I really prefer the current system -- it works nicely, and its hardly a "suicide mission" unless your opponent is sitting a number of ships on the jump point itself. Which is valuable information in and of itself.

albeith ... just for consideration: a "launch sensor drones" could be an cap ship ability. the more points invested, the more systems can be probed (i.e. if you are in a crossways then on higher levels drones will be launched to two or three systems or they just go a bit further) and if the probes get a certain survivability - think of sensor optimised drones or highly mobile ones - so you can see the graw well for half a minute or a minute, it could be nice support ability.

for a race that is constantly on the run from an ancient enemy it would kind of make sense to have something like that *cough* vasari *cough*.

Nah, anything that could remotely scout a system would give you all the benefit of information and no risk, and it would trivialize scouting after the first 10-15 minutes when you're mapping out every planet. Especially anything that can scan more than one system, because that would eliminate any chance of a trap.

Trap being leaving a few ships to bait the enemy into attacking a seemingly weakly defended planet, leaving your main fleet one jump away at the edge of the grav well and waiting for the enemy fleet to fly deep into the trap's gravity well so it would take a long time to get out before jumping your own fleet in

Leave as is is my vote, unless a sensor dampener is also introduced along with it to be able to keep things hidden. But then that becomes even more rock/paper/scissors

This discussion is sort of about a different thing, but to answer your questions:



Nope, it's just an auto-cast ability of scout ships.



You won't see it deploying, but you'll know you have a probe on a planet if: 1) Mousing over the planet, the info card will say you have a probe at that planet if you do and 2) You'll be able to see ships passing through without having any of your ships in its grav well.




Nope, you can have both enabled, one doesn't override the other. But deploying probes has a rather long cooldown and a rather high antimatter cost, so if you leave your scout in auto-explore mode it won't be able to drop a probe at each planet it passes on the way.

I think an in-system fog of war would make sensors like this viable. Also, like I said, if the drone had a limited active time, like a minute or two, that way it wouldn't be possible to have permanent intel in a neighboring system. Even better, if the scout ship spawned a small drone satellite that launched to the next system and deployed once it arrived, this way it is possible to target and destroy quickly.

Not going to happen. The grav wells are much too small for this.

Um, they do have a limit. Its a long limit at max tech, but they have a time limit.

It already does. In fact it looks exactly like a colony pod launch, except there's only one pod.