Does My Site Search Mage Know Something I Don't?

[PyroStock]

I conquer province#90 and province#10 (furthest south & lowest # province I own). #10 has 2 magic sites found by the previous owner (an AI). When I attempt to site search with any mage they don't automatically target #10 and will either target another or ignore it as if it's already been searched.
Is this a bug or ?

[Endoperez]

There was athread about this recently. The mages don't want to search provinces with two or more sites.

[VedalkenBear]

And, well, they sort of _do_ know something you don't. The distribution of sites in a province can be adequately modeled with the binomial distribution, with the following numbers for probabilities in the case of Middle Era default:

0 - 0.1296
1 - 0.3456
2 - 0.3456
3 - 0.1536
4 - 0.0256

The chances that a province will have greater than 2 sites is only 0.1792, and so the computer is programmed to avoid those sites in favor of those provinces that have fewer sites.

It would be nice to see this implementation enhanced to work for specific terrain types, or to simply give the player the choice of threshold.

[Loren]

VedalkenBear said:
And, well, they sort of _do_ know something you don't. The distribution of sites in a province can be adequately modeled with the binomial distribution, with the following numbers for probabilities in the case of Middle Era default:

0 - 0.1296
1 - 0.3456
2 - 0.3456
3 - 0.1536
4 - 0.0256

The chances that a province will have greater than 2 sites is only 0.1792, and so the computer is programmed to avoid those sites in favor of those provinces that have fewer sites.

It would be nice to see this implementation enhanced to work for specific terrain types, or to simply give the player the choice of threshold.

What I would like to see is that all site-searching spells auto-target the province with the highest odds of finding a site, but that they target all provinces where a site could be found even if they have already been searched by a low-level mage. The info on the mage should say what the odds are for the current cast.

[VedalkenBear]

I can see if I can come up with an algorithm. Don't ask me to code it, though.

[Edi]

Pyrostock, this is the thread you are looking for. It has links to an earlier thread where some more mechanics are discussed too.

[Loren]

VedalkenBear said:
I can see if I can come up with an algorithm. Don't ask me to code it, though.

Who needs an algorithm for this?? I wouldn't bother to write one! Making it fast is asking for bugs and one shouldn't calculate what one can look up anyway.

Search level 4 or sites found 4 = skip.

We have 0-3 sites found, a few terrain types, the previous search level (0-3) and the path. Simply store all the precalculated values. I don't think it's more than 10k of data.

The only troublesome cases are the multiple-search spells. My impression is that simply summing the probabilities for all paths they cover would produce an appropriate ranking even though the probability number itself is obviously way wrong.

[VedalkenBear]

Loren: Finding which province is the current best site to search with a given search spell is _not_ that simple, given all the criteria involved.

More linear programming, whee!

[vfb]

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.

[Loren]

VedalkenBear said:
Loren: Finding which province is the current best site to search with a given search spell is _not_ that simple, given all the criteria involved.

More linear programming, whee!

I don't understand why it can't be precalculated for the single-path spells. If the programming gets too hairy don't bother, just monte-carlo it. Make a billion provinces and search them (standalone code, not in the game), see what happens. With modern CPU's that wouldn't take that long.