Quote:
	
	
		
			
				vfb said: 
Well, here's a really simple algorithm that would be better than the current one IMO. 
 
Maintain a CurrentSearch list of sites being searched in current month. 
 
Code:
  
* Loop through owned sites to find next province to search: 
- Capitol? Discard. 
- 4 sites known? Discard. 
- In CurrentSearch?  Discard. 
- Rank =  
     100 * (4 - (current search path level searched in province) 
   + 10 * (4 - (# of known sites))  
   + (total of other paths already searched in province) 
- Rank < CurrentRank? Discard. 
- CurrentRank = Rank, add to CurrentSearch list 
 
  
 
Needs some modification to handle Tiamat, but so does the current search.  
			
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 I don't see the reason for the number of other paths searched term.  I think the number of sites found is the important term.
I do agree that your algorithm is considerably superior to the current one and it's certainly easy to do.
As for the multi-site spells I think they can be reasonably approximated by treating it as the sum of the ratings of casting all the components.  Since the ranking is a unitless value it doesn't matter that Tiamat scores 4x as high as the single-path spells.