Currently, the technology “professional scouts” costs 75 wood, and 275 gold. Each scout costs 60 food. Each deer is worth 350 food. To process those deer, you need roughly 10 villagers ready to go. That’s another 500 food.
In the meantime while you have wasted all of this money and effort researching scouts, the enemy has made an actual military force and has 5-6 horsemen or lancers or some horsemen with pikemen backup. The point is that while the thought of professional scouts and the concept is REALLY REALLY nice…
They just are not viable.
On the other hand, a 6-7 man scout rush is very very viable at destroying outlying parts of an enemy base. Its disgustingly viable. So, here is what I would change.
In order to prevent early game rushing (where the other player knows you will rush, but has no defensive options) I would add in more defenses. All defensive outposts automatically get arrow slits, and can upgrade to balista bolts or cannons. Or they can upgrade to ballista and then cannons. Regardless, picking arrow slits will not lock a defensive structure out of getting fully upgraded to wielding cannons, and they get arrow slits in the dark age. Spear rushing is a thing of the past.
In order to allow scouts to steal the enemy resoources, professional scouts as a tech is available in the dark age, it takes 30 seconds to train, and it costs 50 wood, and no gold. The age of enemy scouts swooping in to steal your sheep has begun!
To protect scouts in this new high damage environment, all scouts get an additional 4 pierce armor against structures.
To prevent scouts from being used to grief, the use of torches to destroy buildings is moved to a technology that can be researched in the feudal age. Until then, you can’t use torches to destroy structures.
Did you ever play the rus? Because it is a really strong tech for them and most rus players will steal your hunt with scouts(also doable with mongols). Deers spawn in patches of 7 and are worth 350 food, every player gets 2 hunts(a close one and a far one) so thats 7x350x2=4900 food that gets fast collected that you can steal away from the enemy and bring it under your own towncenter. Then you also have your own hunt so you can gather ~10k food safely(+sheeps ofc). By this you force the enemy to invest into farms much earlier meanwhile you have loads of food with the best gathering rate ingame at this point without paying any wood for farms. Your vills are safe under your tc so it’s really hard to raid them compared if they had to run to the hunting spots.
In my opinion this is more than enough for the tech price you pay. Making this tech 50wood only and available in dark age would make the rus ridiculous OP.
I haven’t encountered any strong scout rushes so far as its rather easy to defend with some spears. Also it’s not really what scouts are designed for. I dont want that scout are good fighting units, they should be able to uncover the map/collect sheep and be placed in “stealth locations” to grant more vision(with their bonus).