I would like auto exploration to pause when a unit wanders around and then encounters a deer, bear or mammoth to allow players to decide if they want to attack immediately or reposition to make use of terrain advantages.  

I bring this up because currently auto exploration ignores beasts and just focuses on collecting curiosities. If you want to get hunting stars in the Neolithic Age you need to manually explore. When you have several hunting parties, the process of manually commanding all these units is tedious and tiresome.

How soon can we expect to see something like this implemented?

I use auto explore just for curiousities, in the neolitic era I would manually control the units because there isnt much else to do. But I would find a case useful is when a unit may be lost such as exploring to far out into oceans the auto explore be paused