Yeah, it's one of the most infuriating tasks to complete as the robbers don't ever leave the forest cover, and don't seem to leave tracks on the overland map until AFTER you've zoomed in on their location. You have to manually zoom into each tile, and look around for human tracks. If they're nearby you also won't be able to exit the area to the overmap, which is a good indicator. You will lose time, sanity, and unless you savescum (rollback your save to when you just accepted the quest), your save file size is going to massively inflate from all the local maps you've visited. The reward is pretty good though (100 squirrel pelts worth of goods), but I think I'll just save myself the effort and skip that one, next time.
There's no smart way to go about it. You have to do a brute force search of all the tiles within the area. For open terrain it's sufficient to zoom in, look both ways, and then zoom out, but with spruce you can miss them using that method.
They're almost always hidden, so trying to look for them from a high place is unlikely to be successful.
A useful tactic when looking for robbers is to have a beggars outfit, i.e. only carry stuff you can do without, so if you encounter the robbers and fail to get away, you can surrender to them and then return equipped with your real stuff and supported by a posse of hirelings, as you now know where they are.
The payment doesn't nearly cover the cost of hiring a posse to deal with the robbers...
Yeah, it's one of the most infuriating tasks to complete as the robbers don't ever leave the forest cover, and don't seem to leave tracks on the overland map until AFTER you've zoomed in on their location. You have to manually zoom into each tile, and look around for human tracks. If they're nearby you also won't be able to exit the area to the overmap, which is a good indicator. You will lose time, sanity, and unless you savescum (rollback your save to when you just accepted the quest), your save file size is going to massively inflate from all the local maps you've visited. The reward is pretty good though (100 squirrel pelts worth of goods), but I think I'll just save myself the effort and skip that one, next time.
They will essentially stay where they are, i.e. there is an area of a few tiles where there are footprints, and it is possible to follow the footprints until you get near enough for them to home in on you. The crucial thing is to find the first footprints, but once you've done so you can leave, raise a posse, and return to engage them.