Suggestion to autocasting search spells

[llamabeast]

How are you always fighting South?

[jutetrea]

I eighth this notion!

no sites
1 site
2 sites
3 sites
Searched by lvl 1
Searched by lvl 2
Searched by lvl 3
Always skip capitals

[thejeff]

Do we understand the site placing algorithm well enough to say that there's a better chance of finding a site in province with less known sites than in one with more known sites?

Or is it just the statistics I don't understand...

[Hadrian_II]

jutetrea said:

I eighth this notion!

no sites
1 site
2 sites
3 sites
Searched by lvl 1
Searched by lvl 2
Searched by lvl 3
Always skip capitals

I would also like this implemented.

[thejeff]

I don't understand the desire to prioritize searches of provinces with no known sites.

The site placing algorithm, as I understand it is:
roll %chance of site
if yes, determine which site then roll again
if no then exit.

Max of 4 sites, but the point is, if there you know there is one site, the chances of another site are just as good as when you didn't know of any.

I'd much rather search a Waste site (+20%) that already had 3 sites than a farm (-10%) that had none.

Am I missing something?

[RonD]

thejeff said:

I'd much rather search a Waste site (+20%) that already had 3 sites than a farm (-10%) that had none.

Am I missing something?

Hmmm. Suppose you're searching with Acashic Record and the base chance is 50%.

For the Waste province, the chance to find a site is 70%.

For the Farm, the chance to find 0 sites is 0.6^4 = 13%, so the chance to find 1 or more sites is 87%.

Its more complicated when searching with the individual spells (because the Waste site must have already been searched with some).


I wouldn't have spent any more than 10 seconds working that out, because I seriously doubt we will ever see a complicated auto-search algorithm. The devs prefer to spend time adding cool new content - and that's fine by me.

[thejeff]

No, the chance in the Farm is 40%.

It's not 4 separate checks against the percentage. If there is one site, then the code checks to see if there is another one, and so on, up to 4 sites.
If the first check fails, there are no sites there.

[RonD]

Emily Latella said:
Oh. That's very different.


Never mind.

[RonD]

thejeff said:
No, the chance in the Farm is 40%.

It's not 4 separate checks against the percentage. If there is one site, then the code checks to see if there is another one, and so on, up to 4 sites.
If the first check fails, there are no sites there.

It looks like this is not correct. I tweaked Boron's testmap. I took out all the terrain statements (so everything is plains), set ownership for a boatload of provinces to one of the nations (turned out to be 67 provinces total), and used the Seraphs to cast Acashic record on all 67). I created the game with site freq set at 50%.

By your explanation, about 1/2 should have had 0 sites, but here's what I got:

0 sites - 6
1 site - 13
2 sites - 29
3 sites - 17
4 sites - 2

[Sombre]

llamabeast said:
How are you always fighting South?

Just unlucky I guess. It's annoying you can't switch the direction around.