Bug: Voice of Tiamat: Missed the memo?

[Starshine_Monarch]

I have a single player game going as Atlantis. Once I got to conjuration 4, I had about 80 some water gems to spend on massed remote site searching with VoT. To try and speed things along, I select my Deep Seers all at once and set them to cast the spell, not paying attention to exactly where they're being aimed, because the computer is supposed to do that, right?

Next turn I get messages saying that all of my Seers had cast successfully, but only one of them found anything. For a spell with such a wide scope, pretty suspicious. Once I read each message carefully, I found out that my deep seers had cast VoT on the same exact province 10 times! Oh boy was I mad. I thought all the automatic site searching was fixed in an earlier patch, right? The AI picks different targets when casting this way using any other remote searching spell. I decided to play on to see if that was all the bug entailed.

Later on in the game, I found out that when set to monthly casting, even after picking their initial target manually, they always target the province captured the same turn, even if another sage is already aiming his VoT there, and even when that's not the case, they tend to overlap their searching targets. They'll even target provinces already hit by VoT when there are plenty of other, unsearched targets to choose from.

Has anyone else had the same experience with this spell?

[vfb]

Yep, VoT didn't get fixed like other site searching spells, you need to select the target province manually.

[Edi]

Hmm, I need to check that. I think I've seen VoT target just like all the autotargeting search spells.

The snag? If there is any level of any element searches done, it won't autotarget a province. So just Lv 1 search in any single element torpedoes VoT as an automatic spell.

[vfb]

Originally Posted by Edi

Hmm, I need to check that. I think I've seen VoT target just like all the autotargeting search spells.

The snag? If there is any level of any element searches done, it won't autotarget a province. So just Lv 1 search in any single element torpedoes VoT as an automatic spell.

It may have been changed in a recent patch. The first casting currently targets the first unsearched province correctly. But additional casts in the same month will all target that same province.

I haven't seen the problem with it targeting an already-search province when there are unsearched provinces available, but I switched to manual targeting because of the first problem.

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by vfb

It may have been changed in a recent patch. The first casting currently targets the first unsearched province correctly. But additional casts in the same month will all target that same province.

I haven't seen the problem with it targeting an already-search province when there are unsearched provinces available, but I switched to manual targeting because of the first problem.

I've been playing for a year, and this was the behavior I've seen that entire time - no changes.

[Edi]

Originally Posted by vfb

It may have been changed in a recent patch. The first casting currently targets the first unsearched province correctly. But additional casts in the same month will all target that same province.

I haven't seen the problem with it targeting an already-search province when there are unsearched provinces available, but I switched to manual targeting because of the first problem.

Thanks for the clarification. I haven't been throwing around enough of them to notice, so that makes sense. It's been reported on the beta bug thread now.

[thejeff]

Is this a problem with Akashic as well? I almost never use it, so I can't remember if it behaves the same way as VoT, but it's the only other multipath search spell, so it may share features.

Was VoT changed by the recent fix to target provinces that have already been searched in one path?

[vfb]

I've still got a old game in my folders where I had the Ultimate Gateway ... Acashic Record looks like it works fine. At least, it's targeting all the provinces with less than 2 discovered sites, and ignoring a few manual searches. Each cast in a single turn automatically targets a new province.

Unfortunately I've got too many lousy provinces in that game and not enough pearls to see if it'll target provinces with 2 or more discovered sites, once all the less-than-2-site provinces have been searched.