About monthly rituals

[Herode]

When you set a mage to monthly cast some searching sites rituals (Arcane Probing etc.), there is a high chance that he will soon or late search on capitol provinces. We know that capitol provinces do not have hidden sites, am I wrong ? Then I wonder why mage search such sites, thus spoiling time & gems...

[Edi]

Site searching spell autotargeting targets provinces that do not already have the path searched at all and do not already have two or more sites. If a capital only happens to have one site, it gets targeted, period. The mechanics do not make any difference between a capital and a normal province.

Most recent big thread on site searching
Older big thread on site searching
It's generally a good idea to do a search on a topic like this, but I suppose this is going to be in the FAQ since I get tired of rehashing the same things over and over again.

[MaxWilson]

You (the player) are aware that capitals don't have hidden sites, but your mages aren't. They probably figure, "Hey, why not be thorough?"

-Max

[thejeff]

I keep meaning to make a mod that adds a no-gem no-function site to all the one capital site only nations, just to avoid this problem.

But I'm lazy.

[Agrajag]

As a temporary solution, would site searching the capital without a spell prevent mages from autotargeting that capital with site searching spells of that path?
If it works, it's a way to waste only magetime instead of magetime+gems. (and probably less magetime, since the mage might be able to search [and thus protect from] more than one path at a time)

[thejeff]

Yes, it would. Not sure why I've never thought of bothering.