Questions about a game in progress

[lillumultipass]

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

[Tichy]

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]

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.

[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.

[Tichy]

thejeff said:

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 one doesn't seem like a problem to me. It just means that the spellcaster acted before the battle happened. (The idea being something like that rituals have to happen exactly the same way everytime, and can't be stopped once they're started, which is often the way powerful magics are treated in fantasy.) Sounds less like a bug and more like a calculated risk.

Now the fact that the autocaster will target vulnerable provinces is a problem because it doesn't model minimally prudent strategy, which would be to target provinces you aren't likely to lose before one's that you are, unless you have good reason to expect a strategically significant gain from it that's worth the risk.

[thejeff]

Except that nothing else works that way. Normally you can stop his order, change it to something else, change it back etc.
But in this case, you can still change the order, but you can't change it back. It doesn't fit. It's obviously an artifact of the order the program executes orders in. It's a bug.

You can come up with justifications for it, but they're just after the fact justifications.

Well, if you can come up with a good, simple algorithm for "provinces you aren't likely to lose", combine it with the other obvious strategy of targeting provinces more likely to have sites of that path, weighted to keep everyone happy, I'd love to see it.

Generally, by mid-game I've given up trying to prioritize site searching and am just going up or down the list, because it's too much work for me to figure out which provinces are best to search.

I do find it amusing that you're not bothered by it targeting provinces you have lost, but are bothered by it targeting vulnerable provinces.

[Tichy]

Are you saying that in a turn *after* the one in which you lose it it targets it? And that you can't change the order manually? That's goofy.

I thought you were just saying that it targets a province and searches and then a battle is fought and you lose, all on the same turn...

You're also right that to fix the thing I'm talking about would be nearly impossible. I guess the closest you could get would be to have it target province numbers closest to the capital's #, and hope that #'s correspond to proximity a little...