If, on a single board, all Explores are cancled by Wilds tokens, does the Escalation effect still happen on that board?
Escalation: After Exploring, on each board, pick a land of the shown terrain. If it has a building, add one blight. Otherwise, add one town.
In the game we assumed yes, becasue it doesn't specify "After succesfully Exploring[...]", but I wasn't sure.
Yes, that's correct.
I've been thinking about nomenclature for Invader Actions lately, and come to the conclusion that some things - that escalation being a prime example - probably ought to say, eg, "After the Explore step" rather than "After Exploring"; that makes it clear that even if none of the named Invader Actions were successful that the thing still happens - it's specifying timing, not contingency.
(So "the [Ravage/Build/Explore] step" would refer to 'that part of the Invader phase when they Explore' and "Explore" to the action they may take in each of various lands. The only thing I need to figure out is whether the situation where there are 2 Invader Cards would result in one 'step' or two.)
Not a playtester and merely theorycrafting, but from my perspective as a teacher the answer is one step that (in that particular instance) contains multiple actions.
Agreed that a step contains multiple actions, but there's actually three levels:
Current nomenclature uses "action" (or "Ravage" / "Build" / "Explore") for all of these, which is messy/imprecise. I'm sure the top one wants it own term, because that fixes timing specifications (as per the France question above). I'm not sure whether the bottom two want distinguishing, but they might - eg, the Fortification Event says "Invaders Build in one terrain not shown under any Invader Action"; that replicates the middle level, not the bottom one. But a bunch of other cards do things at the 3rd level.
(I'm stuck here the same place I'm stuck on some formalisms for effect resolution: finding an appropriate word that makes sense given the structure and is compatible with the already-published nomenclature - ie, merely adds new terms rather than redefining ones already in use. Perhaps some quality time with a thesaurus will help. :)