Questions about a game in progress

[reverend]

You could still have one type of search going on monthly. But when you have enough free mages and gems, those can be used to manually search other provinces. The monthly spell still tells you its target so you can adjust your other searches.

It's kind of like an indexing service on a computer. Usually run in the background, slow but steady with little use of resources, but when needed, just activate it and put some more CPU time to it. It just depends. If you want results quickly, you have to micromanage. If just want results, let the mages do it themselves.

[thejeff]

It's very annoying. But it's nice to be able to autocast it at all. I usually have one autocasting each search spell and do the rest by hand, making sure to leave the next province for the auto searcher.

The auto search spells pick from the top down, so I just start the manual searching from the bottom up.

There are some other weirdnesses with autosearch, but I haven't pinned them down yet. It will ignore provinces occasionally, for reasons that I don't yet see.

[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.

[PhilD]

reverend said:
It's kind of like an indexing service on a computer. Usually run in the background, slow but steady with little use of resources, but when needed, just activate it and put some more CPU time to it. It just depends. If you want results quickly, you have to micromanage. If just want results, let the mages do it themselves.

Yeah, but if the goal is to help the player reduce micromanagement, then it should really help - like, let the player choose how much searching he wants to do, and start helping from there.

Right now, the site-searching part of the monthly casting is saying, "OK, I'll help you by auto-searching for sites - but only if you want to search one province per path each month. Any more than that, you're on your own", and there's no good reason for this, other than "that's how the computer does it" (which is exactly what I tell my students not to do: the program designer decides what the computer will do, and implements it, rather than implementing something and describing the feature from the result).

[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.

[PhilD]

Tichy said:
By province number -- it'll go down the list from top to bottom as you see it when you hit F1.

While we're on the subject of the "Nation overview" (F1) screen - am I the only one who finds it annoying, in a large game, to hunt for a province that's just described by it name in the messages screen (typically, "RandomMage cast some searching spell on province BlahBlah and found 2 magic sites", only the "go there" button takes me to the stupid mage rather than the juicy province and now I have to look through the pages upon pages of province to find it)? Some option to search this screen would be a big help - even the spell lists have filters by path now, this is at least some help.

The other weird thing with autosearch is that it will target your own capital. I haven't seen it target a conquered capital yet.

I have.

[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.