Shouldn't exploration ability be limited during the Ancient times era?

[Jarlaxe Baenre]

How about you can not have any pertinent information, ie what civ youve met, there borders, any goody huts you pop, or any trade, unless your scout or explorer comes back home. That would make exploration tougher, and last longer. There are many flaws with the ideas that greater minds than I can work out and expand on.

... So if you pop a settler from a goody hut, it'll just wait there until your scout gets back home?

 

[paradigmx]

What I think could work is the way pre-astronomy naval units used to work, the further away from your cultural borders(or neighbor's cultural borders), the higher the chance that the unit will be lost at the end of the turn, which is also how I hope pre-astronomy naval units should work again.

Certain units may get bonuses to the range they can go without being lost, like Settlers, workers and explorers, but units like warriors would easily get lost more than a dozen hexes away from the border or something.

To make this easy, all you would need is a notification that pops up saying your unit is in danger of forgetting the way home or something.

 

[cas]

It's not quite the same thing, but how about units, unless properly upgraded somehow, take damage passing through certain terrains, desert, jungle and ice for instance. This would certainly limit early exploration and help represent the difficulties in exploring hostile terrains.

A little OT, but not just scouts...also armies. It is ridiculous to cross a wide jungle swath with no roads and take no damage. Jungles should shred any BC army/units going through them. And resting to recoup damage inside the jungle doesn't make much sense either...you run out of food/water and still have the disease problem...so no healing in jungles either (except for maybe special promos/units).

Certain land-tiles should be a quasi-barrier early in the game to simulate the difficulty moving through that terrain.

The ease of covering huge distances in the BC's has always made me laugh at Civ4. Obviously, a gameplay decision to favor quicker action and make war easy.

Implementing higher maintenance costs the further a unit travels from the capital is the way to go...if they can balance it correctly.

cas

 

[Tylerryan79]

... So if you pop a settler from a goody hut, it'll just wait there until your scout gets back home?

As I said its flawed, I was thinking more like techs and gold. Units you can get right there on the spot I suppose.

Also I was thinking if your explorer died, you wouldnt loose all his info he collected. A simple mark could be made on the map, maybe a blue circle, where the unit died, then another unit can "collect" his findings and either continue exploring, or head back towards his borders to pass on the info to your civ.

This idea for explorating would only apply up to a certain era or tech, that way it wouldnt be to much of a hassle, but exploring wouldnt just be spamming units and sending them in all directions(well i guess it would be, but it wouldnt be as easy).

 

[702]

A little OT, but not just scouts...also armies. It is ridiculous to cross a wide jungle swath with no roads and take no damage. Jungles should shred any BC army/units going through them. And resting to recoup damage inside the jungle doesn't make much sense either...you run out of food/water and still have the disease problem...so no healing in jungles either (except for maybe special promos/units).

Certain land-tiles should be a quasi-barrier early in the game to simulate the difficulty moving through that terrain.
cas

Yesyes.
Certain units could also perhaps get bonuses travelling through these terrains, or at least they wouldn't suffer so much, like the Jaguar Warrior for instance.


A real life example of all this would be the devastation the Gedrosian Desert wreaked upon the army of Alexander the Great.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Something should be done to either actively limit exploration or reduce the effectiveness by increasing map-size or similar.

Hooked gamers recently had a review, no new info, but he speculates that

Together with the one-unit-per-hex rule, this will definitely make the maps feel a lot smaller than in previous games. This effect could only be countered by making the maps much bigger than they have been in previous incarnations of Civilization games and I doubt that Firaxis will go down that road.

... Why not? Civ4 felt smaller than civ3 and increasing map-size seems to solve a lot of problems and complaints. I hope for it. The game would feel more world-like, there could be proper oceans for naval battles and defensive lines to protect in on land, and the exploration would be a lot more interesting. My guess is that modern era would be more fun too.

 

[helpless_writer]

Agreed. A route or a tech. Language and customs would be barrier from one end of Eurasia to the other.
Scouts literally would be considered barbarians.

All things considered they should look to your civilization as barbarians...

 

[Osama Bin Davis]

I agree but not with the method. I had a thread going a while ago we have had a huge discussion about it.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=360712

 

[backnine31]

I like the increased upkeep idea. Simple, logical, and fairly easy to keep track of. They could also add a "new" unit once a certain tech is reached without those limitations. In fact, that really may be the best solution. Put a distance cap on the scout. Auto-upgrade that unit to Explorer when certain tech is reached and increase limits. Then add a third unit (say, Pioneer, or something to that effect), again, only attainable once a certain tech is reached, which has no limits and has much reduced upkeep costs.

The other thing I would consider is possibly narrowing the visibility these units have as they get farther from home. Only open the hex you're standing on once you get more than, say 6 hexes from your cultural border. If you crest a hill, only open the surrounding six hexes. This would make it pretty easy for your scout/explorer/pioneer to get picked off by a barb or animal they didn't see (making it riskier and more expensive) and it would also mean a much longer exploration period before you could "see" everything.

Just thoughts....

 

[backnine31]

..of course, only opening the hex you're standing on would make the unable-to-attack feature problematic for the scouts since you would inevitably "step" on somebody you can't see. I'm not a programmer so I don't know if that could be easily remedied for those situations or not...

 

[Loppan Torkel]

All things considered they should look to your civilization as barbarians...

I like this. The scouts looking like barbarians to other civs, thus getting killed a lot or just chased off when encountering other civs.

The other civs to you could also appear as white barbarian civs until some action or time has taken place... an embassy established, a diplomat sent, your culture having expanded sufficiently, having some of the other civ's city on your map sufficient amount of time, a tech discovered, or something similar.

This should hamper exploration.

 

[Shurdus]

The upkeep idea is very good.
However, there should be an easy way to know how much it costs you... Probably the individual cost of each unit should appear in red when we hover a unit.

No, it is absolutely horrible and it makes no sense. Not only that, but it is also very very easy to let a scout wander off too far, an then when you note your economy crashing the scout is too far away to pull him back in time to save your economy. Is this what you see as a good system?

I think it is a bad system, because surely these scouting expeditions become self-supporting after a while. They live from what they gather by hunting, and maybe they can trade for food here and there. The upkeep for these units shouldnot be that steep - at least it should not be a significant portion of your GNP in the early game. That would be nothing short of rediculous.How do you see this in your mind? Does your government ship crates of supplies to the scouts? Does the pay the scouts receive increase just because they are now a bit further away from home?

What makes this idea even worse is that the problem with early exploration is not really the exploring per se, but it is more a problem of the fact that you can give a civ on the other side of the continent a call to traqde techs whenever you please. If you want to make things more realistic - and I do not think that one should want that - then one should abolish the contacting of civs unless certain conditions like creating an embassy are met.

Then there is the issue of map trading that makes the upkeep idea even worse. I do not know about you guys, but in a typical game I uncover a rather large chunk of the landmass by trading maps. That way the exploration phase is over by the time you hit paper, which is around 500AD or so - I think. If you guys want the exploration phase to be longer, one should also adress the map trading since if you abolish early exploring and then allow map trading then the uncovering of the map of the continent will be over by around 500AD - just like it is now. Increasing upkeep does not solve this.

I can go on and on and on on why upkeep is a poor idea to limit exploring, but these are my main gripes with it. One final note before I let the topic rest: How would you handle naval invasions if units far away from the continent suffer a huge upkeep penalty? Would your fleet suffer a huge upkeep as well? Would that not be a huge blow to the economy, to th point where one would be rarely in the position to 'field' a fleet sufficient to go out and conquer? How would this barrier that the upkeep of units that are far away from your borders have a rooting in reality?

What I liked more is the idea of scouting units to be unable to go into forrests - or rather, that units that enter a forrest may get lost and be lost to you, just like triremes in Civ1 had a chance to be lost on sea if they did not end their turn next to a land tile. This way one could enter a forrest and explore beyong the borders of that forrest, but it would become rather costly, not in terms of unit upkeep but in terms of hammers you need to spend to replace lost units. This way the forrests become a sort of hazard that you may try to overcome, or not. This seems like a much more natural and logical solution to the exploration issue, and one that accomplishes the same thing, that is it makes exploring in the early era's harder, and it would give the explorer unit a niche role if the explorer could enter forrests without any penalty.

 

[V. Soma]

What if in the early eras only specific units (if at all) could enter tiles like jungle or ice...
Also, cutting jungle be pushed to industrial era...
(I think Rhye had this solution...)

 

[Shurdus]

What if in the early eras only specific units (if at all) could enter tiles like jungle or ice...
Also, cutting jungle be pushed to industrial era...
(I think Rhye had this solution...)

That sounds reasonable to me. I do not know about the cutting jungle idea, since in ancient times surely they could set fire to jungles too. Not only that, but making jungle cities valuable is hard enough as it is. If you would push the cutting of jungle back to really era's later then we might need more options for jungle in order to not make the jungle some impenetrable barrier for the majority of the game.

So I like the entering jungle restriction, but I am not so sure if the cutting the jungle idea is solid.

 

[Zhahz]

I have mixed feelings and don't like most of the solutions presented here.

Increasing cost by distance for land exploration doesn't make much sense since there is no supply train and your explorers would be living off the land. There's more of a danger factor, which is already represented by beasts and barbarians. Bumping up strength of beasts a little or playing with raging barbarians can handle this.

I don't think it's unreasonable to have contacted everyone on your continent. Being able to trade or exchange techs with civs thousands of miles away in ancient times is another thing. That kind of thing should be more tightly bound to tech.

What I find the most ridiculous is exploring the world with fishing boats. Unlimited range and no threat like land units face from beasts or barbs.

One also has to keep in mind this is a game and exploration is a big part of the early game, so putting extreme limits on it for no practical purpose (and to mostly be logical basted on reality) might not be the best thing.

 

[Shurdus]

I have mixed feelings and don't like most of the solutions presented here.

Increasing cost by distance for land exploration doesn't make much sense since there is no supply train and your explorers would be living off the land. There's more of a danger factor, which is already represented by beasts and barbarians. Bumping up strength of beasts a little or playing with raging barbarians can handle this.

I don't think it's unreasonable to have contacted everyone on your continent. Being able to trade or exchange techs with civs thousands of miles away in ancient times is another thing. That kind of thing should be more tightly bound to tech.

What I find the most ridiculous is exploring the world with fishing boats. Unlimited range and no threat like land units face from beasts or barbs.

One also has to keep in mind this is a game and exploration is a big part of the early game, so putting extreme limits on it for no practical purpose (and to mostly be logical basted on reality) might not be the best thing.

Agreed. Adding a danger factor like barbarians make exploring costly already in a natural way because replacing lost scouting units is not free. People seem to be too eager to dismiss this, but replacing lost units can in fact be quite the cost-sink that makes exploring expensive.

I also agree on the dishing boats. Maybe fishing boats outside of your cultural borders should have a chance of being lost at sea. That way exploration will be limited to land units or units that are more expensive like triremes and exploring by sea is available later rather than from the beginning of the game.

 

[ddd123]

It is a problem, but I don't think losing units is the way to go. Perhaps until paper or compass, you forget some of what you discovered.

yeah i agree

also why finding strange way to it?
thats what cartography is for
maybe until its discovery you just see around your cities/units but what you discover disappears suddenly

 

[Babri]

How about you can not have any pertinent information, ie what civ youve met, there borders, any goody huts you pop, or any trade, unless your scout or explorer comes back home. That would make exploration tougher, and last longer. There are many flaws with the ideas that greater minds than I can work out and expand on.

Good Idea ! And what about scouts costing wealth & food along with the production. For example the scout gets 10 food & 10 gold from the city. As he travels he'll loose his resources & once food becomes 0 he'll start loosing health & he may rebel if his wealth remains 0 for few turns. This will lead to careful planning for exploration instead of just automating the scouts like in previous civs.

 

[Shurdus]

Good Idea ! And what about scouts costing wealth & food along with the production. For example the scout gets 10 food & 10 gold from the city. As he travels he'll loose his resources & once food becomes 0 he'll start loosing health & he may rebel if his wealth remains 0 for few turns. This will lead to careful planning for exploration instead of just automating the scouts like in previous civs.

I see how this would work, but I do not think we should want this. The current system is superior to this one imo.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Increasing the danger-level seems like the best option, but if there's too large increase in wild animals and barbarians there's a risk exploration will become more annoying than fun.

A better solution would be, as explained above, to let all civs, AI as well as barb-civs, appear as white, barbarian civs. This way you'll explore parts of the world early but other parts will be left unexplored due to the hostility of other civs early on. Same with ocean exploration.

The same occurs when the AI is exploring close to you. He'll appear to be a barbarian unit, which you'll attack at first chance.