Questions about a game in progress

[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...

[thejeff]

You can change it manually, but once you do you can't set it back to the lost province.

You could, in theory, have it first search provinces that only neighbor provinces that you own, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the effort.

I settle for getting the current version working.

[Tichy]

thejeff said:
You can change it manually, but once you do you can't set it back to the lost province.

Ok, I understand the glitch, but why would you ever want to set it back? In hopes that you'll recapture and get a site search in a single round?

[NTJedi]

Tichy said:

Ok, I understand the glitch, but why would you ever want to set it back? In hopes that you'll recapture and get a site search in a single round?

I'm sure the glitch is not permanent... waiting one turn is not that big of a deal.

[Quakka]

Hi all, first post.

thejeff said:
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.

This is a pretty interesting problem. I'd suggest a simple fuzzy logic algorithm.

The basic idea would be to calculate a score for each province you control, based on n criteria. Each criterion would award points for that province, depending on how well the province matches it on a scale of 0 to 1. Each criterion would also have an intrinsic importance value, which would be used to scale it against the others. The actual points received would be (match) * (importance).

When the scores are calculated, the provinces are sorted according to score, and the highest scoring is selected. Provinces searched to 4 or more in the relevant paths or targeted by an overlapping search are excluded.

In my programming experience, these kind of things work best when you concentrate the weighing on a few things, and keep the rest as "tiebreakers". I'd suggest the following:

1: Ratio of friendly neighboring provinces versus enemy controlled ones. This would cause a tendency to avoid frontier provinces, or provinces you have captured with raids.

2: Previous searches. This would pick unsearched provinces over ones with 1, 2 or 3 level searches. A bit trickier to calculate for Aschaic Record, but possible.

Tiebreakers:

3: Probability of magic sites. Wastelands would get targeted over farmlands.

4: Probability of magic sites for this spell. Gnome Lore would pick mountains over other terrain and so forth.

5: Number of other sites already found. IIRC there is a maximum number of sites that can be found in one province.

It's not a perfect system, and never will be, but it'd be a lot better than going through the province list from top to bottom. Assistive features such as the auto search are not meant to make real decisions for the player anyway, just to remove the chore of making the trivial ones.