Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

Saxon, isn't that Haruspex? The UW forts almost all come from nature sites, namely Kelp Fortress giving a fort of the same name. Academy Underneath and a maybe one other UW fort site are non-nature and they are unique.

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

Academy Underneath seems pretty common though. Seen it in both games where I was using Voice of Tiamat extensively.

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

Looking at the site DB there are 3 possibilities for underwater forts from magic sites:

W1: academy underneath, uncommon freq. (NOT unique)
E2: firbolg fortress, Unique, may also appear on land, uncommon freq.
N1: kelp fort, non-unique, sea only (not deep sea), common freq.

I think I got that right, although last night I was making a lot of dumb math mistakes talking about growth scales, so feel free to double-check.

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

Ah, okay. My mistake then, thanks for pointing it out, Micah. I'm not quite as current on the uniqueness in Dom3 as I was in Dom2 since I just copied those stats and assumed them to be accurate until DrPraetorius did his code diving expedition into the realm of magic sites, at which points I just copy-pasted a few columns and a few formulas to display things and drag-copied them downward without specifically going over each item separately.

I just came to work and I'll probably check it anyway when I get home, to get it out of the way. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

Academy Underneath can't be unique, I have had in 3/4 games where I have been searching water provinces.

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

EDIT: Academy Underneath is unique. It's an uncommon site, so it will appear in most games, especially since the number of possible underwater sites is much lower than the number of sites that can appear on land.

This much can be said of ALL unique sites: They can have any frequency, meaning that there are unique sites that are common. In most games of any size, especially if the map is large and site frequency is high, they will be found. If you found several of the same site, it was not unique.

The rare uniques are another matter, because rare sites only appear if the reroll for site determination also comes up with a rare site (all rare sites are rerolled on first occurrence).

Note that unique sites may appear more than once if they were scripted in the map file. The reason is that sites are randomly assigned first and only after that the map file scripting is added.

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

Thanks Edi, thats very interesting. I have been wondering a bit about the concrete mechanics of magic site distribution.

Could you - or somebody else perhaps - tell me:

1) What is the difference between common/uncommon/rare sites? You mention someting about a reroll being required for a rare site to appear?

2) How often does the different site types appear? I would guess (from experience) that at least 70% of the magic sites are common sites, but perhaps I have just not looked hard enough for the rare (and often high-level) sites.

3) The graphics icons of the magic sites differ - even among sites of the same magic type (fire, death, earth, etc.). Does th different icons indicate the rarity of the site (common, uncommon, rare) or the magic path level (1-4) you need to find the site?

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

1) There are 4 possible slots for sites per each province. First slot is checked against site probability. If site appears, it is randomly determined. Then next slot is checked for site probability. As soon as a site slot comes up as empty, it and all the slots following it will remain empty. So if the first one comes up empty, no sites at all in the province.

Common sites have a greater likelihood to appear than uncommon sites, which again have a greater probability than rare sites. If the random determination results in a rare site, that result is rerolled and the second result will be the actual site that appears. In other words, a rare site appears only if the reroll also comes up as rare.


2) The exact percentages of common/uncommon/rare are not known, but I'd throw an off-the-cuff guesstimate of 60%/30%/10%, give or take something. It'd need some statistical analysis of a fairly large sample size with controlled terrains to get reliable results, and even those would be rough results.

3) The relationship of site icons to their level and rarity is not clearly established, but there seems to be some correlation, in some cases at least. The correlation seems to be more closely to the site level than to rarity.

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

Is this really so? I usually play with 30-35% sites, and according to what you said, the site frequency for, let's say 30% sites would be:

0 sites: 70% provinces
1 site: 21% provinces
2 sites: 6.3% provinces
3 sites: 1.9% provinces
4 sites: 0.8% provinces

Even though I haven't done any statistical testing, I am fairly confident this is not what I'm seeing. Even for 50% site frequency (say, the abovementioned 30% plus terrain bonus) the numbers would be 50 (0), 25 (1), 12.5 (2), 6.25 (3), 6.25 (4).

As opposed to a binomial distribution, which for example for 30% sites would look like this: 24 (0), 41 (1), 26 (2), 8 (3), 1 (4).


K.

Re: Site Searching Strategy
 

I'll take your word for that. I barely scraped through statistical and probability math at high school and failed every course on the subject after that.

It's not that I have a problem understanding the results of statistical analysis and probabilities, but trying to figure out the actual process from raw data, I screw that up every time.

So if the binomial model looks like it fits the observations better, then it's probably more accurate.