[thejeff]

Except that nothing else works that way. Normally you can stop his order, change it to something else, change it back etc.
But in this case, you can still change the order, but you can't change it back. It doesn't fit. It's obviously an artifact of the order the program executes orders in. It's a bug.

You can come up with justifications for it, but they're just after the fact justifications.

Well, if you can come up with a good, simple algorithm for "provinces you aren't likely to lose", combine it with the other obvious strategy of targeting provinces more likely to have sites of that path, weighted to keep everyone happy, I'd love to see it.

Generally, by mid-game I've given up trying to prioritize site searching and am just going up or down the list, because it's too much work for me to figure out which provinces are best to search.

I do find it amusing that you're not bothered by it targeting provinces you have lost, but are bothered by it targeting vulnerable provinces.