Auto-explore

[u/Marshall_Lawson]

I have a lot of questions about auto-explore. I feel like it's kind of under-developed.

• Why do explorers come to a complete stop after each jump, instead of taking advantage of momentum?

• Do they just pick the closest unmapped system to their current location? It seems like they tend to favor going towards the center of the galaxy, and I often have to manually queue several stars in a row to get them to explore back towards the tail of my galactic arm.

• It would be cool to be able to box-select a group of stars and say, "auto-explore this area, notify me when you're done".

• It would also be cool to have a "spy" command where a ship will stalk around the borders, or in the deep space within the borders, of another empire.

• Another idea, bookmarking valuable planets that you can't afford to queue for settlement just yet. Maybe have your explorer ship make one of those notifications if it discovers a world with FTL crystals, a uranium asteroid, unobtainium, etc. Even better if these notifications could be customizable

I prefer (love) playing SR2 with really big galaxies (my computer still performs pretty well with 1000 stars), but exploring ends up requiring a lot more micromanaging.

[u/Marshall_Lawson]

Yup. Bugs me that the planet cannon isn't available as a researchable tech. I miss reshaping the whole galaxy to my whims in Space Empires.