Questions about a game in progress

[thejeff]

Yeah, it makes sense from a programming point of view.

But it shouldn't work that way.

[Cainehill]

While I'm not happy with auto-site-searching only being good for one search per path per turn, it _does_ sometimes have an excuse for targetting capitols. With a number of hand-crafted maps, your capitol could be right on top of a hidden
magic site. This lead to reading the .map file to see if there's something good in your capitol, and then manually searching for it.

[thejeff]

I doubt it's anything that calculated. My impression is that it sometimes searches capitals and sometimes skips them. It also occasionally ignores other provinces.

My suspicion is that the capital problem is by nation. Some nations capitals are always searched, some are never, but I haven't confirmed that. Which would mean a flaw in whatever it's using to determine what is a capital?

[Taqwus]

I've noticed that auto-search seems to skip any province that's been searched at -any- level in that path, even if the previous search level is less than 4 (let alone 9). It's a bit galling if, say, you're EA TC.

[Tichy]

thejeff said:

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 one doesn't seem like a problem to me. It just means that the spellcaster acted before the battle happened. (The idea being something like that rituals have to happen exactly the same way everytime, and can't be stopped once they're started, which is often the way powerful magics are treated in fantasy.) Sounds less like a bug and more like a calculated risk.

Now the fact that the autocaster will target vulnerable provinces is a problem because it doesn't model minimally prudent strategy, which would be to target provinces you aren't likely to lose before one's that you are, unless you have good reason to expect a strategically significant gain from it that's worth the risk.

[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.

[Tichy]

Are you saying that in a turn *after* the one in which you lose it it targets it? And that you can't change the order manually? That's goofy.

I thought you were just saying that it targets a province and searches and then a battle is fought and you lose, all on the same turn...

You're also right that to fix the thing I'm talking about would be nearly impossible. I guess the closest you could get would be to have it target province numbers closest to the capital's #, and hope that #'s correspond to proximity a little...

[thejeff]

You can change it manually, but once you do you can't set it back to the lost province.

You could, in theory, have it first search provinces that only neighbor provinces that you own, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the effort.

I settle for getting the current version working.

[Tichy]

thejeff said:
You can change it manually, but once you do you can't set it back to the lost province.

Ok, I understand the glitch, but why would you ever want to set it back? In hopes that you'll recapture and get a site search in a single round?

[NTJedi]

Tichy said:

Ok, I understand the glitch, but why would you ever want to set it back? In hopes that you'll recapture and get a site search in a single round?

I'm sure the glitch is not permanent... waiting one turn is not that big of a deal.