Hey all I recently noticed something about setting your Heroes to explore for experience and am wondering how many others have found it and realize.

When you are exploring and come across a site your Hero has 2 choices and they are to Continue Exploring or to Investigate. Investigating gives you the # of enemies and how many different types there are but NOT the exact number of each type, Scouting skill allows you to see exact numbers and levels if you have it for the cost of some Gold.

Anyway your Hero can gain exp from exploring and even level. However if you Investigate and then retreat you cannot go up a level while if you choose Continue exploring you can.

I am just wondering if this is a bug/intentional or do you somehow get more exp for NOT investigating? Does anyone know?

The simple solution is to always select continue exploring. Besides, who wants to pay wages for an army when you are just scouting and may not find anything? Edit: which means find the stuff first, then come with an army afterwards.

The problem with that though is when you run across Adventurers and/or are ambushed by Brigands. These are both opportunities for some pretty great items and you would lose out if your not able to take them down.

I try to limit going into the past for things that are totally messed up like when there are those stupid random events that can happen so early and just wipe out your entire armies. Like Undead uprisings when they have friggin 2 Vampires before turn 50.

Undead uprisings only occur if you do stuff like dig up graves and force shamans to leave your province. Although there still are quite a few events like that, such as barbarian attacks, harpy attacks, and troll attacks. I'm not counting brigand attacks as such an event because they are usually quite mild and usually have good loot.

I typically only do things like that if I'm either victimizing one province in particular or if that proving already hates me for some reason or another (usually because the province is occupied by goblins or orcs or centaurs).

Something that I always found amusing is that in the campaign you only have to get your karma up to a decent level, then you can be pretty much as evil as you want, because as long as your shard karma is positive at the end of the shard it gives you positive karma in the astral. And you start each shard with such a huge karma boost that pretty much no matter what you do you can't end the shard with negative karma.

That may technically be be true, but in practice is quite moot, because If you had a scouting army that could take out brigands and adventurers, then you would not be using it for scouting in the first place! Taking new territories and exploring locations will always be the bigger priorities, especially during the early expansion phase when money is so tight and army upkeep makes a big difference.

In situations where money is very tight there are 4 common situations where i might scout without an army, and only 1 much more rare situation where i would scout with an army.

SCOUTING WITHOUT ARMY
1) If my army gets clobbered hard i may have to put it in the castle to recuperate (while taking less wages) and then i will leave the hero on scouting while that happens

2) If i have just purchased my second Hero, often there will be no jobs he can succeed at until i can afford to put him with some better quality units, meanwhile i will put him on scouting.

3) Sometimes i may have to transfer the units from my second hero to the first hero army, and then put the second hero on scouting until i can afford some new units.

4) Any other situations where i have to wait for more units, i will usually put my hero/hero's on scouting.

SCOUTING WITH AN ARMY
1) When i meet up with an enemy hero i will put my hero on scouting (if there were no locations to explore and or i do not have a strong guard contract to spare) until i can either move up a second hero or build a fort.

Wow..I never noticed that. So if you investigate you only can't level this turn or do you get less XP?