Suggestion to autocasting search spells

[Folket]

At the moment mages searches the provinces in order of numbers and skip any province with two or more sites.

Better would be if they started to search in empty provinces, then continues to those with one site, later two sites, three sites and last provinces that have been search with mages of lower level then 4. This would allow for more efficiency early on and would allow people who wants to search for everything everywhere to do that automatically.

It would also be nice if mages recognized capitals and did not search them.

[thejeff]

I'm not sue that starting with empty provinces is more efficient.

Are you more likely to find a site in grasslands where nothing has been found or wastes where you've already found a site.

I'd prefer it to prioritize terrain where sites of that path are more likely to be found. Considering both chance of a site in that terrain and the number of sites of that path available in that terrain.

Priority for me, though, would be not searching capitals and not skipping provinces with 2 sites.

[Humakty]

Are you sure they avoid provinces with sites ? It seems to me they avoid all provinces that have been searched other way by a mage. Quite frustrating to have to hand pick provinces just because you had a 1X mage searching into it at the beginning of the game.

[Folket]

They avoid provinces with two or more sites and any provinces that have been searched.

The priority of terrain is probably even better but propably more demanding to implement.

[thejeff]

Yeah, the terrain priority is an ideal. I'd also like a pony.

Essentially, I'm eventually going to want to search everything anyway. If I really care about the order, it's likely when I have minimal income and I'm trying to get enough gems to finance the rest of the site searches. Or I'm trying to avoid searching vulnerable provinces. That I'm going to do manually anyway.
Other than that I want it to search everywhere that could have sites. Skip capitals, skip anything already searched to lvl 4, skip anything with 4 sites already found. That's it.

Don't get me wrong. I love autocasting search spells. It's a drastic drop in micromanagement. Fixing it so I don't have to scroll through the province list to see if anything has been missed is all I care about adding. Efficiency improvements to the order are just icing on the cake.

[Sombre]

The most annoying thing to me is that they tend to search from South to North and I'm almost always fighting South, so they always try to search provinces right on the border, meaning I have to manually do it every time, or potentially give my enemy free sites.

[llamabeast]

How are you always fighting South?

[jutetrea]

I eighth this notion!

no sites
1 site
2 sites
3 sites
Searched by lvl 1
Searched by lvl 2
Searched by lvl 3
Always skip capitals

[thejeff]

Do we understand the site placing algorithm well enough to say that there's a better chance of finding a site in province with less known sites than in one with more known sites?

Or is it just the statistics I don't understand...

[Hadrian_II]

jutetrea said:

I eighth this notion!

no sites
1 site
2 sites
3 sites
Searched by lvl 1
Searched by lvl 2
Searched by lvl 3
Always skip capitals

I would also like this implemented.