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

[Loren]

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.

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.