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I'm playing Shimazu in Expert mode. Money is tight whenever you play him, but I've noticed something in the expansion pack:
Harvests do not appear to be random anymore. For example, if I save at Autumn, then hit end turn I get the same harvest no matter what - down to the last koku. What's worse, I'm up to 1546 and have had a string of 6 or 7 bad harvests (all 25% failures).
Now this could prevent unscrupulous players from reloading the game when being dealt a bad. Perhaps CA moved the execution of the harvest determination to Summer to prevent this kind of "cheating". I'm afraid that the random generation of the harvests may have been damaged during the upgrade and that they are no longer random at all.
Has anyone noticed these issues with the harvests in the XP? My Lord Shimazu is having a hell of a time battling ikko-ikki, Ronin states, and Imagawa/Oda/Hojo.
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The Buddha is a gyoza. If you find the Buddha, eat him.
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I usually just take the bad with the good (maybe that's why I lose http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif) so I wouldn't know...
but...
I have heard a few rumblings about this from other patrons, so what you say may be 100% correct.
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Jeff, I believe your observation is correct. In the original game, I too used
the ctrl-S/ctrl-L thing to get enough koku to stay alive as I learned the game. Harvests do still seem to be random in the big picture, but it seems they have "fixed" it so that successive "load game" actions do not change it. With the WE, the reduction in building and training costs has seemed to me to result in a MUCH more playable game without resort to subterfuge. Of course I am (a least a little) more savvy now and I really don't seem to miss it.
BTW, I also get the impression that some other "random" events have also been handled in the same way.
cheers.
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Just a side information: Before the add-on I tried to calculate the average harvest over my entire campaign (no save-loads).
I got about an average of 100% (or slightly lower) average on the expert level, such as 96%. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif I guess that's good enough for completing a game.
I do have the impression that back the old days of save-loads I got so many bad harvest on expert. Is that just some psychological effect or the game actually tries to pull back the harvest average to a pre-set value? http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/tongue.gif
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If they have coded against the Save-Load then that's fine as long as they are indeed random. Perhaps it's only paranoia, but after 6-7 bad harvests I'm about to lose to ikko-ikki (Buddhist rebellions no less - and all I've done is trade with gaijin!) what I should have been wagering against the Hojo.
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The Buddha is a gyoza. If you find the Buddha, eat him.
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The cost change on buildings ended the need for me to make sure I got average or better for my first five harvests. Well, maybe I didn't _need_ five good ones, but I've had games lost by the first five being bad. As for rebellions, I tend to build improvements only after I've expended all the koku I can on troops for the first few years. Helps with garrisoning. Also use the shift key to watch your provinces, if you have a string of bad harvests, then you might have to do something about it. I actually had to garrison Shimazu's provinces in 1580 campaign and crank out priests since I started out Christian with churches in most provinces, but 0% Christian population. One thing I've done after my first disaster with the Portuguese is build churches in key provinces first and then the trading post in another.
