We love Illwinter!

[MaxWilson]

I just wanted to say how nice it is to notice that I still have a lot of provinces that haven't been searched, and detail 6 mages to monthly Dark Knowledge and 4 to Gnome Lore. I love the 3.08 patch! Thanks, Illwinter!

-Max

[jutetrea]

Same here!

Although, has it ever been found out why sometimes the searching just gets off track? I had 25 provinces in a game and started searching around acquiring province 12... Once I added a second monthly searcher they kept defaulting back to my start province.

Possibly having to do with acquiring a province with a higher priority (lower province #?) then had been owned before? Or possibly getting mixed up with some manually searched provinces (with some lvl 2's, 1's, etc)?

I ended up having to manually cast the spells for the rest of that game.

But every other game so far has been sweet!

[Shovah32]

I would assume its the manually searched provinces since afaik mages only attempt to search the capitol when all other provinces are searched.

[Olive]

Sometimes, provinces - not manually searched and never conquered by other players - are forgotten by the searching spells monthly cast. OK, it's not a big issue, the F1 screen reveals which provinces are forgotten and I've just to manually choose the province when casting.

And yes, the multi-provinces autocast searching spell is a great feature.

[thejeff]

Except when they do search the capital.

More accurately, when all provinces that they think should be searched have been, they stop searching. If you tell them to cast again, they will default to the province they are in.

For reasons I have yet to understand, sometimes capitals (yours or others) show up as "should be searched". That's probably what happened to jutetrea. If you let them search the capital, they'll move on to other provinces.

Sometimes they'll bypass a non-capital province, too. I had thought that if a province was ignored for one path it would be skipped for all, but my latest SP seems to have disproved that.

There is something wrong with the targeting algorithm, but I still can't see the pattern.

[Gandalf Parker]

Some people might not know, if you want to check where your mages are about to cast their next search on then you can hover the mouse over them. At the bottom of the screen it will tell you.

Its also a good way to see what item is being forged if you forget since the mages icon cuts that short.

[Edi]

I'd also like to add my voice to the chorus of appreciation. Before Dominions, I can't remember a game that absorbed me this thoroughly since the original Age of Wonders.



The site searching improvement is a great one, even though I have yet to use it much.

[thejeff]

Yeah, don't let my puzzling over the edge case problems mislead you. I love the auto site-searching. Even when you could only use one it was good, now it cuts a whole type of micro-management out of the game.

[MaxWilson]

jutetrea said:
Although, has it ever been found out why sometimes the searching just gets off track? I had 25 provinces in a game and started searching around acquiring province 12... Once I added a second monthly searcher they kept defaulting back to my start province.

Personally, I see one mageturn of wasted time as a small price to pay for the time and mental energy saved by <Maximilian, Prince of Darkness, Eater of the Dead>, so I just let them search my home province if they want to. Or did you mean they kept defaulting back even after it had already been searched? That would be weird and I haven't seen that.

And I'm not entirely sure why it skips certain provinces, either. Unless my whole empire has been searched it doesn't really matter to me.

-Max

[K]

I love this new feature as well. I have a mancrush on the developers.