Though I have not read every post on this site, I have made what I believe to be an interesting discovery: certain provinces are so prone to natural disasters (e.g., Syria, Toulouse, Genoa, but also about 5 others) that earthquakes and floods will wipe out your buildings faster than you can replace or profit from them.
Well, maybe not faster than you can replace them if you are totally on the ball, but definitely faster than the profit that you would otherwise make from those buildings. For example, say it takes 16 years to build a structure: during that time, you will almost invariably lose another building, the cost of whose replacement will exceed the profit that the province would have otherwise rendered during the period of construction. Remember that arithmetically the cost of a razed building must be calculated twice, then compared to the putative profit over both construction periods.
I will take the trouble to prove this mathematically if there are doubters...
Now, in the heat of a full campaign, one may not notice this, but if you, as I do, use Julien's date hack file in combination with the "auto-play" to play forever, you will begin to notice certain interesting things as the millennia pass...
People in here always talk about being mathematically savvy about knowing which provinces to implement the agricultural improvements in: I, however, maintain additionally that some provinces are best left TOTALLY undeveloped, because replacement costs over the long AND short term will exceed any profit returned by the province. If the salt mine, say, remains intact, you'll spend more time replacing the other destroyed buildings that, in the final analysis, you will lose mathematically whether your game finishes in 1225, 1453, or long thereafter.
And if you turn off the "auto-build," and allow the years to pass without impulsively clicking on the "build a gold mine," you will eventually see every building in these (what I will call) "crock provinces" destroyed by Mother Nature, often faster than you can replace them, and again, certainly much faster than your ability to profit from said province.
The only use for these crock provinces is therefore, I submit, as a place to build a crude castle to quickly train peasants at the beginning of a game, their agricultural and trade benefits are in fact specious. Any any financial gain from them beyond the indirect gain of cheap troops is an illusion made possible by the fact that so many things are going on in the game that you won't notice you're being ripped off. Nor does the user interface of the game allow for an economic analysis of a province over time.
Anyhow, this ain't fair. Anybody know how to get into the program's files to evenly spread out natural disasters among all provinces, or at least reduce the chance with which they will occur in a given province?
Another thing I'm not sure about is whether the game changes these "crock provinces" from game to game, or from faction to faction. Any insight on this would be welcome.
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