It would be nice if adding more scouts would increase the exploration rate, but instead they just end up following each other around and don't increase the exploration rate much beyond what would be achieved by having just 1 scout.  This algorithm seems to be the same as was used in gal civ 2 which gets even worse if you have scouts that don't have the same speed.

Suggestions on how to fix it:

1) You could take the explorable border region of the players space and place exploration nodes on it that are as far apart from each other as possible, and then have each scout head towards the closest one of these.

2) When looking for a new exploration target, you could assume that the other explorers are going to successfully get to their next 2 exploration targets, and then choose an exploration target based on that information.

3) You can eliminate any exploration target area that required passing through the current future path of any other explorer, unless absolutely necessary.

4) A combination of the 1 and either 2 or 3.

PS:  It would be nice is survey ships looked at all other survey ships they could see, and would not pursue anomalies that would be reached by other visible survey ships first.  This might be a good thing to do for all auto ship algorithms in the game.  It would also be nice if, when a ship does miss out on an anomaly, it would look for another instead of just giving up entirely on being automated and require user input to resume searching again.

Thanks in advance,

TheChucklesStart