Site searching spells - AI select likely province?

[thejeff]

No, I've never seen it.

Going through all the criteria just to be sure.
Some should be blatantly obvious, but I'm trying to cover all the bases.

Let's see: You own the province.
You haven't searched it manually, even 1 level in that path.
No sites found in any path? (less than 2 really, including mines and the like)
Lowest numbered province meeting those criteria.
Gems left at the end of the turn. (searching takes place before gem income)

What do they target when you set them back to searching? Their current province?

If your capital has only one site and is the lowest unsearched province, then yes your mages will try to cast on it every time, until you let them. But if they're going back to defend it shouldn't be that.

(I've been thinking of a mod that just adds empty sites to all the one site capitals, just to avoid this.)

[Foodstamp]

It's probably just a combination of the above. I thought the capital was excluded.

In Vanilla LA game this turn a mage I had set to monthly casting the Haruspex (spelling?) checked a water province then quit. In this game I have plenty of nature gems and it was the first province he checked. I have checked a handful of provinces in that game by site searching with n2 commanders.

In Priori one of my northern most provinces refused to be checked. This was a low pop mountain province that I had to manually search with every different type of mage. Also in Priori I reached a point where my death mages quit searching and I had to search a handful of provinces manually. This occured after taking far south territory from Shinuyami.

Uakari is the game where the one 3500 pop no magic site province refused to be searched. It is the northern most province in my holdings, or second northernmost.

[Edi]

It sometimes gets weird with provinces near the edges of the map, usually near the top or bottom edge.