Quoting Levelheaded, reply 11now, why is the opponent attacking you with 20 or 30 carriers? didn't you... like... yknow scout this shit before it... well.. arrived to twist your nipples?
Im always hearing "this and that" but never the part where you ppl say "oh my, here i fucked up by not going over there to cripple that fleet over there because i never knew it was there because i never use scouts."
While you make a very good point do you not find that at this stage in the game when fleets are that big that scouts are pretty much useless? You certainly can't set them to auto explore anymore as they wont last many jumps and trying to micro scouts and keeping them alive in the end game is waaaaay too much work.
Personally, late mid and end game my method of 'scouting' consists of watching phase lanes and maybe sending 1 ship accross a lane to see whats there before returning.
The Intel Wars are never easy.
Scouts are cheap. I use them as one shot probes. Late game its important to have the phaseimmunity so they dont suffer from 700% jump penalties.
Later in the game, fighters usualy kill single scouts. Most systems have hangars so you need to send several scouts.
Since you need quite a number of scouts ANYWAY due to the whole mine shit, always having some handy should be very well possible for anyone.
The good thing about scouts is that the latest intel you have on a grav well is displayed after your scout dies, together with a timer thats telling you how old said intel is. It shouldnt be too hard to anticipate your ops movement, since in most cases its rather limited anyway. Even if the scout died, it has served its purpose as will the next scout.
As bothersome as it may be: knowing where your op is, is quite helpful in deciding wether to send that fleet of yours away or not.
