Search
One of the options a kingdom ruler has in Shadowmere is to use Rangers to explore. By sending your rangers to various kind of missions you get many different results. Generally all of the exploration outcomes depend on the number and % experience of your rangers, as well as the racial search modifier you have. There are four exploration types that you can use: explore for land, explore for maps, search for the unknown and hunt for food. Each one has its uses as I will analyse right away.
Explore for Land Searching for land is sending out your rangers to find more land next to your borders which can be taken by your kingdom and make it bigger. In effect, you get more land for your kingdom. The amount of land found is related to your current land count, your rangers and your racial search modifier. The more land you have, the less land you will find with this explore type.
Explore for Maps Searching for maps sends out your rangers to find the location of other kingdoms. This means kingdoms that have a score between half your score and double your score. A kingdom's map is needed in order to attack this kingdom, spy it, cast spells on it, invite it in an alliance or send to it PM.
Search for the Unknown The search for the unknown is like playing the roulette, or maybe a Russian Roulette I should say. Generally it results in your rangers finding maps, food, abandoned goldmines (this means give you extra gold), mana fluxes (they give extra mana) or nothing at all. They may even find lost artifacts, troops that will join your kingdom, big chunks of half-built land, beneficial spells cast on your kingdom or equipment for your troops, and many more things that you will probably like. But there is a backfire in this whole unknown exploration "thing". There exists the possibility of bad things happening on your kingdom, which sometimes can be disastrous. Examples are the casting of destructive duration spells on your kingdom, sink holes (they drain your mana) and attacks by raiders. There is also the Ancient Disease somewhere out there waiting your rangers to find it (for more info on that check here). Getting some of these results in a bad time can be disastrous for your kingdom.
Hunt for Food Referred to by many as Ranger Farming (or RF for short), the hunt for food action sends your rangers to the lands of your kingdom to hunt for animals and get food for your subjects. The amount of food each ranger can find is [racial search mod]*[ranger %]/100. The maximum amount of food you can get with RF is 100 per land, except some races that can get 125 food per land (check races section of the compendium guide). For example if you play vampires (search racial mod 2) and have 10k rangers of 500%, they can find 10000*2*500/100=100000 food. If your land is 800 this means the max food you can get per turn of RF is 80000. In such a case you get 80k food instead of 100k since your land is not enough for the rangers to hunt at their full potential. If you had 1000 land, then you could get that 100k food per turn your rangers can find. If you have 2000 land you can get 200k food per turn of RF, so on our current example its better to hire more rangers.
Exploration is a great tool for a Shadowmere player; try to utilize it as best as you can.