Questions about a game in progress

[Endoperez]

It SHOULD be possible to search a province you lost, and impossible to search provinces you won't conquer this turn - that happens when you search by hand and an enemy does a surprise attack.

[thejeff]

But that's not what happens.

The auto searcher can target a province you've lost. That spell will be cast next turn. You couldn't select it to cast a search spell into if you were doing them manually.

[Endoperez]

thejeff said:
But that's not what happens.

The auto searcher can target a province you've lost. That spell will be cast next turn. You couldn't select it to cast a search spell into if you were doing them manually.

I see. It makes sense, though. If the mage is reset to cast the same spell immediately after the previous spell has ended, before provinces are conquered/lost, and even before magic gems have been received... well, that explains the other quirks in the monthly casting.

[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.