Succession

It has come to my realization that after retiring your lead wolf early, that all the biomes your wolves have scouted just disappears. I trust the developer's judgment, but at the same time it's a little disappointing. After all those hours of exploring new biomes just suddenly all goes to waste after appointing a new leader?

Though I could be overreacting. Do you guys have any thoughts on this?

It sounds pretty painful, yeah.  I'm hoping that by the time I retire my lead, my scouts will be good enough that it's going to go a lot faster than it did the first time around!

While I'm sure it's annoying (I haven't retired a lead yet so I'm not sure exactly how that moment of realization feels) I can see the reasoning behind why it happens. If you think about it, the scout really just does quick sweeps of the biomes. It is your lead who really takes the time to learn the details. Find the trails, fight the enemies, interact with the environment and really fully explore. The other wolves in your pack stay in your home biome. So when a new lead takes over, of course they won't know anything about the other biomes, they've only lived in their one territory. So the scout has to go explore and get updated information for this new lead to make sure all is clear for them to go and continue to explore the other lands.

I like Scouting more than Rescouting (being able to send the Scout out without full energy+seeing that bar fill up is satisfying), so I like that it completely resets occasionally. 

Changing the leader won’t happen too often - the breeding male is a separate role so there’s no economic pressure to change the lead. Most people, I assume, will wait until their current lead gets old to replace them rather than pay the GC fee to have a different wolf head in the corner of the screen.

At the rate I’m going with only one NBW Scout, most of my first leader’s life my Scouts will only be able to Rescout. As stats go up, the time it takes to uncover the map will go down. There’ll be enough of a gap between map wipes that it should feel like a nice change of pace when it actually happens.

I've said this many times, and I'm going to say it again.

Scouting will get easier as you get scouts with higher stats, which is very likely when you naturally retire your lead. At that point, you don't exactly even need to buy a high statted wolf, but instead of just breed it. And higher stats make your scout breeze trough the biomes faster. For us, it takes a while as we all just have starter wolves. 

So at that point, the reset isn't going to hurt as much as people think it would.

That's very good to know.