magic site searches

[krpeters]

This reminds me of something that I don't like in Dom3 relative to the original dominions -- it is now *harder* to cast site searching spells, from a UI perspective.

When playing the original dominions, I had a sheet of graph paper with all the province numbers listed, and I'd tick off which ones I'd searched after casting the spell. I could easily punch in new province numbers when I cast new searches.

In Dom3, you can't just type in the province number, you have to find the province on the map, which means I have to click away until I find the province number I'm looking for. And there's no way to see from within the casting menu which provinces have/haven't been searched, so I still have to rely on my trusty sheet for prov. numbers...

The current system is great for manually site earching, but still needs improvement for the search spells.

[Saxon]

Not to grumble but I will anyway...

The first province offered to be searched does not have a full search at 9 done, which is nice. However, once you pick it for a search, the next mage you use to cast the same search spell (in the same turn) gives you the same first choice. It would be great if you were given a choice of all provinces not searched to 9 when you cast a spell. Further, since I am already asking, it would be cool if that choice indicated that you had already issued orders to search a given province.

While you are at it, I would like free beer every Friday afternoon, preferably ice cold.

[llamabeast]

It would definitely be a lot better if the automatic choice of province when site searching was more carefully done. Ideally, it should:

- Choose wastelands, mountains, forests and not-farms preferentially
- Avoid any captured capitals (unsearched but you know nothing will be there)
- Choose sites you've searched to a lower level last, searching those already searched to level 1 first, then 2, then 3
- Most importantly, take account of other site-searching orders already given (I understand this might be difficult).

If it took all these things into account, then you could just give a couple of people monthly casting orders on the site-searching and leave them to it, and they'd make the same decisions you would. When there are no sites left to search they should cancel the order.

This might all be a bit over-optimistic . But there's no harm in describing the ideal solution, even if it would be hard to implement.

[Loren]

How do you make it automatically pick search targets anyway??

[thejeff]

If you assign a mage to cast a site search spell as a monthly ritual (Shift-M), he will pick a new province to target every month.

As I understand it, he picks the first province that, when he chooses his new target, is owned by you and not searched yet. There are two problems. The most obvious is that it doesn't consider provinces that are already being targeted this month, so only one auto searcher can be used per path.

The more subtle is in that "when he chooses his new target". This is done during the ritual casting phase, apparently right after he casts.
If other mages are also using that searching spell, targeted manually, they may or may not have cast already. Thus a province searched later in the turn may be targeted.
Also, since battles occur after the new target is chosen, provinces conquered that turn are not considered and provinces lost can be searched.

Whatever is being used to determine whether a province is a capital seems broken as well. Some capitals are searched, some are not. Sometimes non-capital provinces are skipped for no apparent reason.

All told, it's still worth using, but I hope it can be fixed.

[Loren]

I tried that once and got the same place searched each turn until I stopped it.

[FaceLess]

Another usefull improvement might be that the message is from the province searched, ie provinnce X has been searched and Y magic sites were found. Sort of similar to the blood hunting message. Then goto province and you can choose that to see which sites have been found