Radar or some fantasy equivalent giving a large field of vision.

When playing many turn based games, much of the effort is focused on building your cities or planets. Then it seems to be a race to get combat units out to the opposing cities.  This seems to lack a strategic approach and certain tools would bring another level to the game, specifically tools like radar. Compensating by making a large number of low level units and spreading them out becomes taxing. As an example in Civ IV, it gets so expensive to make a navy fleet just for simple patrol to prevent the surprise invasion that drops in only 3 moves away from your main city.

So I suggest that each faction be able to produce something that can be used to monitor activities beyond one’s borders, even into enemy territory. It should be relatively cheap for each unit (with no continuing maintenance penalty) but expensive enough that the player has to make a choice between several combat units or a large field of detection.  I think the detection units should be small non-combat units that can be blended into background graphics with varying degrees of view ranges, say 3 – 5 tiles.

Some suggestions for

Kingdoms:  eagles, owls, bunnies (yes bunnies), deer, trees, clouds, peasants, scouts

Empires: ravens, crows, vultures, rats, other predators, smoke, scouts, toothless old women in huts…

Rats and peasants would be more of city monitoring (construction, buildings, soldier type and number) versus birds viewing large areas of land.