city question
 

When your city is under siege, do you still get the gems from that province?

Re: city question
 

Yes.

If you Use the S button you can even search the province for more magic sites with the mages in the castle. All of the found magic sites will conveniently be located inside the walls as well.

Re: city question
 

If you are sieging you can also still search for magic sites. Any found will give the gems to the defender of the castle. Gold is split in half and defender and attacker get half of it (iirc). But the sieger sets the tax rate.

Re: city question
 

OT: That must mean you can see other sides' searches. I had always thought you had to do your own site-searching to see anything??

Re: city question
 

If a site is found all players can see it. But you cannot see the paths your enemy has searched in.

Re: city question
 

What I really wish about revealed sites is that the game would track what you can deduce about how someone else has searched a province. That is, if there is a F3 site visible, then mark the province as searched to F3. It would make it much easier to make guesses about what's still worth searching.

In MP, how much do people usually search provinces taken from the enemy? Do you assume he's searched everything? Everything in his main paths? Complicated algorithms involving the path levels of his mages and the number of sites of each type he's found?
I'm assuming you've staked a serious claim to the territory and aren't just swapping it back and forth. Maybe you've beaten one opponent and are at peace for the moment.

Re: city question
 

This is bad news! :( I had recently discovered auto-turn-mage-search, and didn't care too much that it searched provinces I was swapping with enemy or even just raiding. Now it looks like I'm just doing the AI's searching for him!

[EDIT: Also, I think my mages are searching provinces where sites have already been revealed by enemy, because they don't see it as searched as you say it doesn't show as searched.]

Re: city question
 

If you know the opponent doesn't have access to a certain type of magic (water, say) and you haven't seem them using any water Indy mages, and if you've seen that they don't have water on their pretender, it would become clear that you'd want to search water on them.

That being said, you never know if they missed a province in the busyness of attacking you. At that point, it becomes a bit of a gem-gamble, but it's low risk/low reward, so I'd probably do it. If I recall correctly, on a Dom3SA Let's play, Pythium had beaten Tien'Chi. He didn't assume that Tien'Chi had searched everything, and wasted a lot of gems...until he uncovered an Alteration bonus 20 site that Tien'Chi failed to uncover. So it can pay off, big time.

Re: city question
 

I'm usually quite anal about searching my territory as fully as possible. (After all, 2 gems is such a minor investment it's almost allways worth it.)

I will generally not remote search a province in a path of which a site allready is present
I will generally not remote search in my opponents main paths IF it looks (from conquering his territory) like he has done a decent job searching in those paths and we have reached a stage in the game were you can assume basic site-searching has been finished
I will generally not remote search at all if we're really deep into late game, UNLESS conquered territory shows one or more paths of magic sites being underrepresented, or if I saw no or very few mages of a particular path while fighting the defeated opponent.

I might be a bit more thorough when having defeated less experienced players.

In all of the above cases I will still do a manual search with mages not having anything urgent to do. (So, generally, all conquered castles will still be relatively thoroughly searched as I have my mages search there before putting them on research)
I will generally also do a couple of searches in any provinces containing no or only one site, either manually or remotely, just to test the other player's thoroughness.

If either of these two methods still turn up a couple of sites I might reconsider the no-remote-search policies above.