Anyone else lost their enjoyment of playing the Neolithic era after discovering that if you set your starting scouts on auto explore , they go straight to food and curiosities through the fog of war? Its simply much more efficient to set them to auto and watch them go straight to the collectibles, than waist turns manually scouting the map.

If it kills your enjoyment, why do you use it in the first place? No one is forcing you to do it.

Further, I don't think knowing where the curiosities are leads to "optimal" play, as you would lose out on hunting. Those mammoths with their 20 influence and 20 food are a huge factor.

I just tried at the moment and it's terrifying, every move my scouts did end up with is an anomaly, every turn. I will not use this technique because it kills all the fun but it poses two serious problems anyway:

- the AI will necessarily always be the first to choose its civ

- I don't do multi, but I imagine that in multi it must be very powerful, limit cheating ...

Siptah wrote:

If it kills your enjoyment, why do you use it in the first place? No one is forcing you to do it.

Further, I don't think knowing where the curiosities are leads to "optimal" play, as you would lose out on hunting. Those mammoths with their 20 influence and 20 food are a huge factor.

No one is forcing me, but as the user below you said, that poses a major issue with the enemy ai as it will always beat you on civilization choosing, also its just not fun knowing fog of war doesn't even matter at all for the ai , since they can always know where everything on the map is.

Waifu wrote:

Siptah wrote:

If it kills your enjoyment, why do you use it in the first place? No one is forcing you to do it.

Further, I don't think knowing where the curiosities are leads to "optimal" play, as you would lose out on hunting. Those mammoths with their 20 influence and 20 food are a huge factor.

No one is forcing me, but as the user below you said, that poses a major issue with the enemy ai as it will always beat you on civilization choosing, also its just not fun knowing fog of war doesn't even matter at all for the ai , since they can always know where everything on the map is.

This. Response from Siptah was insulting and unhelpful.

It's a sad case really. They wanted to make the early tribal stage more user engaging than in Civ, but one button toggle totally throws all that careful design of hunting, gathering, and exploring all out of the water. Hope they find some sort of solution soon. This is a legit problem that I'm surprised got past all the open devs. Maybe people just never noticed or wanted to keep this advantage for multiplayer lol.

Sorry, didn‘t mean to be insulting. I was genuinely curious why one would use a feature if it takes their fun away from playing. But I guess the answer is there why people do.

Siptah wrote:

Sorry, didn‘t mean to be insulting. I was genuinely curious why one would use a feature if it takes their fun away from playing. But I guess the answer is there why people do.

The optimal strategy should be fun and rewarding, not letting AI play for you. There are only two extremes in this instance: either you explore manually and handicap yourself against AI/other players who turn auto-explore on, or you turn auto-explore on and let the game play itself for a bit.

SpicyCrab wrote:

Siptah wrote:

Sorry, didn‘t mean to be insulting. I was genuinely curious why one would use a feature if it takes their fun away from playing. But I guess the answer is there why people do.

The optimal strategy should be fun and rewarding, not letting AI play for you. There are only two extremes in this instance: either you explore manually and handicap yourself against AI/other players who turn auto-explore on, or you turn auto-explore on and let the game play itself for a bit.

Yes i agree with Spicy. I would also like to add, but this is definitely my personal opinion, that it makes me feel like the fog of war does not matter at all, i mean why not just remove the fog of war all together if the ai knows from the start where all the best areas to settle are and where the New world is. It feels kinda cheap knowing that only you, the player have to explore the map and not the ai. Just a minor gripe.

I also agree with the initial post. I do use auto-explore later on, because micro-managing exploration is not as fun in the middle to late game (unless you just discovered the new world).

But early game, auto-explore should NOT be much powerful than manual exploration. I think this behavior should be fixed somehow.

What if units see through fog of war only in their movement range? Sometimes it seems that units just recognise loot locations only when those are one turn ahead at most. 

I have noticed this problem as well but, if you use auto explore, you'll indeed miss out on mammoth hunting which seems to me to be much more efficient to grow exponentially than collecting a few food sources and some science goodies.

Also, you're likely to miss out on pillaging animals nest which is even faster than hunting mammoths. 

My latest game without auto explore I ended up with 24 tribes and enough influence to create two cities and a few outposts immediately at the start of the ancient era. 

With that said, the current auto explore is definitely broken, especially after the neolithic when you can just let a couple of scouts harvest all the gold and science bonuses, and later, with ships it's even worst.

I mean, you can still do that. Turn auto-explore on, watch for sanctuaries/lairs or ending your movement near a deer, take control and pillage/fight, then turn auto-explore back on.