lol @ 3 peasant archers. Totally worth starting a war with that faction by blocking their port?

I don't think the random number is saved in the saved game, because I can get it to eventually kill someone on the 30%+ range. The percentages just don't match the number of reloads it takes to complete the mission.

Along the same lines as your mission rewards finding, I autocalced a battle to see if I could do better than the computer seiging a town with cannon towers (I couldn't unless I brought culverins to take them out first), I reloaded and autocalced again with a worse result than the first time. After 5 reloads and getting the same (bad) result, I decided to wait a turn for my seige equipment to arrive.