Scouts should be able to survive the wild, that stay true in fantasy settings. And there's also the savages and demon faction out there.
Here's the problem, when you build a scout in any civilization game, your goal should be to explore the map, plan your expansion, contact other civ, etc. This is a strategy game, goodies hut are just a bonus. And if my scouts had better chances of survival out there I'd rarely explore features with them. There's some near useless rewards for a scout and some "not so bad" result are deadly to them. That'd become the gamble: should I risk a scout that'll probably stay alive and useful for a while?
P.-S: @BanTingyun -> Morrowind will stay the best game in the serie. But since it's getting old, I hope skywind delivers
P.P.-S: I won't start an argument about the best civ but, in my opinion, the only important things civ 4 did better was the hapiness/ressources systems. And the Community Balance Patch made it slightly better than in civ 4
As for scouts surviving in a high fantasy world--not really,in that scouts in FFH don't translate into everything called "scout" in high fantasy, rather they represent a civilization's first baby steps into exploring a dangerous world. Hunters and above are more what you would see called scouts in normal high fantasy or DnD. I mean, scouts in FFH are guys with sticks, not even bows--that's not going to be very survivable in a dangerous world.
Agreed that scouts are currently a goodie hut gamble, but I like that. I also agree that scouts should have a limited map exploration role, which they currently do (exploring the immediate area around settlement and planning for next cities, seeing where immediate threats are). I disagree with your proposed broader purpose of scouts (ie exploring the larger map and contacting other civs that aren't immediately adjacent). First, because there is no purpose in knowing other civs at this tech level (without possibility of trading techs because no tech prereq for it, trade with farther off civs because no network that reaches far, etc), and because it is quite silly for civs just getting out of the stone age to somehow have regular diplomatic contact with other nations halfway across the world, and the same thing with having accurate map of far off parts of the world. I would object to it not just in a fantasy realm (though it hurts the mystery there), but also in the real world. Much better to have exploration be a dangerous thing and only with advancing tech do you start having the means to explore more widely and know more than your immediate neighbors.
At any rate, from a purely game mechanics perspective, if a scout is capable of surviving well and grabbing 2 goodie huts on average before death, it will become a dominant choice in the early game. So if scouts are made more survivable, goodie huts might be made less profitable. Besides, always wondered how these random villages are so damn rich (oh, visitors, here's the entire income of your civilization for years and years in the form of a gift..)
As for the other topic, agreed, I've been eagerly awaiting Skywind for years. Skyrim certainly improved game mechanics, but then sucked much of the character out of the world, while turning quests into "follow the magic arrow to your destination" that completely destroyed anything resembling exploration.
I more hate the Civ 5 1 unit per tile system. Civ 2 had a much more artful solution on the stack of doom issue even (one combat defeat kills all stacked units, making it dangerous to move men tightly), while realism invictus came up with a pretty cool solution as well (a logistics system that punishes you for stacking too much). Civ 5's designers just did something simple that really messed up the AI and made map scaling so incredibly weird. Plus, them having limited the modding capability like they did was just unforgivable in light of the amazing mods for Civ 4.
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) are missing, as well as basically all the resource icons. On a fresh civ install, 14.11 and svn215. Steam version of Civ .