Quote Originally Posted by Madae View Post
The map does seem slightly larger, not just in land mass, but more as if it is "zoomed in" more. There are several new, one province islands though, along with a Kyushu-esque (without a land route to the mainland) island on the other side of the map near the Date starting point.
That would be Hokkaido, the second largest island in Japan.


I'm going off memory here, but I believe the primary "money-making" upgrade was 1700 -> 2100 or so. Still, you gotta look at it from the long term. Without a gold mine, a province really doesn't make crap to begin with. I had a town with a gold mine making 11,000+ a turn by itself, compared to the 1800 my fully developed capitol was making. There are also several different bonuses that lower the cost of constructing buildings.

I don't agree that "all high-tier buildings" are terrible. Gatlings come from the highest tier artilerry range, Imperial/Shogunate Guard troops from the highest tier infatry buildings, many craft buildings have two routes to develop (better single province, or bonuses faction-wide), etc etc. If you want to upgrade a town completely, you'll probably need a max level police station to keep public order up vs. modernisation.
I was talking more about the economic buildings rather than the military ones. Some previous CA games like Rome and Medieval 2 were notorious in that the first tier buildings like ports and markets gave huge bonuses but upgrading them were very expensive while providing marginal benefit. At first glance, I found some of the highest tier economic buildings to be very expensive while not looking like they provided much in the way of benefits. Of course, I don't have a game that is far enough yet to build them.

I was wondering if there's something to be said for only building the first 2-3 tiers of mines, factories or other buildings.

There are unique units for each faction, but probably not the ones you're looking for. Tosa did have one - I remember seeing them running around with some - but I was playing Satsuma, and only noticed that I had some "bear-head" infantry that were not quite as good as the second-best (compared to Imperial Guard) Imperial Infantry.
The bear heads come much earlier, though, no? Or at least, that's my theory on what CA intended for them to be upon looking at the tech tree. Tosa does have a unique light infantry unit that's better than the regular sharpshooters.