It would be nice that you could build explorers which you could sent a certain direction. Or you could start an expidition which you could also sent a certain direction. And ONLY when the explorer or the expedition returns you receive a map. Those maps may not be that accurate but they give you an idea how the explored region looks like (where rivers, mountains, empires more or less are situated or if there is an natural wonder) . The explorer could also name the natural features and wonders/empires/cities/ found so if an explorer of an other empire explored the same area the names on their maps may be different than yours. You could also if wanted sell/buy or resell/rebuy maps but when you sell a map, your vision on the region of that map is less accurate or completly dissapears. You could also NOT control the explorer/expedition during its exploration, but you would receive messages where you must make a decision which could affect the outcome of the exploration (for example: when the explorer or expedition encounters an outpost it could do multiple thinks that you decide like offering gold, trying to spread your dominate religion, trying to capture/burn the outpost for food or gold.) Before you sent your explorer/ expedition somewhere you can give a certain amount of gold (the more gold you give the further and longer the expidition could go and last). Your explorer/expidition spends the given gold gradually to buy food, but you could use the given gold for different purpeses like offering it to an newly encountered empire, or recruiting new members/local military units (which is really expensive) for the expedition... But your expedition could also be robbed/raided which result into a loss of all or an part of your given gold. Your expedition could also end due to everyone dying in it, because of evryone being killed by raiders, or evryone straving to dead because it hadn't any gold left to buy food. It will also be handy to be able to look to all your currently going on expeditions, the amount of gold it possess, how large the expedition is/ how many people they are compared to its start in percentage and the historical events it had. It will also be more realistic to letting exploring with units be less accurate than with explorers/expeditions. You could also send miltary units TOGETHER with the expedition in order to lower the chance of getting robbed/raided and losing gold when getting robbed/raided, but it would make the expedition more expensive in gold. The advantages it has to explore the world with explorers/expeditions is that it happens a lot more faster than exploring with units and that it is also more accurate. The disadvantages are that it's more expensive and possibly dangerous.