Quote:
Originally Posted by AreaOfEffect
Even all of that still doesn't explain why some locations who don't have any magic sites found are skipped yet contain magic sites when manually selected and searched. I suppose this will still occur even after the next patch is released.
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Sure it does, unless there are facts you're not telling me. Consider a hypothetical province Green Gallows, which has zero discovered sites, and one undiscovered level 3 death site. If I have searched manually with a D2 mage in Green Gallows, when I monthly-cast Dark Knowledge the automatic site-searching algorithm I outlined will skip Green Gallows because it's been partially searched already for D. The patch enhancement will make it go back and search Green Gallows after all the "prime" locations have been searched. This makes sense because a totally "fresh" province with no discovered sites and no Death searches yet is more likely to have a Death site than Green Gallows is (because a fresh province may produce a D1, D2, D3, or D4 site, whereas Green Gallows will yield only a D3 or D4 site. The number of discovered sites matters because it's relatively improbable to discover a D site in a province which is already known to have e.g. 2 air sites, since the average total number of sites in a province is only about 2 anyway, depending upon what site frequency you are playing with and what the terrain type is). If you crank the math, the site-searching algorithm is already a pretty good rule of thumb for searching. But Green Gallows is not a worthless province even if it is less probable, and in fact we already know that it *does* have a D3 site, so the enhanced algorithm will eventually get around to finding the hidden site.
-Max