[thejeff]

It will only sometimes target your own capital. It may be by nation, but I'm not sure. I know some games it has and some it hasn't.

It will target the next province in the list (by province number) that hasn't been searched when the mage finishes casting his search spell. If you have another mage casting the same search spell on that province, but he casts after the autosearcher, that province hadn't been searched when the autosearcher chose his next target, so he will cast on it again. That's why I do manual searching from the bottom up.

Worse, anything that happens after spellcasting isn't considered. Newly conquered provinces aren't possible targets, but if you lose a province already targeted it will still be searched.

This isn't going to be an easy fix. To do it right, they'll have to make some significant changes in the order things are done in turn processing.