Questions about a game in progress

lillumultipass · #1 November 7th, 2006, 06:43 AM

Ok, my game is going well for the moment, even though I guess it is going to be harder now that I am at war with Tien Chi, Caelum and Agartha at the same time.

I had forgotten how much micromanagement was involved in the middle to late game: it is a pity mages can't autoforge the same item every turn...And assigning the ten lightless lanterns you forge each turn to 10 mages is not funny either. But I guess that's the downside of having so many possibilities.

one thing however: I was casting something like 2 Haruspex, 3 augury, 3 gnome Lore, 3 arcane Probing and 2 Dark knowledge a turn, and I found that my success rate was low. Then I took a closer look, and it turned out that the mages were all searching the same province on a given turn, even those that were casting the same ritual! I guess this is a bug, or I am just unlucky. Hence, I have stopped casting each spell more than once per turn. But it's a pity.

Endoperez · #2 November 7th, 2006, 06:47 AM

It's a bug. It seems none of us remembered to mention the bug...

lillumultipass · #3 November 7th, 2006, 07:00 AM

ok. So, basically, it's pointless to autocast the same spell multiple times.
It is kind of annoying...

PhilD · #4 November 7th, 2006, 09:37 AM

Quote:

lillumultipass said:
ok. So, basically, it's pointless to autocast the same spell multiple times.
It is kind of annoying...

Yeah, it is. I mean, it might be bad strategy to autosearch as much as you can, but I'd like to be able to decide on my own bad strategy (esp. in SP) without the game making the micromanagement help only available if I limit my searching...
(and as a result, I end up only casting each spell once per month, because the monthly casting is so much more convenient)

reverend · #5 November 7th, 2006, 09:53 AM

You could still have one type of search going on monthly. But when you have enough free mages and gems, those can be used to manually search other provinces. The monthly spell still tells you its target so you can adjust your other searches.

It's kind of like an indexing service on a computer. Usually run in the background, slow but steady with little use of resources, but when needed, just activate it and put some more CPU time to it. It just depends. If you want results quickly, you have to micromanage. If just want results, let the mages do it themselves.

PhilD · #6 November 7th, 2006, 10:30 AM

Quote:

reverend said:
It's kind of like an indexing service on a computer. Usually run in the background, slow but steady with little use of resources, but when needed, just activate it and put some more CPU time to it. It just depends. If you want results quickly, you have to micromanage. If just want results, let the mages do it themselves.

Yeah, but if the goal is to help the player reduce micromanagement, then it should really help - like, let the player choose how much searching he wants to do, and start helping from there.

Right now, the site-searching part of the monthly casting is saying, "OK, I'll help you by auto-searching for sites - but only if you want to search one province per path each month. Any more than that, you're on your own", and there's no good reason for this, other than "that's how the computer does it" (which is exactly what I tell my students not to do: the program designer decides what the computer will do, and implements it, rather than implementing something and describing the feature from the result).

thejeff · #7 November 7th, 2006, 09:57 AM

It's very annoying. But it's nice to be able to autocast it at all. I usually have one autocasting each search spell and do the rest by hand, making sure to leave the next province for the auto searcher.

The auto search spells pick from the top down, so I just start the manual searching from the bottom up.

There are some other weirdnesses with autosearch, but I haven't pinned them down yet. It will ignore provinces occasionally, for reasons that I don't yet see.

lillumultipass · #8 November 7th, 2006, 10:13 AM

what do u mean by "the auto spell pick from the top down"?
alphabetically?

Tichy · #9 November 7th, 2006, 10:18 AM

Quote:

lillumultipass said:
what do u mean by "the auto spell pick from the top down"?
alphabetically?

By province number -- it'll go down the list from top to bottom as you see it when you hit F1. The only problem is that it may target a newly captured, and therefore vulnerable, province before it targets "safe" provinces

The other weird thing with autosearch is that it will target your own capital. I haven't seen it target a conquered capital yet.

thejeff · #10 November 7th, 2006, 10:32 AM

It will only sometimes target your own capital. It may be by nation, but I'm not sure. I know some games it has and some it hasn't.

It will target the next province in the list (by province number) that hasn't been searched when the mage finishes casting his search spell. If you have another mage casting the same search spell on that province, but he casts after the autosearcher, that province hadn't been searched when the autosearcher chose his next target, so he will cast on it again. That's why I do manual searching from the bottom up.

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 isn't going to be an easy fix. To do it right, they'll have to make some significant changes in the order things are done in turn processing.