[thejeff]

You may be misunderstanding the problem. It's not that the province is searched and then taken on the turn the spell is cast. That's expected and can occur casting the spells manually.
It's that the automated caster can target a province that is then taken, leaving the caster with orders to cast on a province you no longer own. This can't be duplicated manually, since you can't select that province.

It could be fixed with a quick cleanup check after the battle phase to clear out any monthly orders no longer valid. (Or preferably re-target to a now valid province.)

Actually a better fix would be to handle all of next months monthly orders later in the sequence. This would let you use this months gem income on monthly spells.


As for the current order, it looks to me like you are right about the intent, except that it skips some provinces, often, but not always and not all, capitols.