Following on from last week’s post about our overhaul of manual scouting, today we’re excited to delve a little deeper into our newest feature: Auto-scouting.

First off, let’s talk a little about our goals with these changes. We had been aware for some time that many players did not feel scouting was worth the investment, so when we set out to rework it, our approach was multi-pronged: we needed to provide changes to scouting in general that made it compelling and useful to engage with manually, while also offering a lower investment approach with some level of trade-off with the automated version.

To that end, we have made it so that auto-scouting allows you to scout ahead of and around your comitatus without spending Movement Points at all. It also has two modes you can switch between – one where you simply scout the terrain directly in front of your comitatus’s current trajectory, and one where you cover adjacent nodes, too. The former is represented by the highlighted rightward arrow shown below on the UI, while the latter is depicted by the three multiple arrows which branch outward:

In this situation, the comitatus is set to scout everything on its path, and to stop automatically when a node has a base hunting and foraging chance of 45% or higher, along with an average yield of 245 Supplies. Other conditions can be set, too, one merely needs to toggle between the other options here: the axe represents conditions set for Crew Combat encounters, while the scroll represents conditions that can be set to stop in the case of Events or Mercenary Tasks scouted.

Scouting Results

While out traversing the wasteland with Auto-scouting on, you are not prompted by results in the same way you are when you initiate manual scouting. Results that can be moused over will show on the campaign map, but to get a full overview, you will need to click the emblem in the top left corner. Results will then be shown in a list as below:

The path scouted is also represented to the left of the list, displayed as an orange line on the campaign map. The results of each node and its corresponding number (shown as 11-15 here) remain visible for three in-game days (or turns, gameplay-wise), which means that charting your return journey from a settlement can prove to be a very fruitful endeavor indeed.

Now let’s look at a few more examples, this time using the second mode of auto-scouting through which your comitatus scouts the surrounding terrain. In the below example, ‘Ventures’ (meaning Events and Tasks) are the conditions through which the caravan stops automatically, set at a minimum of 15% on nearby scouted nodes:

Two things become apparent from this example – firstly, your chance of success drops dramatically when scouting both forward and adjacent nodes, and secondly, when you set conditions such as these your comitatus will stop less frequently because of auto-scouting. This is because it is generally harder to scout for Events than nodes that are ripe for hunting and foraging. Let’s take a look at the results in this instance:

In this final example, we can see both the nodes already scouted (denoted by the orange coloring) and an Event that was scouted and is now shown by the emblem with ‘89’ next to it. As it turns out, this node has a 100% chance to trigger an Event – this is because it is a fixed Event. What’s most important, however, is that Auto-scouting allowed the vagrus to see the Event before moving forward onto it, thus giving them a moment to consider how they might prepare for such a situation.

Along with Manual scouting, which is great for feeling out a larger area all around the comitatus as well as looking for something specific in a given region, Auto-scouting, which is great for finding opportunities along a journey, is the final piece of the puzzle that reworks campaign map movement and scouting into a newer, sleeker system. We are looking forward to hearing from our community about both Manual and Auto-scouting and hope that it opens new avenues to exciting gameplay. That’s all for today, so for now – stay tuned, stay safe, and conquer the wasteland!

- The Lost Pilgrims Team

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