Legendary difficulty - dealing with late game hordes?

[Maltz]

There could be a few common misconceptions about the tax system in STW2:

(1) All the Commerce money from Markets (200, 500, 1000...), Sake Den (100, 200...), etc. is NOT what what we actually get. We only tax a fraction of it. For example, the 500 extra commerce from Rice Exchange is only +150 at 30% tax rate before admin cost. So after admin cost it only generates 100 extra koku. Building a rice exchange only breaks even after 15 turns.

(2) Town growth is subject to reduction from tax rate, too. At 30% tax rate, the town growth is reduced by 30%.

I have seen (and probably made) many arguments that sound like "this works for me, so it must be true". I actually agree with it - whatever works. On the lowest difficulty level, maybe everything works. What I propose works on Legendary. But maybe even that is not an optimized strategy. So I use the Excel spreadsheet to really go through all the calculations. For the market upgrade argument, there are a few factors that changes the decision:

(1) Metsuke (effective tax rate). Having a high effective tax rate on the province favors having a high-level +income building.

(2) Number of provinces. Rice exchange gives 10 town growth. So it breaks even exactly at a province count of 10. If we have 22 provinces (the pause time before Realm Divide for a domination game), +1 growth for 22 provinces is better than +10 growth for 1 province. Naturally, a shorter campaign favors upgrading the markets because we pause at fewer provinces.

(3) Number of turns. In most scenarios, within the first 20 turns or so, not upgrading Market is always better (due to the initial cost of the Rice Exchange vs. nothing). Then upgrading market wins during 20-40 (it really varies in different scenarios) turns since the extra tax beats the extra town growth across all provinces. Then not upgrading market wins again. So playstyle matters here.

So my long-version conclusion is:

(1) Upgrade Markets if you:
- Use Metsuke in that province
- Play a short campaign
- Do not like rush, do not like to take things slowly

(2) Leave as Markets if you:
- Do not use Metsuke in that province
- Play a long campaign
- Likes to finish as quickly as possible, or likes to take things very slowly.

***

And the Ashigaru argument... I guess play style also matters. Let me try to make a similar comparison:

(1) Use more Ashigaru if you
- Like to finish the game as soon as possible
- Use agents to reduce enemy's morale
- Only fight a battle where you can win, avoid all battles you cannot win
- Exploit AI's battlefield weakness (bait and trap, etc.)

(2) Use more Samurai if you
- Like to take things as slowly as possible
- Do not use agents frequently
- Often fight battles at a disadvantage and hope for a heroic victory
- Charge AI head-on

But the bottom line is whatever works.