Unfortunately, the ability to scout is a locked w.g activity without much applicable way to be carried out; that is unless through some opaque practical methods you have at your disposal like doing all your enquiries as a adventurer first, then retire into a site later to be a fortress, or a already established retired fortress. In short, its not very optimal, and also time consuming activity to do something we already have a (c) world map & mission functionality for.
The proposed system includes picking out a tile out on the map to scout, and simply sending your messenger there & to come back with some haste, experiencing the weather & violent bouts of cave adaption sickness as they go. The effectiveness of scouting increases the 'Tracker' & 'Observer' skills implicitly with each mission your messenger is sent out on with similar progression to multiple raids, and typically while they can get lost, intercepted or go insane on a scouting mission they aren't in any implicit danger.
If your scout dissapears, just replace them with a new one without the complexities of handling a squad. If more than one dissapears visiting the same area, you might want to train a more experienced scout to spy the danger from further away before whatever's there gets them.
Some Activities
Sites
- Finding the remains of battlefields, lairs or abandoned artifacts - situationally lootable opportunities creates a special kind of site allowing you to retrieve or steal items with a military strategy mission marker, usually these last for a limited amount of time (on amount of retrievable items present) and other looters or scavenging animals/defenders may attempt to attack your dwarves. Zombies around towers or in evil death-regions will be a persistent threat doing retrieval activities nearby.
- Finding out more about minor & major sites before departing a squad - Based on the skill level of the scouting unit a greater level of perception by a few more tiles around the designated scouting site will also yield more detail, helping reveal features & more accurate tallies of the occupants of major & minor sites down to what kind of sentient or animal creature the are.
Groups & Armies
- Discovering hidden societies - Camps of refugees, vaults, kobold caves & camps of bandits; hidden or transient groups of people can be found allowing you to interact with them
- Finding idle & moving army controllers - With the ability to see all around them, a scouting messenger with high tracker & observer would be able to determine the movement of a encountered hostile army, or the route one came from to give players additional foward warning while they are out in the field.
As a final note, scouting lets you get your anvil back from the keas, as the birds will probably have a natural lair around somewhere solving the riddling question of what happens to them when they go off map
There are some other threads on this topic, similar suggestions can be found here.
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@lovesword : Culture Travels (About domestic expeditions)
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@Leonidas : More Site Info (About greater detail surrounding viewing sites to not be ambushed by 30 gorillas protecting one elf)
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Myself @FantasticDorf : (c) civilisation screen cavern exploration (About cavern exploration regarding a similar system)
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@eurydike : Hidden world properties and reversed embark profile (A reverse suggestion of hiding more world-detail to encourage finding it)
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@Neonivek : Traveling Outside the Box And Wall Strength (Additional resource collection activities offmap besides scouting)
Author
Topic: Scouting the world, tile by tile in fortress mode. (Read 725 times)