AI War:Scouting Best Practices
What's The Best Way To Handle Scouting?
Q: When I send out scouts, they don't make it very far -- a planet or two away, at most. How am I supposed to figure out where stuff is? This is especially noticeable when I play on higher difficulty levels.
A: This is a very important topic, since good scouting is so crucial to your success. You can't decide where to send your offensive forces if you don't have intel on where your goals are (your earliest goal: finding as many Advanced Research Stations as possible).
Tactic 1: Unlock Higher Level Scouts
In a multiplayer game, the best approach is to have one player specialize in scouts. They can unlock Mark II and Mark III scouts relatively quickly, and then if they gain control of an Advanced Factory, they can build the incredibly-effective Mark IV scout.
Tactic 2: Micromanage Low-Level Scouts
In single-player games, or in multiplayer games where the players are barely holding back the enemy waves, this may not be an option, however. In those cases, you'll have to scout smarter, which means that a lot of manual effort is involved on your part. You'll have to guide the scouts through each planet, skirting enemy command posts, astro trains, etc. This works best with a Mark III scout, since it can spend most of its time cloaked. The easiest way to do this is by setting waypoints for your ships (hold Shift while right-clicking).
Tactic 3: Group Any Level Scouts
That much micromanagement is a still pretty tall order, though, especially if there are a number of heated battles raging elsewhere. Another tactic is simply to build all of your Mark I or Mark II (or both) scouts, then send them ALL together along the same path. The enemy will pick many of them off, but some will get through. In general, if your scouts aren't penetrating as far as you'd like, send more along that path -- and try to avoid paths that cross higher-level planets, too. This works particularly well because of the Cloaking Booster ability that Mark I-III scouts have.
Expected Results
It's generally not possible to scout the entire map without either taking a significant portion of the planets or having a Mark IV scout, though. At some point you'll have all the Intel you can gather for the time being, and you'll need to make the best decision you can with the information you have. You might even decide to take a planet simply because it's ideally placed for launching successful scouting runs. After you've taken another planet or two, you can try scouting again, and see if you're able to get better penetration.
