Thanks to everyone for the discussion about the auto scout feature. We want you to know the development team is watching this conversation with interest, and we understand the concerns that some have expressed in this thread.
We’re very excited to share this widely requested feature with the community, and we also acknowledge that it will have an impact on gameplay. We expect that impact to be positive: Our hope is that new players will feel more confident joining their friends in multiplayer matches, and more seasoned players will find it a nice quality-of-life improvement they can use to keep exploring when they want to focus elsewhere (though it’ll still be far less efficient than a manually commanded scout by a skilled player).
However, as with any change we make, we’ll continue to listen to feedback from the Age of Empires community and make tweaks based both on what you tell us and how we see the feature being used in game.
Our plan is to release auto scout for all game modes in the next update, and our request is that you try it out and give us your feedback once it’s released. We’re open to all feedback on this and other aspects of the game as we continue to work on improving the Age II DE experience for everyone!