BUG? - Stupid scouts?

This has been happening to me for a long time (since 1.03) and even when I move them to another unexplored system manually they stil go back to the explored one, never really remembered to post it...

I have also been getting this its more a bug that they dontgo the unexplored planet near them (evenin home system ) but instead take thelongestpath toone that is unexplored

it does happen in 1.05 too.

I believe the scouts have some sort of a priority system of where they should scout. In explicite, I think a scout frigate will choose to visit an explored planet close to your borders, which hasn't been checked for some time, instead of just going somewhere to the other end of the universe.

In other words, I think a scout frigate thinks "up-to-date intel on planets in the vincinity of your empire is more important than exploring worlds somewhere 15 phase jumps away".

N3rull's analysis is correct and the desired behavior. If you build more scouts, the 'up to date' intel on border worlds objective will be completed more often, so the latter scouts will explore further into deep space.

I guess for me the issue is that the button is labeled "Explore" and when I enabled autocast, my expectation was that the ship would auto-explore. And by explore I mean "go out an explore the unexplored. The behavior that you're describing is one of the traditional roles of scouts, but not what I would classify as exploring -- more of a "gather intel" feature.

Future enhancement perhaps? A button on scouts that would toggle behavior between "gather intel" and "explore the unexplored"? As it stands now, I think the intel priority needs some balance so that it doesn't override the common sense. In a game yesterday, I was playing a 3-star map on single player with 2 other races. I had created a bunch of scouts, scouted my local system, then conquered my local system for all but 1 or 2 planet systems far out from the local star. I then created some new scouts (cause the old one were dead), researched the star jump tech, and then sent 5 scouts out to the two remaining systems. Those 5 scouts headed out to the other star systems and then immediately turned around to the home system to try and scout out the remaining 2 planets in the home system (which were on the far end of the home system away from the star). It's almost like you normally go out to the store to buy milk for your mother, but then one day you leave Michigan to drive to California to attend a conference. Once you get to California, your mom asks you to get milk for her. Instead of calling up a buddy and asking them to do it, you blow off the conference, drive home to Michigan and then go buy your mom milk.

My 2 cents.

It is better the way it is as at the moment as in the beginning you dont really care about what is happening on a planet 20 phase jumps away as much as what is happening at a planet right on your doorstep so its much better that they discover the planet which is the closest first. You do have a point as somtimes scouts will take ridiculously long routes in order to achieve their objective of getting intel on closer planets firsts although you can stop this from happening by building a larger fleet of scouts to explore. That is why at the start of any game I always build the amount of scouts equal to the amount of phase lanes leading from my home planet so that they dont have to turn back to explore the others.