Exploring

Explore missions discover new land. Each mission lasts 6 months by default. More explorers find more land; owning more land also raises the food cost to send them.

Explorers

Town centers provide explorers (usually 6 per town center; some civilizations differ). When you launch a mission, people leave your population to become explorers and discover land each month until the mission ends.

Land types

• All land — finds plains, forest, and mountains (most plains, then forest, then mountains)
• Specific land — mountains, forest, or plains only — more of that type, but nothing else

Horses

You can equip explorers with horses (1× / 2× / 3×) to lengthen the trip:

1× means one horse per explorer, 2× means two, and so on.

Early game, skip horses while explore food cost is still low. A common rule of thumb:

• Most civs: no horses under ~300 food per explorer
• Turks: under ~150
• Japanese: under ~225

Later, when cost is high, longer horse trips can pay off. See Protection start for the land-race opener, plus Population and Buildings (town centers).