New patch soon?

[AreaOfEffect]

I believe "automatic site searching" refers to the fact that the game will auto-select a province with each casting of the a site searching spell. Sure, you are prompted to select the province and the selection process can be flawed, but it at least chooses a likely candidate for each casting.

I remember when I had to handpick each province beyond the first site searching for that round. If you weren't careful, casting dark knowledge twice could easily search the same province in a row. 3 death gems down the drain.

Note: You can automate the process by setting the mages to cast the site searching spells as monthly rituals (shift+M). These castings won't prompt you to choose a target, which is usually fine, except for the flaws in the selection process. This method won't be very helpful when you are constantly draining your gem supply or if you've searched all provinces from the previous round. It's best for catching up when you fall behind on site finding.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by AreaOfEffect

I believe "automatic site searching" refers to the fact that the game will auto-select a province with each casting of the a site searching spell. Sure, you are prompted to select the province and the selection process can be flawed, but it at least chooses a likely candidate for each casting.

I remember when I had to handpick each province beyond the first site searching for that round. If you weren't careful, casting dark knowledge twice could easily search the same province in a row. 3 death gems down the drain.

I don't remember that ever being the case. The flaw, back in 2007, was that when you had *monthly* castings of site search spells the first turn your mages would spread themsleves out as you describe in the first paragraph, but on the second month (i.e. the first month with no UI-based targeting of the spell) they would all pick the same province. I got around this by simply picking 20-odd mages every few turns and having them all cast the site-searching spell that month, then go back to researching. The fact that I can now just set four or five of them to cast monthly is really nice.

Originally Posted by AreaOfEffect

Note: You can automate the process by setting the mages to cast the site searching spells as monthly rituals (shift+M). These castings won't prompt you to choose a target, which is usually fine, except for the flaws in the selection process. This method won't be very helpful when you are constantly draining your gem supply or if you've searched all provinces from the previous round. It's best for catching up when you fall behind on site finding.

I don't really mind the "flaws" in the selection process because I don't even really optimize my manual site searching much. Sure I know that wastelands and swamps are supposed to be best for sites, and mountains seem to be good for earth and death, but I have never bothered to go through the site searching database and figure out exactly what the optimum order is to search each kind of terrain for each path, adjusting for province security and distance from enemy fronts. I'm pretty much happy as long as all of my provinces get completely searched eventually. In other words, I view site searching as a form of probabilistic clamming (i.e. clam-forging) which is province-limited instead of commander-limited. E.g. "spend 9 death gems per turn to increase death income by 0 to 2 gems per turn," without bothering to compute exactly what my likely return is going to be.

YMMV though. Some people don't like automatic site-searching at all, and if I have multi-path mages I may do all manual searching until my gem income gets pretty large.

-Max

[AreaOfEffect]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

I don't really mind the "flaws" in the selection process because I don't even really optimize my manual site searching much. Sure I know that wastelands and swamps are supposed to be best for sites, and mountains seem to be good for earth and death, but I have never bothered to go through the site searching database and figure out exactly what the optimum order is to search each kind of terrain for each path, adjusting for province security and distance from enemy fronts. I'm pretty much happy as long as all of my provinces get completely searched eventually. In other words, I view site searching as a form of probabilistic clamming (i.e. clam-forging) which is province-limited instead of commander-limited. E.g. "spend 9 death gems per turn to increase death income by 0 to 2 gems per turn," without bothering to compute exactly what my likely return is going to be.

The flaws I'm refering to is that some provinces don't seem to be searched even though manually choosing the province will yield sites. Also, on occassion my mages will select my capitol even though their are other sites left to search. Maybe you never encountered this or you just haven't noticed.

Personally, I don't optimize my manual selections that way either.