aread, and when I tried to manually cross him thru one the territories, I was warned that would declare war. soo, I gave up, and left scout there. but it was funny, he did provide a lil bit line of sight where I wouldn't otherwise be seeing line of sight, and every now and than, Id see him move back in forth in the row of tiles, unable to proceed away.