What if Scouts were gone?

[Snes]

A hypothetical situation: what if the game had no Scouts? What if all early exploration had to be done with the slower, more expensive units?

I ask this because I love exploring the map. I love finding new wonders, civs, and city states and finding new places to found cities. But I find that Scouts expedite the exploration period drastically. Before long, I have discovered most of the map that can be discovered. I was wondering how different the game would be if players needed to make a bigger investment if they wanted to know everything that was around them, and focusing on what was in the immediate area (only sticking your neck out to find new city sites) was a viable strategy?

 

[PreLynMax]

R.I.P., Scout...
You will get games where almost no land is explored.
You would get an empty map up to Satellites.

 

[General Tso]

Not necessarily. I've played numerous Pangaea maps where I had other priorities so I didn't build any scouts. I usually ended up exploring a large part of the map anyway. I didn't end up revealing the whole map like I probably would have done with several scouts but I did reveal most of it.

 

[JSMCAG]

Well, it would be a huge nerf to The Shoshone!

 

[Snes]

Well, it would be a huge nerf to The Shoshone!

Wow, only three posts until someone brought up the Shoshone. I knew it would happen eventually, but all the same, I'm impressed at how quickly someone jumped on that remark.

 

[Miravlix]

Well, it would be a huge nerf to The Shoshone!

uh, Shoeshone doesn't have a scout, they have a Pathfinder thats a warrior/scout hybrid.

So it would actually be a huge buff to SS.

 

[JSMCAG]

uh, Shoeshone doesn't have a scout, they have a Pathfinder thats a warrior/scout hybrid.

So it would actually be a huge buff to SS.

But it replaces the Scout. No Scout to replace, no Pathfinder thats a warrior/scout hybrid!

 

[Ryoga]

The scout does help but not immensely so. Moreover in sea dominant maps is practically useless.

Anyway depending on the abundance of rough terrain a fast unit like the horseman could end up being a faster scout than the scout itself.

Scouts are mainly useful at the very beginning where you want to meet all CS before anyone else, find ruins and all that stuff.

But it's not like they are truly necessary for map exploration.

 

[Bex]

I hardly ever play pangea, usually continents or archipelago. I do the majority of my exploring later on with caravels... they don't get blocked off or trapped like scouts and triremes. Depends on the map but I don't always build scouts... if I think there's a good chance of an archer upgrade from ruins I do. By the time I have resources to trade, someone has usually found me already.

 

[I_qua_I]

It would also buff the Inca. (Do the Aztecs' UU get the movement bonus on forest/jungle outside their borders? If so, I imagine that would be a slight buff to them as well.)

 

[AW Arcaeca]

A hypothetical situation: what if the game had no Scouts? What if all early exploration had to be done with the slower, more expensive units?

That's what I do anyway, go exploring with warriors, so...
(But maybe that's just because I'm a n00B to civ5)

 

[joncnunn]

I think it would be a huge boost to the Shoshone; whose base unit would then be a warrior.

But other than that:

1. Minor nerf to the AI on Emperor & above; even if they replaced their free starting scout with an additional starting warrior with whatever flag the AI uses to tell it to scout with it were on.

2. Less of the map would be explored, but people will still try to find all natural wonders & city scouts. As usual once they already have located all city states & wonders there's no real point of exploring outside of the nearby zones.