city question

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by thejeff

In MP, how much do people usually search provinces taken from the enemy? Do you assume he's searched everything? Everything in his main paths? Complicated algorithms involving the path levels of his mages and the number of sites of each type he's found?
I'm assuming you've staked a serious claim to the territory and aren't just swapping it back and forth. Maybe you've beaten one opponent and are at peace for the moment.

I'm usually quite anal about searching my territory as fully as possible. (After all, 2 gems is such a minor investment it's almost allways worth it.)

I will generally not remote search a province in a path of which a site allready is present
I will generally not remote search in my opponents main paths IF it looks (from conquering his territory) like he has done a decent job searching in those paths and we have reached a stage in the game were you can assume basic site-searching has been finished
I will generally not remote search at all if we're really deep into late game, UNLESS conquered territory shows one or more paths of magic sites being underrepresented, or if I saw no or very few mages of a particular path while fighting the defeated opponent.

I might be a bit more thorough when having defeated less experienced players.

In all of the above cases I will still do a manual search with mages not having anything urgent to do. (So, generally, all conquered castles will still be relatively thoroughly searched as I have my mages search there before putting them on research)
I will generally also do a couple of searches in any provinces containing no or only one site, either manually or remotely, just to test the other player's thoroughness.

If either of these two methods still turn up a couple of sites I might reconsider the no-remote-search policies above.