Auto-exploration

[Sild]

After reserching and outfitting the dozen or so exploration ships, wathcing them warp into the great unknown to discover it's wonders was quite exciting. A few
in game years later they still haven't fully explored the closest system because, apparently, freaking asteroids are more interesting than actual moons or planets. So, my question is how to go around the exploration of asteroid clusters and keep it automated. I probably missed that part. Played it really late last night.

[SirHoraceHarkness]

Unlike in DWU exploration even of asteroids takes time now and a scout will sit at an asteroid and send probes for quite a while before it moves on. Only way I see so far to speed this up is to put some training into the scanner research tree.

[Sild]

So there's no command to prioritise planets or something like that? Because i feel there should be. Moon and planet potential is clearly higher in terms of discoveries and thus priority should be higher.. this wouldn't be as big an issue if exploration didn't take so long to complete for every object in a solar system. And there's loads more asteroids than anything else in the ones i've seen.

[Lymark]

I was going to post this exact issue, but I just read that automated explorers would ignore asteroids If we don't equip them with resource scanners. Haven't tried it yet myself tho.

[Erik Rutins]

Researching Resource Scanners and upgraded Exploration Ships will greatly increase their speed at getting through asteroid fields.

[Lymark]

Researching Resource Scanners and upgraded Exploration Ships will greatly increase their speed at getting through asteroid fields.

It would be nice If we could have an additional option for explorers to prioritize planets over asteroids.

[rxnnxs]

A queue would also help. But for sure leaving asteroids out of automated exploration would be wonderful.

[Panpiper]

How did you get them to warp out of system? My explorers just sit idle after exploring their home system. (Yes, I put them on auto...)

[BTAxis]

If they're not leaving, check that they have decent fuel range (a stat in the design screen). If they can't get to any unexplored objects, they will be idle.

Fuel range is increased by having more and better fuel cells, more efficient hyperdrives and more efficient reactors.

[dunnjona]

Does anyone know the difference between these two options in the Automation choices for exploration ships: Auto-Explore and Auto-Scout Systems?

[BTAxis]

I think auto-scout just visits each system to find out what planets there are. It doesn't try to survey anything. It can be useful early on if you're just looking for habitable planets to expand to.

[Justus2]

It would be helpful to have a chart that defines them. If that's the real meaning of auto-scout, that could be useful. I'd definitely like an option to ignore asteroids, as mentioned earlier. And also an option to explore within a system, but not leave it (I believe the AI will do that as it is, until there's nothing left to scan).

[Miravlix]

It's super easy to avoid asteroids, they are fairly hard to target if you do it manually.

Get more scout ships,auto explorer only seem to work in a group before you can leave the system, after that it's one ship pr. system, so if you cranked up the world to 2K stars, maybe it's time you doubled the number of scouts too... Like 30-50 scouts before you start colonizing.

Auto-scout unfortunately suffers from all the ships heading to the same system (And they all get the wait around part, so they will still be synced when going to the next system), but you actually may want to use auto scout over auto explorer/full auto and then cherry pick what system you explore and force many scouts to do the big asteroid systems.

[Buio]

It would be nice If we could have an additional option for explorers to prioritize planets over asteroids.

Shouldn't even be an additional option, should be default.

In my game they would spend an eternity to scan a bunch of low value asteroids. Those asteroids orbiting a for my faction inhabitable unscanned world. Which after a forced manual scan was found to have valuable resources. Stupid explorers!

[ClassicAz]

Researching Resource Scanners and upgraded Exploration Ships will greatly increase their speed at getting through asteroid fields.

Thanks Erik.

Aside from performance issues, one of the biggest motivation killers for me in DW:U was the feeling that I needed to manually queue dozens of explorers to reach the goodies before the pirates/other civs. I really urge you and Elliot to consider implementing an anti-clumping feature for Auto-Scout and toggle-able ignore asteroid option for Auto-Explore.