STW 1.1 Recurring Poor Harvest problem

[EatYerGreens]

Mori on the contrary sits on very poor lands and is more difficult to play.

I tend to think Oda is even more tricky. Even with better lands, you have to stack up enough defences to keep Mori, Uesugi and Imagawa at bay, whilst having enough forces left over to deal with all those WM rebels in the early stages of the game. I've had games where I've gone in with a minimum of 600 YS & SA against 360 (3WM, 3SA) and still been massacred. In other campaigns I've simply forestalled the attack until I've developed Naginata to tackle them but, having won Yamashiro and Ise, I don't get a lot of time to develop them before the Hojo horde is knocking at the door...

Mori's lands are poor and the lands where he can invade generally bring in less per year than the cost of armies required to capture them and garrison them afterwards. However, the same argument goes for Oda and the AI will preferentially make him attack the rebels in his midst, then head eastward at first. Similarly, the Shimazu will generally agree to keep out of your way if you don't provoke them. If you can hold onto Harima, you have a mine and can build a port cheaply. Equally cheap port in Bizen. Sanuki is worth heading for at an early stage and improving the lands.

If you can succeed in knocking out the three Takeda provinces before he builds up numbers there, you have another ready-made port plus another mine in Aki and Bitchu's farm output may be worth boosting. Once that's been achived, it's possible to just sit tight, save up the koku and build additional ports whenever you could afford them. A similar approach can pay off for Shimazu but maintainance on defensive forces usually means the annual profit margin is so small that it could be a decade or more before you have enough to build each new castle+port combination.

Interesting you mentioned the 300+ farmland output as the threshold for being worth improvement. Soon after starting the game, some years ago, I did myself a spreadsheet, to work out the breakeven point (in terms of years you would need to retain the province and including the cumulative construction time) for all the various income boosters and the conclusion I came to was round about the same figure.

If you think about it, starting from a bare province, the breakeven period for a port is 13.5 years. 1 year for the castle, 2.5 years for the port, 2000 koku spent, 200 per year coming in, so 3.5 yrs to build and ten years recouping the investment. This doesn't account for expenditure on troops required to stop the province being captured and I don't think 180 Samurai or 360 Ashigaru would be particularly off-putting.

In the early game, I tend to see ports as a luxury - the outlay would easily eat half of the amount I usually have to play with after each years harvest and other things always have to take priority, so I'm perpetually waiting to build them. In the later stages of a game, where you have provinces far out of reach of any opponents, so they won't need a garrison and koku coming out of your ears, then by all means build them and get even richer. Better still, build trading posts at all the ones you've built or captured so far, to double their income, before you start opening new ports as the trading posts are cheaper than starting from scratch.

I would only build a port in preference to a TP for strategic reasons. For instance, if it was a case of needing to get my troops to the frontline faster, such as the nearest port being 3-4 season's land-travel distant from where they're needed.