General Synopsis

The Scout action is an important knowledge gaining action which you will have at your disposal as soon as you gain your first faction member. It is low level compared to other knowledge actions, but is useful for learning about where secret locations are, discovering sleaze left by opponents, finding residences of people you may want to attack/recruit, and so on.

There is not much to do in this action once it has been set in motion, so you will rarely watch it happen, but you can see what it is like below.

Action "Tweak" Details

"Dig Deaper". This tweak is a little harder to use then most tweaks as you have to go searching around the district that is being scouted whilst the action is being performed. If you find a place in the district that brings up a question mark icon when clicked, then you can instruct the character performing the action to dig deeper into finding information about that particular place, to the detriment of finding general district information. This tweak is not always available; it depends on the person performing the action, current levels of information, and so on.

Action Costs / Rewards (basic level)

Force Cost: 10
Influence Cost: 0
Wealth Cost: 0
XP points available: 20

Action Walkthrough

Depending on who and what you choose as variables to the action, what you see on screen may well differ from my screenshots. This walkthough shows you how the action unfolds - for specific game help and hints about actions see other parts of my site or the manual. The ingame tutorial will also help.

All thumbnails are "clickable".

	OK - here we are wandering around the game world... how about we start the action?
	The action, as always, is started by choosing a faction member (myself in this instance) and selecting "Scout" from the list. Take note of the Force, Influence and Money costs, as well as XP points awarded upon completion.
	We are dropped into the map screen. Notice in the bottom corner we are asked to choose a district only for this action. I can choose any district - the town centre area is currently highlighted.
	I could try this Force area instead... it's where my faction member and I both live, and where I recruited him, so that has helped drum up 25% support there already.
	If I click on a district, the ideology comparison will appear. On the left is my faction ideology. On the right is the current ideology of the district in question. The number on the top shows the magnitude of the modifier which will occour after completion. Because my ideology is more force based then anything else, I will gain extra knowledge points if I do the action here, because this is an Influence area, and you always gain the best return by doing an action on the next ideology area when going clockwise around the three ideology points.
	As you can see if I were to do a scout action in a wealth district, the modifier would be 0...
	... and if I did the action in a force area, I would receive 20% fewer information points.
	However, I'm a Force kinda guy, so I'm going to scout Morozov Manor anyway. I need to know some areas where I could do a few more of my later force actions. So - everything is set and clicking on the green tick finalises everything and takes me back to the...
	...game view, where I can see my action has been put into the first available slot after the one I am currently in. You may notice the little post-it note icon next to the action indicator - this shows I have set a reminder, and the action will be played out to me automatically when the time comes for it to start. This can be set in several ways, but I did it by clicking on the bookmark icon next to the green tick in the previous screenshot.
	OK - it's the next time slot and our action is ready to begin.
	Chances are you won't view this action very often...
	... as to be perfectly honest there is not much going on.
	Our character wanders the streets looking at various places of interest...
	... occasionally stopping to jot down some interesting information.
	here he is waiting to cross the road... looking at his watch.
	And he is taking a photo of a building - I managed to get the screengrab right when the flash went off so you can't see the camera very well, but it's pretty nicely modelled.
	The action stops when the time slot draws close, and I can see that whilst the action has indeed been successful (note the green coloured marker) it has been knocked by the fact I chose an area with the same ideology. Incidentally, the game manual (not finalised yet) says that "using information actions of the same ideology as the target district will deliver the best returns", so unless I'm wrong/confused, there is something not quite right here. I'll chase this one up for you. Notice it has also gone dark now.
	If I look on the map screen, you can see my knowledge has increased by 28 point (out of 100). The current information level I currently enjoy about a district is indicated by the green bar above the mini-map in the top right hand corner.
	OK - let's have another go. This time I am going to concentrate on the wealth district "Town Centre", which, if you remember, gives a modifier of zero, so our result should be higher this time round.
	You cans see that this area is slightly nicer...
	I check out a pedestrian area with some shops (not shown, but I go in one).
	This time I get out my phone half way through and chat to a contact.
	Enough pictures - when the action finishes I return to my world window and can see that the action has been successful again, although there is no note this time, because there was no modifier.
	You can see here that I got 33 points from that action. If I had done the action in an Influence area, I would expect closer to 40 points.
	Upon completion of this action I have now gained 100 XP points, which entitles me to an upgrade... (notice the star next to my face). Clicking on it takes you to this next screen...
	... where you can see I can choose to either upgrade my Headhunt or Scout actions to 1 star. I also have 10 action upgrade points, which is currently at 0 in the screenshot as I have already put them into my charisma levels. Anyway - more about action upgrades will be detailed elsewhere on this site, not here, so I'll stop now!