i seem to recall hearing on a PBS show that muskets were pretty much worthless after about 100 yards. remember, 100 yards is the length of a football field and those guns were terribly inaccurate. they also tended to blow up in your face at times.

english longbows could easily shoot 400 yards or better. i dont know what type of bow the samurais used, but i've noticed in the game that bows and guns seems to be about the same range. this really surprised me when i first started playing in battle mode.

remember also that cav units used a much smaller bow with a much smaller range. they had to for manueverability's sake.

i've also heard the arguement about initial costs of units and the game says something like 'the cost to feed and maintain the units for one year'. that's far from an exact quote but it does point out that a unit's cost is based NOT on training or initial equipping but rather for maintaining the unit over a years time. this also surprised me regarding the multiplay. a gun was much more expensive to build. you needed forges and gunsmiths and miners and so on to build the bloody thing or the 'dirty foreigners' to trade with. since in battle mode you are 'buying' your army it seems to me that you would include not so much the maintenance cost of a unit but rather the initial training and equipping cost in order to 'buy' that unit, in which case, guns would cost at least twice the amount that bows do.

by the same token i've seen arguements about the costs of other units and if the game really is trying only to reflect the maintenance cost of a unit then how is it that a samurai eats any more than an ashigaru or a monk. if the cost is just 'the value of an amount of rice to feed a unit for a year' then all human values would be very close to each other. and have you ever tried to feed a horse for a year? it aint cheap, bubba!

did the japanese reward different units in pay at diff rates or what? i'm really ignorant here about their system of rewards and pay for varying unit types. maybe someone else knows this?

K.