“What’s over this hill?”
That question — simple, instinctive, irresistible — is where everything begins.
I often go hiking, map and compass in hand, starting at Point A and figuring out how to get to Point B. Done right, off the beaten path, it unlocks great vistas and a genuine sense of escape. I consider it a reset of sorts — away from office work and sitting at a computer. It’s an energising experience that engages the senses and tickles the part of my brain that likes solving things. What’s over this hill? Does this stream go where I think it goes, based on the map?
Exploration in a game, done right, can hit those same notes. Familiar territory, perhaps, but the exploration phase of a 4X is where expectations are set, and where the magic begins.
Or doesn’t.
Arguably, exploration in this sense begins before you even start the game — buying into the hype, choosing, purchasing, and downloading. But that is really a discussion for another post (i.e., marketing).
This is a companion article to the podcast Explore First, Ask Questions Later in which the eXplorminate team have a special guest – Zeikko, of Astro Protocol fame.
If you prefer, the podcast is also available as a video.
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The Linchpin of the 4Xs
As the first of the four Xs, exploration sets the player up to go through the full gameplay loop, which ends with extermination (and, hopefully, victory). It is often described as the most engaging of the four, because decisions here affect everything downstream. They matter the most at this stage, and it is at this point that you, as the player, are looking to begin your snowball. On top of that, because you have less information about the game state, you are at your furthest remove from information overload — and from the dreaded micro-management we so often associate with the endgame.
The start of a game session is exciting, whether the game is new to you (where you are testing the mechanics — how does this work?) or you are experienced (and itching to try a new build). You are also paying closer attention at the start, and have more attention to spare. As the game progresses, your attention span shrinks precisely as the demands on it multiply.
That said, not every game gets this right. So it is worth exploring what makes a good exploration phase good, with examples — and looking at instances where it doesn’t quite come together. It is also worth noting at this point that a 4X or grand strategy game can be tremendous fun even without a distinct exploration phase, or with a fixed map that you can approach with prior knowledge. A good exploration phase should present the player with a variety of interesting possible actions, and ideally with some form of pressure, so that the player has to decide how and where to deploy their limited resources.
Age of Wonders 4: A Masterclass?
I think Age of Wonders 4 has a very strong, well-defined exploration phase. The game gets a lot of attention for its faction customisation, but I think its real strength — aside from the leaders — is the map generation.
Shaping the contours of your game map, including things like the named exploration sites, goes a long way towards making the world feel alive and makes you want to explore. And I think this is the key: a well-executed exploration phase makes the world feel alive and interesting, and this in turn makes the game interesting to interact with. Of course, it is just one path to get to this effect.
In AoW4, you typically start with about four or five units, and you want to explore in all directions. So, do you split your five units and explore five different directions? Or do you wait a couple of turns until your five units become six (the recent xp changes add a wrinkle to this decision making), pick one direction, and start clearing — or some mixture of the two?
What your units uncover will immediately affect your decisions about what to build, when, and why. For example, a nearby and lightly defended creature cage will net you some juicy XP and a free unit. Nice.
Conquest of Eo: A Different Flavour
In contrast, a game like Conquest of Eo arguably has a much lesser, more truncated exploration phase — and this is part of why it isn’t a 4X per se, but really a “Sauron sim” (credit: tenwoo) with some juicy 4X elements.
It is also a lot of fun, and I would argue there is actually a strong exploration aspect. It’s not traditional exploration, because Sevenkeeps will always be in the same place and certain points are likewise fixed.
But you are still exploring because the game state changes based on your actions. Furthermore — and this is especially true when you are new to the game — there is considerable internal exploration: discovering what your class does, and what recipes you can concoct.
The Fixed-Map Puzzle
A game with a much-reduced exploration phase would be something like Crusader Kings.
The starting position of your chosen faction is always the same (Ireland will not be changing its position any time soon, and the factions therein always start identically from game to game), and thus the game, in this respect at least, is much more of a puzzle to be solved.
By this argument, the Total War games are similar. You will notice that this does not make them bad games.
Would it be possible to design and produce a game like Crusader Kings or Total War with a randomised map? I find myself thinking of Old World here. Is Old World the GOAT?
Tower Dominion: Push and Pull
Not a 4X by any means, but I have been enamoured lately by a game called Tower Dominions.
There is a clue in the name that this is a tower defence game, but even though you can zoom out and view the entire map from your first turn (wave), you are required to make decisions about where to explore.
There is a quasi-resource called discovery, which increases your chance of finding anomalies that unlock bonuses if your towers are built adjacent to them. This generates a push-and-pull dynamic: your best defence comes from overlapping towers, but you also want to venture outside your death zone.
That push-and-pull factor is arguably the heart of fun games generally, but it is especially vital in the exploration phase.
Dune: Spice Wars: Automation done right
From the creators of Northgard, this real time 4X challenges you to assert your authority on Arrakis. It is very thematic, and every 4X beat is there.
Your very first unit is an Ornithopter, which is your Scout. Now, the clever thing here is how regions are largely unknown, and have areas that require full scouting, e.g. to determine the village name, the special resource etc.
The game strongly encourages you to automate this, and in the context, it makes sense (whereas in other games it feels like an afterthought). Plus, Ornithopters have one more critical function â they protect your Harvesters. Without them you are vulnerable to sudden Worm appearances, and lost economy.
Further, it is rare to fully explore a map by the end of a playthrough, and because travel is generally slow, and your unit count low, scouts remain useful throughout the game, giving you advance warning of invaders, the disposition of your enemies, as well as the lay of the land.
At eXplorminate, we are blessed to have some serious strategy minds in the community, along with several developers, and so I reached out and asked a few people what they associate with exploration and what they think makes for a good exploration phase.
We put the following questions to them:
As a game designer:
- 1. What do you understand by the term “exploration”?
- 2. How important do you think it is?
- 3. Can you give some examples of games that get it right, and games that get it wrong?
- 4. If you were making a brand-new game, how would you implement it? Alternatively, how have you implemented it in your game?
Postbop — Creator of Rogue Hex
“Ok, here you go, exploring some thoughts. First, I’ll say that exploring has always been my favourite X. I’m one of those who feel that the first few hours of a 4X are the most fun. I think that exploration plays a huge role in that equation; I see it as the linchpin of the first thirty turns or so.
Dopamine
This part is dead simple. Every time your scout steps on a hill, cutting through a bank of clouds, revealing a village hut in the green valley below — it’s pure dopamine.
In Civilization, scouts are the only unit that gain experience points for visiting goodie huts and ruins. I think this is brilliant. It rewards the player for using scouts to perform their core purpose.
I iterated on this mechanic in Rogue Hex by giving each scout an innate trait called ‘Adventurous’ that grants them EXP for every single tile they discover. I wanted to make that core function-reward loop even stronger.
And of course, I juiced the tile reveals: fluffy cloud-puff particles, satisfying sound effects, and glowing EXP stars flying to your scout like a magnet. It’s hard to overstate the importance of these juicy bits in delivering that exploration dopamine. (And I’m just one little fish — the bigger teams with real budgets can really deliver on this.)
Most 4X games give a bit of a slot-machine pull when you step on a goodie hut tile via a random reward, with some being stronger than others. Some newer iterations like Civ 7 add an element of choice, prompting you to pick one of a few options. I’ve taken this approach in Rogue Hex, offering three rewards to pick from, and gone a step further by adding a Reroll button tied to the Faith mechanic.
Ruins in Rogue Hex are even more impactful than villages. They offer a choice of three Relics, similar to what you might see in Slay the Spire; each has a rarity level, and the more powerful relics can shape your entire run. Discovering a ruin on turn three, spending some faith to reroll it, and hitting a rare relic is a good old-fashioned dopamine bomb. (Not to mention, it improves replayability and diversity by pulling your build into a focused direction, like a rare joker in Balatro. But that’s another story.)
Competition
In most games, I find that the exploration process also takes the shape of a race.
We rush to capture goodie huts before the other leaders. The opportunity cost of missing a hut comes with the extra sting of your rival growing stronger from it.
There is also the mad scramble to quickly identify prime city spots, control the space, and dispatch a settler to grab them. A single movement point in the first ten turns can shape the three hundred turns to follow.
On one hand, the race model is exciting. It feels good to invest in a scout and push them over a hill to capture a hut under an enemy’s nose. And settling a new city on a gold deposit a turn before your opponent is manic.
But I think this competitive pressure comes with a cost. Placing a strict timer on exploration can reduce the decision space by dropping the comparative value of early expansion, development, or aggression. It runs the risk of deferring the other Xs to a linear sequence of phases instead of interesting opportunities that you weigh as each turn comes.
The asymmetrical structure in Rogue Hex allowed me to try a different approach. You compete with a barbarian horde instead of peer leaders. Barbarians cannot capture goodie huts or establish new cities, so the player is free to explore at their own pace. The rewards are still there, but without the harsh time pressure and with less punishing opportunity cost. You can rush to pop goodie huts and spam cities in the first twenty turns, or focus your efforts elsewhere and circle back later. The fruit will be there waiting for you until you pluck it.
Orders
I think the Orders currency is one of Old World’s greatest strengths, and moreover, one of the cleverest design innovations in the 4X genre in recent years.
Orders create a natural tension between exploring, developing your land, and mobilising your military. On a given turn, you’re almost guaranteed to have an interesting choice between pushing units around the board or taking a useful action.
Zooming out, Orders tie exploration into the game’s economy in a direct way, allowing players to invest in and expand their ability to explore beyond the simple production of a scout unit.
A branch of Orders appears in Rogue Hex as Plans. I iterated on the concept and made some tweaks and additions such as the Fatigue mechanic.
Naming the World
Another shout-out for Old World. The dialogue box that appears when you’re the first to discover a major river or mountain is absolutely brilliant.
It speaks to the childhood fantasy of exploring the world, making sense of it, and leaving our mark on it.
Not to mention, it’s great for streamers and content creators to have a bit of fun with.
I haven’t implemented this in Rogue Hex yet, but I think every 4X game would probably benefit from this nice touch.
Seven Cities of Gold
I noticed that Sid Meier often recalls Seven Cities of Gold as an inspiration for the first Civilization game. I’m sure I’ve heard Soren Johnson cite it as well. I checked it out for homework in the early days of Rogue Hex and found it quite interesting.
On the face of it, it’s one of the first games to procedurally generate an open world specifically for players to explore. Comparing it directly to a modern 4X would be a stretch, but there is certainly an argument to be made for it as the progenitor of the first X.
Created pre-Civilization, it exists free of its influence. No overworld grid, production queues, or culture bombs. Apple II peers like Oregon Trail and Ultima lend their design verbs instead: supply menus, dialogue windows, ‘Look / Touch / Speak.’
A different ancestral species to our 4X, and surely a prolific contributor of design DNA. It chases the same fantasy: tracing the edge of a mountain range, following a winding river into a valley, stumbling into a village rich with gold.
I guess I’ll call it there for now — I could babble on about this stuff for hours. A few other bits that came to mind that I didn’t get around to writing the long version for:
- The Curiosities mechanic in Rogue Hex — a few extra-powerful points of interest randomly scattered on each map.
- The tide system in Endless Legend 2 — intriguing promise, but will it still feel like the ‘exploring’ we love, or is it something else in the context of the mid-to-late game?
- Settlers gaining EXP and levelling up in Rogue Hex.
- The genre’s obsession with perfecting the ‘first city position process’ on turn one (or recently, the first few turns).
- The new scout ‘peek’ mechanic turning exploration from a dopamine hit into a chore in Civ 7.”
James Coote — Developer of Critias Empire
“My personal definition of exploration is the player going out into the world, finding something, and then bringing it back. That thing could be knowledge — for example, ‘there is a good source of berries here’ — rather than, or in addition to, actual berries. See also the last part of the Hero’s Journey theory on storytelling.
I think most game designers would understand exploration as uncovering the map and finding new things therein.
It’s hard to think of a game that gets it wrong. There are definitely games that on the surface appear to have exploration but in fact are more like puzzles. For example, the game Carto — I never worked out if the islands were procedurally generated or not, but I suspect not, and therefore it becomes a bit of a puzzle figuring out how to fit all the map pieces together. Which is not to take anything away from that game, as it’s really great at what it does (a cutesy adventure). Most of the time, if exploration goes wrong, it’s more because it’s just a bit poorly implemented — like units not having enough movement and too many obstacles like mountains and rivers to cross, making it feel stodgy.
Among purely 4X games, Old World adds an extra dimension of ‘do I even spend my orders to explore?’ It’s a bit sad, as exploration slows right down towards the end of the game when orders become a limiting factor in other areas like wars. But at the start, it’s great that you can spend up to four orders to really do a lot of exploration in a turn, or do a little and save orders for other things.
It also stops explorer-unit spam. In one game of Humankind I played, I built an early ship unit, which let me discover the goodie huts — or whatever the special exploration points are called in that game — on water. One of the rewards can be getting a second ship, which can rapidly snowball and soon lead to having a huge navy all over the map, having just built one ship. It was cool and fun, but a bit immersion-breaking.
As for how to do it differently, in Critias Empire at the moment it doesn’t really scratch that itch of discovering cool new stuff. It feels more like the ‘scanning’ mechanic that some city-builder and colony-builder games have. You’re just spending resources to reveal a random patch of land, rather than moving a unit. (It’s even called ‘survey’ rather than ‘explore.’)
From a game-design perspective, moving units (versus scanning) gives a stronger opportunity cost: if you move an explorer unit north and next turn change your mind, you’ve got to spend a turn just getting back to your start point. So it forces you to commit. Plus you can spend precious early-game resources to build a second unit and double your exploration potential. It also leads to some higher-level strategies, like exploring in a loop or exploring in a straight line until you find your neighbour or the coast.
I’m mulling changing to unit-based exploration in Critias Empire for these reasons.
If I ever make a Critias Empire 2, I want to do something really quite different. I would have regular 4X-style, unit-based exploration with a map that starts mostly hidden. But I would also have the concept of ‘expeditions,’ where you assemble an expedition, send them off with an objective, and then they come back some turns later, revealing a much longer-distance section of the map. It would be a little bit random what they discover. The concept being to recreate something like the Viking sagas, the Franklin expedition, or the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama (there are loads from history, and not just European ones) — where a new continent was discovered, a new sea passage to distant lands found, or a river mapped right into the heart of a continent.
Other things that come to mind: Endless Legend‘s exploration had a feature where at some point — you got far enough in the story or researched a tech (I forget which) — about two-thirds through the game, you could go back to all the ruins you had previously investigated and re-investigate them to gain new goodies or trigger new story points. That worked quite well, I thought. At the very least, it’s exciting to roll the dice again and have a second shot at the lucky dip. I can see how, in a historical 4X, it would be the discovery of archaeology, and suddenly you can go back and re-discover things.
I think Imperial Ambitions has some neat exploration ideas along this line, from what I remember of playing the demo and talking to the dev (Aoiti) way back. You could start doing palaeontology, geology, and discovering new foods and trade goods, if I recall correctly — which of course was a big part of that era in world history (potatoes from the Americas, and so on).
Another angle could be exploration in terms of slowly revealing an ecosystem and how it works, if someone were making an environmentally conscious city-builder or strategy game. So you would have this first dimension of discovering that this tile is forest, this tile is mountains, and so on. And then a second dimension of discovering that this tile contains this ecosystem, with these animals and plants.
Another 4X game I’ve been following closely is Folk Emerging, and speaking to the dev (Curious Dynamics), it seems there’s quite a complex system in there for food webs. I think the idea is that if you overhunt mammoths, they go extinct — but also, the knock-on effects impact other sources of food or materials that depended on that now-missing piece of the ecosystem. It tries to simulate for the player that decision space of survival versus sustainability versus wanting to grow your tribe.
A bit tangential maybe, but going all the way back to the start, it comes down to what information the player needs to make decisions and how you reveal hidden information.”
Conclusion: The Frontier Never Closes
Exploration is the spark that lights the fuse. It is where curiosity meets consequence, where a single tile reveal can cascade into an entirely different strategy.
As we’ve seen, the best exploration phases share a common thread: they make the world feel alive and worth interacting with, whether through dopamine-rich discoveries, meaningful resource tension, or the simple thrill of naming a mountain.
The developers we’ve heard from demonstrate just how many creative avenues remain open. From Postbop’s dopamine-focused design and competitive rebalancing in Rogue Hex, to James Coote’s vision of expedition-based discovery in a future Critias Empire, the genre is far from running out of ideas.
If anything, exploration itself is being explored — reimagined, iterated on, and expanded in ways that the original 4X pioneers could scarcely have imagined.
What unites every good example is a respect for the player’s agency. The best exploration phases don’t just hand you information; they make you earn it, weigh it, and act on it under pressure. They reward curiosity without punishing caution too harshly, and they ensure that what you find out there genuinely matters for the hundreds of turns that follow.
So the next time you boot up a 4X, pay attention to those opening moments — the fog lifting, the first scout stepping into the unknown, the map slowly taking shape under your decisions.
That is where the magic lives. And if a game gets that right, the rest of the Xs have a fighting chance.
“Not all those who wander are lost.” â J.R.R. Tolkien
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