An Important thing left out: multiplier effect. The gain (in saved wood, mostly) increases by the number of farms you have, and so is re-seeding time. When you get to the last upgrade, you usually have quite a few farms going, and the amount of wood saved (which needs to be collected far outside the base, especially for wood-based civs (like the British) and trash units) matters.
Also the graph makes sense with 2 farms but in reality you are slowly seeding farms through that whole time span. It just pushes all the reseeds of lets say 20 farms laid over a period of 10 minutes or so back by roughly 4 minutes. So from minute 22 to 32 you are pushing farm reseeds back by 4 minutes.
Multiplication by 1 is perfectly expected for a coder like myself. It's just a leftover from the time they planned for an upgrade to also add an increase to farm rate. You can find such things sometimes if the decision was made at the last junction, and then whoever wrote it didn't have a time or, more likely, inclination to pretty it up since functionality is the same anyway.
They might even leave it in on purpose to allow modders (or game designers making the next patch) to easily tweak it to something better, especially since doing one unnecessary multiplication whenever someone researches a farming upgrade is not going to tank performance
Another possibility is that multiple techs call the same function and you have to pass the parameter no matter what. And so, to have it not affect the farm rate, they just pass one. Yet another possibility is not just that the decision was made at the last junction to not have a particular tech affect the farm rate, but that they considered the possibility that they might want to have it changed in an expansion/update, and it is easier to have it ready to do it from the get-go. I would not assume that it happened from laziness or because they were not following good practices, to be honest. It IS pretty funny when you see something like that though. I can grant that.
"Farms don't so much generate food but just let you convert your wood into food" My mind just blew, I lived based on a lie since I was 9 years old 😂😂😂 Love your channel, congrats from Brazil.
Pro tip: If you need food in a x256 mod game, you can research supplies multiple times and eventually adding militia to your queue will generate food for you. You can even cancel the unit while it's being created and keep the free food as well as the gold.
@@BlueFlash215 You should understand my comment better. if you have to reseed 10 farms at min 20 it's going to be more painful than reseeding farms 10 farms at min 24 when you have a better eco.
@@Halvtooth you save on the costs for the upgrade and furthermore Hidden Cup was a perfect example that a lot of farms techs weren't even researched until castle or imp. Those are the world's best players. You can balance your eco ahead of time. It's not like you have no clue on how much wood you'll need after placing your farms Edit: Furthermore, the earlier this upgrade comes, the more impact on your economy it has in a negative way. This results due to having very little villagers to produce this amount of food and wood which could be spend otherwise
That carry capacity boost in food gathering speed explains why Aztecs (villagers carry +5 ressources) and Vikings (free wheelbarrow and handcart) eco bonuses are so good.
Spirit of the Law, you forgot something about the refresh time. By increasing how much food a farm has, the villagers spend more time collecting the farm while they spend the same time refreshing the farm, making the %of time refreshing lower in comparison to collection. Yes, this only happens once so often, as you mentioned, but it also offers a slight boost on a longer game. With this in mind, you can argue that increasing villager building also increases farm production slightly. The impact is minimal, I know, but would be nice to know how little it is 11. I would do the maths but I don't know the numbers and I'm unnable to test right now.
@@puppieslovies ...Incas really need a better team bonus. I'd say it's worse than the Saracens, since theirs can become dangerous with massed archers or chu ko nus.
I also wanted to mention how he forgot to talk about the initial cost of researching farming techs. The payback is not just 3 farms later because the initial tech has a sunk cost in itself. A decreasing factor proportional to how many farms you have but should have been a covered point nonetheless i feel.
Great video, as always! I just want to point out that: 1. After finishing your eco development, you must have about, let's say, 30 farms. So every advantage you get by saving wood must be multiplied by 30 to be fairly considered; 2. Making the farms last longer allow you to keep a smaller number of villagers on wood, which means you'll have more villagers collecting other resources such as gold and stone. By this POV, mill upgrades not only save you wood but also allow you to get other resources faster.
1) "every advantage you get by saving wood ". You do not save wood until 38 minutes (in this example). It does not matter if you pay x wood now or x wood in two minutes. 2) better point and I'd like to see it addressed.
@@whuzzzup Actually, there is a small difference if you pay a certain amount of wood in a moment or later, because the game mechanic has economic inflation. Wood in the early game worth much more than in late game.
I like how he keeps an old style of narration even though his channel grow so much. It makes me feel like I'm listening to the old videos while maintaining the high quality of the present. I wouldn't want it otherwise!
Frankly, it makes him sound like *the* professor of AoE2, and I mean that as a compliment. It says a lot his homage to Khan Academy on the (now ancient) Mongol analysis still sounds very much like Spirit of the Law.
The other thing to note when comparing farm upgrades to wheelbarrow is that wheelbarrow takes time away from the town center training villagers, whereas farm upgrades do not, so it does make a huge difference in affecting your villager growth (and thus resource income) to get wheelbarrow
3:21 - You're actually handicapped by farm's food generation rate (0.4 f / sec), not by farmers' gathering rate (0.53 f / sec). (See a reddit post 'The Slav Farm Bug: Cause and Fix' on that topic.) This means you max out at 24 f / min after hand cart or something like 3 wheelbarrows. I re-ran the test with 10 and 20 wheelbarrows researched to receive exactly 24 f / min, not 23.25 f / min. Also, heavy plow impact depends on other upgrades and civ bonuses. Noticeable boost of +3-4% is only true for unupgraded non-Aztec/-Khmer farmers. 3:00 - Interesting. So for farming, +carry capacity impact (+10% speed is roughly equal to +1.5 carry capacity) is lower than for other resources, as in 'Villager Gather Rate Formula' (6:58), you calculated that +3 capacity = +30% walking speed (+10% speed = +1 carry capacity) if villager is 3 tiles away from the tree. However, from what I've observed so far, Berbers civ bonus is marginally worse than generic unupgraded farmers with heavy plow while it should be the opposite. Freaking farming mechanics and its randomness.
I always thought you want about 8 farms for horse collar. You place 2 in dark age, then 6 in feudal with horse collar, and then you reseed the 2 dark age ones.
Yeah, I also like to put down a couple farms in dark age to diversify my food income, and then try to get horse collar before any more. My personal justification was always the long-term wood savings, though, so it was interesting to have that intuition challenged by the numbers.
Same, for me the most important thing in having some dark age farms is less villager idle time, when they finish harvesting/hunting and just stand there before I queue them in building farms.
I learned that the wood upgrades are no doubt the eco upgrades to go first, considering farms need wood for resending, but the farm upgrades become important too when you wanna make a ton of farms. They may not directly speed up the food production, but they make it easier for players to put more villagers on farms without running out of wood. ^^
4:19 Isn't this analysis a bit flawed and Horse collar pays off much quicker as you generally have more than one Farm? As you save the wood per farm, I think you would reach break-even sooner the more farms you have... But besides this, great video as always!!
I agree the way it was presented is a bit misleading, but if we scale up the test to each player having ten farms all started at the same time, it takes the same amount of time until the non-collar player is paying for an extra round of farms. It’s true that you get more value the more farms you have though - in this example it represents a swing of 600 wood, as opposed to 60
@@zoroark567 True, i noticed that as well, that my point is maybe also a bit misleading. But still, I would say, that it pays off much sooner as you are also delaying your wood expenses which are your bottle-neck in Feudal Age. So in conclusion, no matter how you put it, Horse collar is worth it.
I couldnt agree more. How can you spread the entire overhead of the research over a single farm? The research cost is a fixed cost. Spread it over 20 farms and the breakeven is much, much lower.
@@zoroark567 Yeah, and in my opinion it's much more impactful than the video seems to suggest. Because this savings in wood start to kick in as soon as the first farms need to be resseded, which is around 20 to 24min according to the video, and that's around the time you get to Castle age and need wood to add more forums or militatry buildings.
the interesting thing about the 4 minutes of farm time you gain is in a normal scouts build with some feudal age fighting your first farms run out about the same time you want to build TCs (and drop some more farms!) so getting horse collar. at this point you dont replace 1 farm but more often than not 4-6 at the same time. man that hurts. The moment you do Horse Collar in a scout build should be the moment you hit feudal and at this point you are not struck on food or wood, but on stable worktime so the 150 res you could invest in military cant be invested there for other reasons. Crop Rotation is more like a long term insurance. if you have free res you are probably not in a bad position(otherwise you had to invest into military) so why not give yourself not an even better chances to win in the lategame.
Contrast with AoE3 where every single upgrade for mill, plantation, field and rice field speeds up collection speed considerably and every little boost will pay for itself pretty quickly.
For some reason.. The first thing that came to my mind when you mentioned Farm upgrades speeding up collection rate is the time saved from reseeding the farm...Now i think about it, the effect is kinda(very) miniscule.
@@michaeltaylor8698 Exactly. it is almost pointless. Even spirit makes jokes about it though he does not pick on it as much as the saracen one. Maybe they should get something like allowing multiple farmers to use one farm. That might have to put a limit to stop it from being OP
@@eccentrichorse11 Saracen one is actually useful now that they have a civ bonus for archers against buildings, and it stacks with Mayan Obsidian arrows which makes them really good at taking down most buildings. Chu ko nu with a Saracen ally can also shred through buildings which I did not expect until I actually had a game where I tried it. As for the Incan team bonus, I've suggested in the past that A) they could get a bonus that increases the Eagle Warrior los by +2 (obviously only benefits 2 other civs but still more useful than their current bonus).
@@michaeltaylor8698 Increasing Eagle line of sight by two seems kinda OP since that is gonna make them incredible at darkage scouting combined with their extra llama
Ummmmm your missing the forest for the trees on this one..... Or your barking up the wrong tree with that comment Maybe you've logged to much time on the Internet today Knock on wood I don't make another unfunny pun
Would be awesome to see a similar analysis about feudal age blacksmith upgrades. For example, in a small archer battle where one player has fewer units but they are upgraded, how many more un-upgraded units does the opponent need to make up the quality difference?
@Spirit Of The Law I think the best way to put it is by splitting the result in two: 1-the benefit from having to pay (same amount of wood) but later (hard to measure and kinda independent by number of farms) 2-the benefit from paying "relatively less" because natural inflation of the game (easy to measure, if u have a inflation rate already computed, and dependent by numbers of farms) Let's say for simplicity that 1 of any res has a value at time t of v(t) = 1 / n(t) where n(t) =: num. of vills at time t, maybe approx by a parabola or a statistic(the num of vills). then if u research horse collar at time t0 you are spending 150 * v(t0) value of res and at time t2 = t0+12:15 u will have to pay f*60*v(t2) for a total equal to the sum of this to terms, instead if u don't research HC u wll have to spend f*60*v(t1) , t1 = t0 + 8:30. So the diff is D(t,f) = f*60*( v(t2) - v(t1) ) + 150 * v(t0). This take into account just the 1st expiring of farm but it still prove that getting HC can payoff even after only one rotation. Now you can do the math and tell us all the breakpoints for making it worth :P
The thing about farm upgrades is how indirect the benefit is, i usually try to get Horse Collar before i start to get all my income from farms because that few extra minutes of not having to pay the first wood reseed will allow me to expand my economy enough to absorb the cost without having to sacrifice economy development elsewhere. Also in the late game, were trash war starts, being able to develop Crop Rotation and shift villagers from wood to food (or just have surplus of wood if you need to) gives you a slow but important economic edge. Of course that in an aggressive early game you shouldn't even think of getting the upgrade because you don't know if you will be alive to reap the rewards.
I love all your videos, analysis and the work you put into each video. However, as someone else has pointed it out and u have acknowledged it, u missed the scalability of the wood saving due to the number of farms. I wonder how big is the diminishing return in the later upgrade, and how much the slavs or Khmer has it better than other people. Anyways, thank you very much for your videos. I always look forward to seeing them.
I've thrown games where I forgot to get either the lumber camp upgrade or the farm upgrade. You can feel it when you don't get either, your wood is always at zero.
When we were 8, we used to play this with my sister, she would put all women on farms, the men to hunt because she didnt want wolves eating the women lol
Joker meme for double-bit axe and horse collar made my day. Besides all the usefull data, you are a genious in AoE2 memeing. Thx for your work, it really helps to keep the game and the community alive.
I guess Horse Collar is multiplying farming gather rate by 1 because they were experimenting with increasing the speed at some point during developement(s) but for some reason, decided to keep it where it is, while leaving the door open for a quick adjustment if they feel the need is there.
for 11 minutes, 15 seconds of the 36 1/2 minutes it takes two horse collar farms to run out, the player with horse collar has extra wood (from 20.30 to 24.15 and from 29.00 to 36.30). Just because things come back even periodically doesn't erase that advantage. That advantage could be pressed in additional military that snowballs out of control. 4:50
One thing to keep in mind is the new farms you seed after researching horse collar vs just reseeding the same farm over and over, if youre booming youre more than likely to be able to research horse collar before hitting castle age, and by castle age you'll be building new TC's and farms to go along. Not having farm upgrades will very quickly start hurting your wood if youre planting 3-4 new farms on each TC to keep up with food demand and you'll be needing plenty of wood for houses to hold new villagers.
I think the reason people say it increases the collection rate is because you have more food in the farm meaning you refresh it less often which takes the villager time to do,and instead it can continue gathering food
Longer farms times, reduce a different cost, the cost of changing ones attention to and from farming, especially before the auto infinite replant feature.
Aha, so I was right about the wheelbarrow effect when researching it a bunch of times. The total collection rate over time is technically increasing, but the drop offs become more spaced out, making the income less consistent. It could be mitigated by telling your villagers to drop off manually of course, but that requires attention and micro time.
So there are two main benefits from researching the horse collar: 1. you're delaying they payment for reseeding your initial ~10 farms - it's a huge one, it lets you pay the ~600 wood cost around 24;00 instead of 20;00. The early castle age is a pretty important moment to have such a flexibility. Also 600 wood at 20;00 has more value than 600 wood at 24;00 because of the natural inflation (600 res is a lesser % of your total res income at 24;00 than at 20;00 so it hurts less to pay). 2. you're unlocking your way to the heavy plow which seems to be a better tech than I thought (+12.5% farming speed... damn son) and delays your wood payments even more which adds up Also very soon after the first reseeding of your farms with the horse collar (5:07 24;15) you have to reseed your farms without the horse collar for the second time (29;00). Again, it's 600 wood that moves from 36;40 to 29;00 and you still don't have the heavy plow because you didn't research the horse collar so your villagers don't have +12.5% farming speed. It's very tough to actually calculate the benefits and loses but I'm sure that researching the horse collar asap is benefitial and if you're straightly booming then the heavy plow is a must-have asap.
Wait, you say that farms are essentially just Wood -> Food Machines. That got me thinking, could you use a market instead of farms, and use the extra villagers freed up from the farming to bolster wood gathering?
You could, but the prices change as you sell wood and buy food. You'd end up gaining less food than the wood that you sold, instead of gaining more food than the wood spent. Or worse, if you didn't sell wood, and just converted your gold to food, you'd likely be spending more gold for the food than you would have spent wood on a farm.
Always thought to get horse collar before farms so I get more food for the 60 wood. Now I don’t know what to do, I’ve been playing this game since 2000 and I haven’t a clue what I’m doing lol this a constant feeling I get from your videos.
If the farm reseeding is more staggered out, you could make the argument that farm upgrades lets you allocate fewer villagers to wood to support the trickle cost of 60 wood every few moments, which has the knock on effect of fewer exposed lumberjacks you have to defend + more villagers on other resources.
Thanks so much! I thought is was totally vital, even going so far as to idle some vills to make sure they plant horse-collar farms... now I won't stress out about is that much
Not to stress you out, but it's probably worth idling them for a second to wait for horse collar to come in. If you're paying for a tech, you might as well get the benefit :)
By the way (since you mentioned the 256x tech mod) I found that making fish traps was a lot more efficient/quicker in the long run since the gillnets research makes gathering from fish traps faster. So you can end up getting food from traps VERY FAST.
Great video! I would like to add a comment. I hardly think horse collar will have an impact on number of military units one would get in the field (or at least it shouldn't). The thing is, in the begin you will have only one or two military buildings, which is the limiting production factor in a well executed build order. Probably the only exception is straight 2 archery ranges, which, nowadays, seems not to work too great. Even in that case, you would delay your horse collar anyway because you would delay building farms for a bit. Hence it is a good rule of thumb to get the correct horse collar in a well performed build order. That said, you can use horse collar timing to adjust your build order if you get some problems like an unexpected drush, trush, boar steal. Or if, for some reason, you screwed up your dark age. In any case, I don't recommend delay double bit axe, unless you really know what you are doing.
I've been doing some farm numbers myself. I was looking at how much of an effect it has when you place farms farther away from a drop off point. Specifically, looking to see just how important it is to have a TC or mill near by a farm. To make things short, here are two lists of numbers. Each number is how far it is away from a drop off point, by one farm length away. So first is right next to a TC, second is one farm length away, etc. The first list is without upgrades, the second list is with upgrades. ~.343/s ~.282/s ~.230/s ~.197/s ~.388/s ~.376/s ~.343/s ~.307/s My thoughts on conclusion: It is extremely important to have farms right next to a drop off point early on, when you have no upgrades. As the game progresses, it is still most efficient to be right next to a drop off (obviously), but even up to 3 farm lengths away, you still get pretty good returns. I suppose one way to look at it is when you are mid boom and you are at a high villager count and working on farm upgrades, you don't need to get too "neat" with placement. As long as you aren't dropping farms too far away, they all should be working in that .34-.38 range.
Man I gotta say, I just recently discouvered your chanel and it's fantastic, love your calculations, you are a true man of games and science! I'm eager to see more of your content, greetings from Mexico!
Does the fact that Heavy Plow is a better upgrade and needs Horse Collar as a requirement makes Horse Collar worthy a bit earlier? Keep up the good work! :)
Depends on what you want to do, if you want to fight in feudal, you should get horse collar as first thing in feudal and then place farms. If you go for a fast castle you will probably have to place farms in dark age (3-4), then you don't do any techs until you clicked for castle. Then while you are going up you can do double bit axe (1st) and then horse collar, Then prioritize; getting up new tc's > wood upgrade > heavy plow. (Wheelbarrow ( at around 35 vills) from one of your tc's or in an extended feudal you can do it while you are housed ;). )
If I had to guess, I figure they were going back and fourth on whether or not the upgrades should affect gather rate and by how much... and keeping the multiplier but changing its value was faster adding, removing, re-adding, re-removing the multiplier? I haven't edited AoE, but I've done that kind of thing before tinkering with other games.
This suddenly comes to my mind. Wouldn't it be interesting if after you research 'Wheelbarrow" for example, you can see the villager carrying a wheelbarrow around.
Before watching this video full, let me guess, the extra food means less time needing to be spent reseeding gives a minute increase in food per minute, and I assume the university tech that makes you build 20% faster speeds up farm creation too thus increase collection rate by a small margin as well.
With one farm, yes, horse collar takes 3 farm cycles to pay off. But that also means that it pays off in one farm cycle with 3 farms, or some 20 minutes. Usually a player will easely have over 12 farms, which brings horse collar paying for itself in roughtly 5 minutes. Got 20 farms? It pays itself in one minute.
I think you should have considered the farm upgrades in terms of wood cutters required to get the wood for the next reseed. If getting farm upgrade means that one woodcutter can do something else, the farm upgrade is already worth it immediately. Paying wood cost later isn't "resources saved" exactly but its the next best thing because it allows collecting resources for the reseed for a longer time.
Good info. I'll probably start delaying getting heavy plow if I need resources like say with a Knight Rush. Still get horse collar though as the timing of those reseeds means I'm usually scarce on wood.
Thanks for another great video, SOTL. I really DIG (ha ha ha, get it?) your testing regimes to crunch (!) the numbers on farmed vegies and show us how the game works. But enough bad puns. A question, if I may? How, when, which civilisation, which version of the game do you get "Crop Rotation"? I've never seen it yet. Thanks.
Never thought about it like that, treadmill crane is a economy tec. Reseeding farms faster means less collection downtime, plus building things faster also means your villagers can go back to collecting resources faster too.
Ok, I have two things to criticize though: 1. The farming upgrades should increase the collection rate over a longer time, because the villagers spend less time rebuilding the farms and can hence collect more food in the meantime. You don't see that when you observe it only for one cycle, of course, because the rebuilding time is not included then. But let them collect for let's say 30min straight with autofarming on and there should be a difference. Is it big? I don't know, probably not... But there should be one. 2. Horse collar is worth it already after the first cycle. That's because you spend your resources to rebuild later. Resources are worth more earlier in the game than later. It's called inflation, SOTL made a great video about that, you should watch it ;)
4:45 But you are just considering one farm, if say each initial farm lasts 8 minutes, and horsecollar adds around 4 minutes, that would mean you get a "free farm" every 2 farms you seed, at around 25 minutes (for the first cycle you proposed). So the more farms you make the better the upgrade gets.
Not in a practical sense. You are right, in the long term; but SotL's point is that if you compare yourself to a mirror player (making the same number of farms, reseeding them when they run out) you are still behind until 37ish minutes. Breaking it down: You have say, 10 farms built at 12 min and researched HC. I also have 10 farms, but don't get HC. At 20 min my farms need reseeding (costing 600 wood). At 24 min, your farms run out (costing the same 600 wood). You haven't saved any resources, and are in fact 150 resources behind (the cost of HC itself). You did delay your repayment by 4 and a bit minutes which isn't nothing, but you still have pay out the exact same amount as me. The same thing happens at the second cycle, except you earned the time difference twice, so you get to keep your wood for an extra 9 minutes. You still have to pay the exact same amount, though. At 36 min, we have still both paid the same amount to keep our 10 famrs up and running (plus you spent 150 resources on HC). It isn't until the 37:30 min mark, when I've had to pay to reseed 3 times (1800 wood), whereas you have only spent 1200, that you actually see a profit. You can make that profit bigger or smaller based on how many farms you build, but you can't make it appear any faster.
SOTL has to be the main professor teaching settlers how to optimize advancements to their civilization. I can see it now, he is in that little university building lecturing in a medieval lecture hall to everyone.
As a programmer, that multiply by 1 is probable some sort of compiler optimization, or perhaps some sort of branchless method (using math to avoid an _IF_ statement, which is also an optimization if the compiler can detect it).
I think all farm upgrades indirectly DO affect the gather rate over time, because they delay reseeding. Reseeding itself takes time. So fewer times you reseed, more of that time you’re spending gathering. You could only detect this over multiple reseed cycles 🙂 That’s why the Inca team bonus of faster farm reseeding is a thing.
@Spirit, one comment in here - if we would consider more than 1 farmer at the same moment (which means that not 1 but 10 farms would die faster) it changes everything. Horse collar cost is divided by the sum of those farms, not just the single one. Based on your math it should pay off after 3 cycles, so 3 farms, right?
Having checked this out by making a quick mod, I feel pretty confident that the reason why there are 1 multiples is because of the fact that boosting farming rate doesn't behave anything near how you'd expect, because of how villagers still pick up and move after the same amount of farming regardless. With all the econ upgrades, it makes a significant impact, but you don't feel like it does, so it doesn't necessarily work.
hi SOTL. i starting to play aoe2de and thanks to yours tips i playing fairly well, but you upload a video called "beginner guide to the first 15 villagers" and help me a lot, and you say that you do another video for water maps, it really be helping to noob like me to know what to do exactly and what not to, thanks for your videos (sorry for my english isn't god, i'm form south america)
In the 256 mod Malay can research Forced Levy and Supplies so that their Militia cost nothing to create. After researching Supplies enough times, the food cost becomes negative, so building militia adds food to your stockpile
This is true, while playing as Franks I notice that in long games, you don't need 15-20 on wood. Just a mere 7-8 villagers are enough. What is more, effectively u get free 7-8 villagers in post imperial that u can use on other tasks. U could either sell the excess wood or free up about half the woodcutters and increase population or make more farms. So the Frank economy bonus acts as : free villagers in post imperial
I have not even played Age of Empires II since before there was an HD version, i.e. I haven't played Age of Empires II for (way) more than 7 years. But I still watch Spirit of the Law's Age of Empires II videos, since I find his content enjoyable regardless :)
One thing you didn’t consider is crop cycling would allow more spaced out reseeding which is more time gathering food than having the villager replant.
In the long run there is a slight boost to farming speed from the farm upgrades because the build time interrupts production less often. Minor, but I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned.
I don't feel like the horse collar test is very fair since players aren't going to have 1 farm in feudal. How do those figures look when you have 8 farms simultaneously.
yes, but also no. they payoff is temporary at first. while you certainly have more resources during the time perion between 20 and 24 minutes, after 24 its back to being one horsecollar behind again until the non horsecollar guy starts his third farms. or to put it differently: the first 510 seconds youre behind. (-1 horse collar) the next 225 seconds you have an advantage (-1 horse collar, + x farms) the next 285 seconds youre behind again (-1 horse collar) followed by 450 seconds advantage (-1 HC, + x farms) a short 60 seconds behind (-1 horse collar) and then finally the permanent payoff. ignoring that 60second negative window, it pays off after 17 minutes, 13 of which you are behind
No. SotL could have made it clearer, but he is completely ignoring how MUCH of a payback the techs will get you, he is only talking about WHEN that payback happens. Obviously, Horse Collar will be 6x more valuable with 30 farms than with 5, but you still aren't going to get any of that value until after 3 reseeding cycles (about 20 min) later.
You have more wood to spend in the time before the reseed happens. A better way to look at it would be: "In the additional time that it takes the upgraded farm to expire, how much extra wood is collected?" Each farm cycle nets you a portion of that permanent advantage, since you are able to use that extra wood you collected on other things without being unable to reseed the farms immediately when they expire. It's especially relevant if you're using auto-farm reseed. In that first cycle, horse collar will pay for itself if you have 10+ farms, because it will enable you to spend more wood elsewhere than it costed in total resources in that minute where, without horse collar, you would have already spent the wood on reseeding farms. It takes 3 cycles for your upgraded farms to "lap" farms with 1 less upgrade and be permanently on a different cycle. That doesn't mean you don't get an advantage from it much earlier than that.
4:28 few day ago i was playing so aggresively on a nomad tg as celts and forgot to take even horse collar upgrade but never felt out of food or wood. now this video explains why...
There were some great questions in the comments here, so I made a followup video to address some of them:
ruclips.net/video/6dxRZYB75mw/видео.html
Nice!
Spirit ruuuuuules jajaj pls reply
2:47 Aztecs: *excuse me sir?*
Personally I prefer leaving the dead corpses of my villagers on the fields from the last scoutraid. Their rotting corpses are perfect fertilizer
🤣💀
What is wrong with you? 😆😆
god bless this man
*efficiency*
well, if the scouts are able to kill villagers on farms, which are usually next to your tc, you probably doing something wrong
An Important thing left out: multiplier effect. The gain (in saved wood, mostly) increases by the number of farms you have, and so is re-seeding time. When you get to the last upgrade, you usually have quite a few farms going, and the amount of wood saved (which needs to be collected far outside the base, especially for wood-based civs (like the British) and trash units) matters.
Also the graph makes sense with 2 farms but in reality you are slowly seeding farms through that whole time span. It just pushes all the reseeds of lets say 20 farms laid over a period of 10 minutes or so back by roughly 4 minutes. So from minute 22 to 32 you are pushing farm reseeds back by 4 minutes.
"7 minutes about farms?! MEH!"
7 minutes later...
"Wow, this guy sure makes farms interesting"
Multiplication by 1 is perfectly expected for a coder like myself. It's just a leftover from the time they planned for an upgrade to also add an increase to farm rate. You can find such things sometimes if the decision was made at the last junction, and then whoever wrote it didn't have a time or, more likely, inclination to pretty it up since functionality is the same anyway.
there is a special 256x tech mod on HD where farm upgrades also increase farm rate :)
They might even leave it in on purpose to allow modders (or game designers making the next patch) to easily tweak it to something better, especially since doing one unnecessary multiplication whenever someone researches a farming upgrade is not going to tank performance
Lazy coders, that is the answer... myself I also count as one.... but multiplication by one is good thing to consider :D :D
Another possibility is that multiple techs call the same function and you have to pass the parameter no matter what. And so, to have it not affect the farm rate, they just pass one.
Yet another possibility is not just that the decision was made at the last junction to not have a particular tech affect the farm rate, but that they considered the possibility that they might want to have it changed in an expansion/update, and it is easier to have it ready to do it from the get-go. I would not assume that it happened from laziness or because they were not following good practices, to be honest.
It IS pretty funny when you see something like that though. I can grant that.
My favourite is the train-headed npc from Fallout 3 :D
"Farms don't so much generate food but just let you convert your wood into food"
My mind just blew, I lived based on a lie since I was 9 years old
😂😂😂
Love your channel, congrats from Brazil.
I keep scattering wood chips on the ground but nothing is sprouting plz halp
@@planescaped burn the wood first, add seeds. That way the ground won't run out of nutrients so you can plant farm in the same spot for longer
If you're from Brazil you should know how much wood goes into making farms lol
@@shukterhousejive damn man, you've made me cry in deforestation.
Ive been playing for game for damn near 20 years - never once considered converting wood to food.
Pro tip: If you need food in a x256 mod game, you can research supplies multiple times and eventually adding militia to your queue will generate food for you. You can even cancel the unit while it's being created and keep the free food as well as the gold.
Wat
Pretty sure farm upgrades are important for your sanity
Because you're going to hear the -cursed sound- farm expired sound less
レイ·ライト -Raylight
^the Real reason we upgrade farms. *That* sound must be avoided at all costs.
@@jefffinkbonner9551 also you save wood because you pay for the wood later when you have a better wood eco.
@@Halvtooth you should watch the video again
@@BlueFlash215 You should understand my comment better. if you have to reseed 10 farms at min 20 it's going to be more painful than reseeding farms 10 farms at min 24 when you have a better eco.
@@Halvtooth you save on the costs for the upgrade and furthermore Hidden Cup was a perfect example that a lot of farms techs weren't even researched until castle or imp. Those are the world's best players. You can balance your eco ahead of time. It's not like you have no clue on how much wood you'll need after placing your farms
Edit: Furthermore, the earlier this upgrade comes, the more impact on your economy it has in a negative way. This results due to having very little villagers to produce this amount of food and wood which could be spend otherwise
1:27 My favorite part, it makes my day. 11 "The sound of maracas" Can't find a better description for that annoying farm dying sound.
I just honestly always thought it was supposed to sound like a dry bush
@@krakenloco Just found a meme about AoE2 farm memes few minutes ago, it said "Farms dried up? Stand there and shake maracas!" xD
My and my friends have been calling that sounds "the maracas" for years and I'm so glad SOTL agrees with us
DE's reseed option is worth buying the game all over again
you know the situation is dire if you hear that sound
I Like farms
Prove it
I love lamp
They're not rough/irrirating, and they don't get everywhere.
@@RG001100 they do get everywhere tho
I like trains
That carry capacity boost in food gathering speed explains why Aztecs (villagers carry +5 ressources) and Vikings (free wheelbarrow and handcart) eco bonuses are so good.
or Khmer who don't need to carry that stuff at all
@@creepy3ric how lol
@@samraa1878 Khmer farmers drop food off instantly
Spirit of the Law, you forgot something about the refresh time. By increasing how much food a farm has, the villagers spend more time collecting the farm while they spend the same time refreshing the farm, making the %of time refreshing lower in comparison to collection. Yes, this only happens once so often, as you mentioned, but it also offers a slight boost on a longer game.
With this in mind, you can argue that increasing villager building also increases farm production slightly. The impact is minimal, I know, but would be nice to know how little it is 11. I would do the maths but I don't know the numbers and I'm unnable to test right now.
Isn't there even a crappy team bonus for "farms reseed faster"? I forgot which civ...
@@Mermaidkilla It would be better if it was something like cheaper reseed. Still have to pay the initial cost but reseed for less wood would be nice.
@@puppieslovies ...Incas really need a better team bonus.
I'd say it's worse than the Saracens, since theirs can become dangerous with massed archers or chu ko nus.
I also wanted to mention how he forgot to talk about the initial cost of researching farming techs. The payback is not just 3 farms later because the initial tech has a sunk cost in itself. A decreasing factor proportional to how many farms you have but should have been a covered point nonetheless i feel.
@@meneldal Thats an excellent bonus idea, anyone think we should try it out on magyars?
Great video, as always! I just want to point out that:
1. After finishing your eco development, you must have about, let's say, 30 farms. So every advantage you get by saving wood must be multiplied by 30 to be fairly considered;
2. Making the farms last longer allow you to keep a smaller number of villagers on wood, which means you'll have more villagers collecting other resources such as gold and stone. By this POV, mill upgrades not only save you wood but also allow you to get other resources faster.
1) "every advantage you get by saving wood ". You do not save wood until 38 minutes (in this example). It does not matter if you pay x wood now or x wood in two minutes.
2) better point and I'd like to see it addressed.
@@whuzzzup Actually, there is a small difference if you pay a certain amount of wood in a moment or later, because the game mechanic has economic inflation. Wood in the early game worth much more than in late game.
@@whuzzzup ten wood now are worth more than ten wood later, etc. That's a core aspect of finance.
I like how he keeps an old style of narration even though his channel grow so much. It makes me feel like I'm listening to the old videos while maintaining the high quality of the present. I wouldn't want it otherwise!
Frankly, it makes him sound like *the* professor of AoE2, and I mean that as a compliment. It says a lot his homage to Khan Academy on the (now ancient) Mongol analysis still sounds very much like Spirit of the Law.
The other thing to note when comparing farm upgrades to wheelbarrow is that wheelbarrow takes time away from the town center training villagers, whereas farm upgrades do not, so it does make a huge difference in affecting your villager growth (and thus resource income) to get wheelbarrow
3:21 - You're actually handicapped by farm's food generation rate (0.4 f / sec), not by farmers' gathering rate (0.53 f / sec). (See a reddit post 'The Slav Farm Bug: Cause and Fix' on that topic.) This means you max out at 24 f / min after hand cart or something like 3 wheelbarrows. I re-ran the test with 10 and 20 wheelbarrows researched to receive exactly 24 f / min, not 23.25 f / min.
Also, heavy plow impact depends on other upgrades and civ bonuses. Noticeable boost of +3-4% is only true for unupgraded non-Aztec/-Khmer farmers.
3:00 - Interesting. So for farming, +carry capacity impact (+10% speed is roughly equal to +1.5 carry capacity) is lower than for other resources, as in 'Villager Gather Rate Formula' (6:58), you calculated that +3 capacity = +30% walking speed (+10% speed = +1 carry capacity) if villager is 3 tiles away from the tree. However, from what I've observed so far, Berbers civ bonus is marginally worse than generic unupgraded farmers with heavy plow while it should be the opposite. Freaking farming mechanics and its randomness.
But the calculate will get ruined if we dismiss the bonus haha
I always thought you want about 8 farms for horse collar. You place 2 in dark age, then 6 in feudal with horse collar, and then you reseed the 2 dark age ones.
Yeah, I also like to put down a couple farms in dark age to diversify my food income, and then try to get horse collar before any more. My personal justification was always the long-term wood savings, though, so it was interesting to have that intuition challenged by the numbers.
How are these comments from 13 hours ago
Harry is a wizard!
Same, for me the most important thing in having some dark age farms is less villager idle time, when they finish harvesting/hunting and just stand there before I queue them in building farms.
@@MajdFreiji patreon magic I think
I learned that the wood upgrades are no doubt the eco upgrades to go first, considering farms need wood for resending, but the farm upgrades become important too when you wanna make a ton of farms. They may not directly speed up the food production, but they make it easier for players to put more villagers on farms without running out of wood. ^^
4:19 Isn't this analysis a bit flawed and Horse collar pays off much quicker as you generally have more than one Farm? As you save the wood per farm, I think you would reach break-even sooner the more farms you have... But besides this, great video as always!!
I agree the way it was presented is a bit misleading, but if we scale up the test to each player having ten farms all started at the same time, it takes the same amount of time until the non-collar player is paying for an extra round of farms. It’s true that you get more value the more farms you have though - in this example it represents a swing of 600 wood, as opposed to 60
@@zoroark567 True, i noticed that as well, that my point is maybe also a bit misleading. But still, I would say, that it pays off much sooner as you are also delaying your wood expenses which are your bottle-neck in Feudal Age. So in conclusion, no matter how you put it, Horse collar is worth it.
Kondrathe has the right answer. More farms doesn't change the timing, but it does mean the payoff when it finally happens will be larger.
I couldnt agree more. How can you spread the entire overhead of the research over a single farm? The research cost is a fixed cost. Spread it over 20 farms and the breakeven is much, much lower.
@@zoroark567 Yeah, and in my opinion it's much more impactful than the video seems to suggest. Because this savings in wood start to kick in as soon as the first farms need to be resseded, which is around 20 to 24min according to the video, and that's around the time you get to Castle age and need wood to add more forums or militatry buildings.
the interesting thing about the 4 minutes of farm time you gain is in a normal scouts build with some feudal age fighting your first farms run out about the same time you want to build TCs (and drop some more farms!) so getting horse collar. at this point you dont replace 1 farm but more often than not 4-6 at the same time. man that hurts.
The moment you do Horse Collar in a scout build should be the moment you hit feudal and at this point you are not struck on food or wood, but on stable worktime so the 150 res you could invest in military cant be invested there for other reasons.
Crop Rotation is more like a long term insurance. if you have free res you are probably not in a bad position(otherwise you had to invest into military) so why not give yourself not an even better chances to win in the lategame.
Contrast with AoE3 where every single upgrade for mill, plantation, field and rice field speeds up collection speed considerably and every little boost will pay for itself pretty quickly.
Just like Age of Empires online :)
Or Age of Mythology
@@nanoboso3656 Age of Mythology has to do it with the infinite-food farms (if my memory serves right).
@@Alche_mist Yes, like in AoE3 in fact
For some reason.. The first thing that came to my mind when you mentioned Farm upgrades speeding up collection rate is the time saved from reseeding the farm...Now i think about it, the effect is kinda(very) miniscule.
That kinda sounds like the effect that the Incan team bonus has
@@eccentrichorse11 And the Incan team bonus has a less than 1% impact on your farming rate. I wish they'd get a new civ bonus already
@@michaeltaylor8698 Exactly. it is almost pointless. Even spirit makes jokes about it though he does not pick on it as much as the saracen one.
Maybe they should get something like allowing multiple farmers to use one farm. That might have to put a limit to stop it from being OP
@@eccentrichorse11 Saracen one is actually useful now that they have a civ bonus for archers against buildings, and it stacks with Mayan Obsidian arrows which makes them really good at taking down most buildings. Chu ko nu with a Saracen ally can also shred through buildings which I did not expect until I actually had a game where I tried it.
As for the Incan team bonus, I've suggested in the past that A) they could get a bonus that increases the Eagle Warrior los by +2 (obviously only benefits 2 other civs but still more useful than their current bonus).
@@michaeltaylor8698 Increasing Eagle line of sight by two seems kinda OP since that is gonna make them incredible at darkage scouting combined with their extra llama
I honestly thought this was another April fools video like the "are houses useful" vid.
not really if you're the huns
A truly missed opportunity to say...
"Thanks for watching guys, and I'll seed you next time !"
Ummmmm your missing the forest for the trees on this one.....
Or your barking up the wrong tree with that comment
Maybe you've logged to much time on the Internet today
Knock on wood I don't make another unfunny pun
Would be awesome to see a similar analysis about feudal age blacksmith upgrades. For example, in a small archer battle where one player has fewer units but they are upgraded, how many more un-upgraded units does the opponent need to make up the quality difference?
@Spirit Of The Law I think the best way to put it is by splitting the result in two:
1-the benefit from having to pay (same amount of wood) but later (hard to measure and kinda independent by number of farms)
2-the benefit from paying "relatively less" because natural inflation of the game (easy to measure, if u have a inflation rate already computed, and dependent by numbers of farms)
Let's say for simplicity that 1 of any res has a value at time t of v(t) = 1 / n(t) where n(t) =: num. of vills at time t, maybe approx by a parabola or a statistic(the num of vills).
then if u research horse collar at time t0 you are spending 150 * v(t0) value of res and at time t2 = t0+12:15 u will have to pay f*60*v(t2) for a total equal to the sum of this to terms, instead if u don't research HC u wll have to spend f*60*v(t1) , t1 = t0 + 8:30. So the diff is D(t,f) = f*60*( v(t2) - v(t1) ) + 150 * v(t0).
This take into account just the 1st expiring of farm but it still prove that getting HC can payoff even after only one rotation.
Now you can do the math and tell us all the breakpoints for making it worth :P
Lol, RUclips links timestamps even if they fall after the end of the video
The thing about farm upgrades is how indirect the benefit is, i usually try to get Horse Collar before i start to get all my income from farms because that few extra minutes of not having to pay the first wood reseed will allow me to expand my economy enough to absorb the cost without having to sacrifice economy development elsewhere. Also in the late game, were trash war starts, being able to develop Crop Rotation and shift villagers from wood to food (or just have surplus of wood if you need to) gives you a slow but important economic edge.
Of course that in an aggressive early game you shouldn't even think of getting the upgrade because you don't know if you will be alive to reap the rewards.
I love all your videos, analysis and the work you put into each video. However, as someone else has pointed it out and u have acknowledged it, u missed the scalability of the wood saving due to the number of farms. I wonder how big is the diminishing return in the later upgrade, and how much the slavs or Khmer has it better than other people.
Anyways, thank you very much for your videos. I always look forward to seeing them.
2:48 "unfortunately, +3 carry capacity is NOT a civ bonus" *Astecs sobbing*
Haha it wasn’t at the time of making this video, but I guess that explains those Aztec tears xD
I love the light music in the background and slight pans on the windmills. Adds so much
I've thrown games where I forgot to get either the lumber camp upgrade or the farm upgrade. You can feel it when you don't get either, your wood is always at zero.
Im glad this guy has the brains and the ambition to make these videos - while I'm a single-player only guy, it is interesting to see these analyses.
1:25 : No male farmers.
2:35 : Equally male and female farmers.
eye for detail, huh
When we were 8, we used to play this with my sister, she would put all women on farms, the men to hunt because she didnt want wolves eating the women lol
@apocratos Jesus H Christ
@apocratos I was praising the development of society and then I saw your comment
@apocratos based
The point in researching crop rotation is the convenience of not having to refresh the farms so frequently.
This guy reminds my childhood times. Age of empires is still my favourite computer game since I was 7
Hey Spirit, great video as always! It'd be neat to see the math behind monks healing other units.
Joker meme for double-bit axe and horse collar made my day. Besides all the usefull data, you are a genious in AoE2 memeing. Thx for your work, it really helps to keep the game and the community alive.
Maybe it has something to do with the youtube algorithm but I miss your openning, Good Job Chief!, Keep the great Work.
I guess Horse Collar is multiplying farming gather rate by 1 because they were experimenting with increasing the speed at some point during developement(s) but for some reason, decided to keep it where it is, while leaving the door open for a quick adjustment if they feel the need is there.
for 11 minutes, 15 seconds of the 36 1/2 minutes it takes two horse collar farms to run out, the player with horse collar has extra wood (from 20.30 to 24.15 and from 29.00 to 36.30). Just because things come back even periodically doesn't erase that advantage. That advantage could be pressed in additional military that snowballs out of control. 4:50
One thing to keep in mind is the new farms you seed after researching horse collar vs just reseeding the same farm over and over, if youre booming youre more than likely to be able to research horse collar before hitting castle age, and by castle age you'll be building new TC's and farms to go along. Not having farm upgrades will very quickly start hurting your wood if youre planting 3-4 new farms on each TC to keep up with food demand and you'll be needing plenty of wood for houses to hold new villagers.
Nili taught me that heavy plow gives farmer +1 carry capacity.
I really liked how this video ended with a bit of a summary. I hope all future videos do this too.
I think the reason people say it increases the collection rate is because you have more food in the farm meaning you refresh it less often which takes the villager time to do,and instead it can continue gathering food
Longer farms times, reduce a different cost, the cost of changing ones attention to and from farming, especially before the auto infinite replant feature.
Aha, so I was right about the wheelbarrow effect when researching it a bunch of times. The total collection rate over time is technically increasing, but the drop offs become more spaced out, making the income less consistent.
It could be mitigated by telling your villagers to drop off manually of course, but that requires attention and micro time.
these upgrades made more sense when you had to manually re-farm.
I remember post imp, no farm upgrades was a nightmare
I never imagined I'd find farm upgrade videos interesting until I discovered SOTL
So there are two main benefits from researching the horse collar:
1. you're delaying they payment for reseeding your initial ~10 farms - it's a huge one, it lets you pay the ~600 wood cost around 24;00 instead of 20;00. The early castle age is a pretty important moment to have such a flexibility. Also 600 wood at 20;00 has more value than 600 wood at 24;00 because of the natural inflation (600 res is a lesser % of your total res income at 24;00 than at 20;00 so it hurts less to pay).
2. you're unlocking your way to the heavy plow which seems to be a better tech than I thought (+12.5% farming speed... damn son) and delays your wood payments even more which adds up
Also very soon after the first reseeding of your farms with the horse collar (5:07 24;15) you have to reseed your farms without the horse collar for the second time (29;00). Again, it's 600 wood that moves from 36;40 to 29;00 and you still don't have the heavy plow because you didn't research the horse collar so your villagers don't have +12.5% farming speed. It's very tough to actually calculate the benefits and loses but I'm sure that researching the horse collar asap is benefitial and if you're straightly booming then the heavy plow is a must-have asap.
I can't even imagine how fast I would lose playing to this guy
Lose before you build your second house 😂
@@M0rdFustang 😂😂😂😂 he will have full army and castle age
Wait, you say that farms are essentially just Wood -> Food Machines. That got me thinking, could you use a market instead of farms, and use the extra villagers freed up from the farming to bolster wood gathering?
I do that when I'm in siege mod. I don't use the farms at all. Just convert gold into food all the time
You could, but the prices change as you sell wood and buy food. You'd end up gaining less food than the wood that you sold, instead of gaining more food than the wood spent. Or worse, if you didn't sell wood, and just converted your gold to food, you'd likely be spending more gold for the food than you would have spent wood on a farm.
This mills are so hypnotic. XD
Always thought to get horse collar before farms so I get more food for the 60 wood.
Now I don’t know what to do, I’ve been playing this game since 2000 and I haven’t a clue what I’m doing lol this a constant feeling I get from your videos.
If the farm reseeding is more staggered out, you could make the argument that farm upgrades lets you allocate fewer villagers to wood to support the trickle cost of 60 wood every few moments, which has the knock on effect of fewer exposed lumberjacks you have to defend + more villagers on other resources.
Thanks so much! I thought is was totally vital, even going so far as to idle some vills to make sure they plant horse-collar farms... now I won't stress out about is that much
Not to stress you out, but it's probably worth idling them for a second to wait for horse collar to come in. If you're paying for a tech, you might as well get the benefit :)
wow I just wanna say I really appreciate the production quality on these vids
I play the Japanese and I hated that you don't get crop rotation but now I feel I don't need it as much as I thought thank you!!!
By the way (since you mentioned the 256x tech mod) I found that making fish traps was a lot more efficient/quicker in the long run since the gillnets research makes gathering from fish traps faster. So you can end up getting food from traps VERY FAST.
Great video! I would like to add a comment. I hardly think horse collar will have an impact on number of military units one would get in the field (or at least it shouldn't).
The thing is, in the begin you will have only one or two military buildings, which is the limiting production factor in a well executed build order. Probably the only exception is straight 2 archery ranges, which, nowadays, seems not to work too great.
Even in that case, you would delay your horse collar anyway because you would delay building farms for a bit. Hence it is a good rule of thumb to get the correct horse collar in a well performed build order.
That said, you can use horse collar timing to adjust your build order if you get some problems like an unexpected drush, trush, boar steal. Or if, for some reason, you screwed up your dark age. In any case, I don't recommend delay double bit axe, unless you really know what you are doing.
I've been doing some farm numbers myself. I was looking at how much of an effect it has when you place farms farther away from a drop off point. Specifically, looking to see just how important it is to have a TC or mill near by a farm.
To make things short, here are two lists of numbers. Each number is how far it is away from a drop off point, by one farm length away. So first is right next to a TC, second is one farm length away, etc.
The first list is without upgrades, the second list is with upgrades.
~.343/s
~.282/s
~.230/s
~.197/s
~.388/s
~.376/s
~.343/s
~.307/s
My thoughts on conclusion: It is extremely important to have farms right next to a drop off point early on, when you have no upgrades. As the game progresses, it is still most efficient to be right next to a drop off (obviously), but even up to 3 farm lengths away, you still get pretty good returns. I suppose one way to look at it is when you are mid boom and you are at a high villager count and working on farm upgrades, you don't need to get too "neat" with placement. As long as you aren't dropping farms too far away, they all should be working in that .34-.38 range.
Man I gotta say, I just recently discouvered your chanel and it's fantastic, love your calculations, you are a true man of games and science!
I'm eager to see more of your content, greetings from Mexico!
Does the fact that Heavy Plow is a better upgrade and needs Horse Collar as a requirement makes Horse Collar worthy a bit earlier?
Keep up the good work! :)
Depends on what you want to do, if you want to fight in feudal, you should get horse collar as first thing in feudal and then place farms. If you go for a fast castle you will probably have to place farms in dark age (3-4), then you don't do any techs until you clicked for castle. Then while you are going up you can do double bit axe (1st) and then horse collar, Then prioritize; getting up new tc's > wood upgrade > heavy plow. (Wheelbarrow ( at around 35 vills) from one of your tc's or in an extended feudal you can do it while you are housed ;). )
If I had to guess, I figure they were going back and fourth on whether or not the upgrades should affect gather rate and by how much... and keeping the multiplier but changing its value was faster adding, removing, re-adding, re-removing the multiplier? I haven't edited AoE, but I've done that kind of thing before tinkering with other games.
I am not even an active AoE player but i still enjoy watching your videos because i somehow find them very relaxing. Keep up the good work!
You should make a video comparing farming upgrade cost efficiency vs extra mill-close-to-farms cost efficiency.
Agreed
He does have a video on double-layer farms or build a mill, fairly similar
This suddenly comes to my mind. Wouldn't it be interesting if after you research 'Wheelbarrow" for example, you can see the villager carrying a wheelbarrow around.
These are the types of aoe2 vids that I'm especially glad for Not to say I don't appreciate your other ones, I appreciate everything that you do!
Before watching this video full, let me guess, the extra food means less time needing to be spent reseeding gives a minute increase in food per minute, and I assume the university tech that makes you build 20% faster speeds up farm creation too thus increase collection rate by a small margin as well.
I usually have 8 farms. It does pay off quickly if you're on a black forest or you get a good wood vein at the start
With one farm, yes, horse collar takes 3 farm cycles to pay off. But that also means that it pays off in one farm cycle with 3 farms, or some 20 minutes. Usually a player will easely have over 12 farms, which brings horse collar paying for itself in roughtly 5 minutes. Got 20 farms? It pays itself in one minute.
I think you should have considered the farm upgrades in terms of wood cutters required to get the wood for the next reseed. If getting farm upgrade means that one woodcutter can do something else, the farm upgrade is already worth it immediately. Paying wood cost later isn't "resources saved" exactly but its the next best thing because it allows collecting resources for the reseed for a longer time.
Good info. I'll probably start delaying getting heavy plow if I need resources like say with a Knight Rush. Still get horse collar though as the timing of those reseeds means I'm usually scarce on wood.
Thanks for another great video, SOTL. I really DIG (ha ha ha, get it?) your testing regimes to crunch (!) the numbers on farmed vegies and show us how the game works.
But enough bad puns. A question, if I may?
How, when, which civilisation, which version of the game do you get "Crop Rotation"? I've never seen it yet. Thanks.
Never thought about it like that, treadmill crane is a economy tec. Reseeding farms faster means less collection downtime, plus building things faster also means your villagers can go back to collecting resources faster too.
Ok, I have two things to criticize though:
1. The farming upgrades should increase the collection rate over a longer time, because the villagers spend less time rebuilding the farms and can hence collect more food in the meantime. You don't see that when you observe it only for one cycle, of course, because the rebuilding time is not included then. But let them collect for let's say 30min straight with autofarming on and there should be a difference. Is it big? I don't know, probably not... But there should be one.
2. Horse collar is worth it already after the first cycle. That's because you spend your resources to rebuild later. Resources are worth more earlier in the game than later. It's called inflation, SOTL made a great video about that, you should watch it ;)
4:45 But you are just considering one farm, if say each initial farm lasts 8 minutes, and horsecollar adds around 4 minutes, that would mean you get a "free farm" every 2 farms you seed, at around 25 minutes (for the first cycle you proposed). So the more farms you make the better the upgrade gets.
Not in a practical sense.
You are right, in the long term; but SotL's point is that if you compare yourself to a mirror player (making the same number of farms, reseeding them when they run out) you are still behind until 37ish minutes.
Breaking it down: You have say, 10 farms built at 12 min and researched HC. I also have 10 farms, but don't get HC. At 20 min my farms need reseeding (costing 600 wood). At 24 min, your farms run out (costing the same 600 wood). You haven't saved any resources, and are in fact 150 resources behind (the cost of HC itself). You did delay your repayment by 4 and a bit minutes which isn't nothing, but you still have pay out the exact same amount as me. The same thing happens at the second cycle, except you earned the time difference twice, so you get to keep your wood for an extra 9 minutes. You still have to pay the exact same amount, though. At 36 min, we have still both paid the same amount to keep our 10 famrs up and running (plus you spent 150 resources on HC). It isn't until the 37:30 min mark, when I've had to pay to reseed 3 times (1800 wood), whereas you have only spent 1200, that you actually see a profit. You can make that profit bigger or smaller based on how many farms you build, but you can't make it appear any faster.
@@boosterh1113 lmao i aint reading that
@@boosterh1113 600 wood in minute 20 is a lot more than 600 wood in minute 24.
SOTL has to be the main professor teaching settlers how to optimize advancements to their civilization. I can see it now, he is in that little university building lecturing in a medieval lecture hall to everyone.
As a programmer, that multiply by 1 is probable some sort of compiler optimization, or perhaps some sort of branchless method (using math to avoid an _IF_ statement, which is also an optimization if the compiler can detect it).
Amazing video! Classic SOTL!!
Love the videos man. Love how aoe is getting popular again. Especially with aoe3 def. I hope you make videos on that too!
I think all farm upgrades indirectly DO affect the gather rate over time, because they delay reseeding. Reseeding itself takes time. So fewer times you reseed, more of that time you’re spending gathering. You could only detect this over multiple reseed cycles 🙂
That’s why the Inca team bonus of faster farm reseeding is a thing.
@Spirit, one comment in here - if we would consider more than 1 farmer at the same moment (which means that not 1 but 10 farms would die faster) it changes everything. Horse collar cost is divided by the sum of those farms, not just the single one. Based on your math it should pay off after 3 cycles, so 3 farms, right?
Having checked this out by making a quick mod, I feel pretty confident that the reason why there are 1 multiples is because of the fact that boosting farming rate doesn't behave anything near how you'd expect, because of how villagers still pick up and move after the same amount of farming regardless.
With all the econ upgrades, it makes a significant impact, but you don't feel like it does, so it doesn't necessarily work.
This guy could literally turn anything you might think of into a math video
Yet his maths is all wrong
hi SOTL. i starting to play aoe2de and thanks to yours tips i playing fairly well, but you upload a video called "beginner guide to the first 15 villagers" and help me a lot, and you say that you do another video for water maps, it really be helping to noob like me to know what to do exactly and what not to, thanks for your videos (sorry for my english isn't god, i'm form south america)
In the 256 mod Malay can research Forced Levy and Supplies so that their Militia cost nothing to create. After researching Supplies enough times, the food cost becomes negative, so building militia adds food to your stockpile
This is true, while playing as Franks I notice that in long games, you don't need 15-20 on wood. Just a mere 7-8 villagers are enough. What is more, effectively u get free 7-8 villagers in post imperial that u can use on other tasks. U could either sell the excess wood or free up about half the woodcutters and increase population or make more farms.
So the Frank economy bonus acts as : free villagers in post imperial
I have not even played Age of Empires II since before there was an HD version, i.e. I haven't played Age of Empires II for (way) more than 7 years. But I still watch Spirit of the Law's Age of Empires II videos, since I find his content enjoyable regardless :)
Spirit, you are like Martin Luther, nailing your discoveries on the gate of the AoE church. And those discoveries are brutal...
And Hitler when he's your enemy
@@beastmasterbg Or even worse, when he hates you - Hoang :D
One thing you didn’t consider is crop cycling would allow more spaced out reseeding which is more time gathering food than having the villager replant.
1:59 When you finally realize why farmers get +1 food compared to other resources after more than one and a half decade of playing.
Horse collar with 15 farms in feudal age saves a lot while hitting castle age specially if you want to go to knights and add tcs.
You are so good at explaining. Thanks!
In the long run there is a slight boost to farming speed from the farm upgrades because the build time interrupts production less often. Minor, but I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned.
I don't feel like the horse collar test is very fair since players aren't going to have 1 farm in feudal. How do those figures look when you have 8 farms simultaneously.
Multiply them by 8.
Read top comment's first reply
Thats true for a single Farm...If you make 20 that payoff happens 6 times at the First cicle
yes, but also no.
they payoff is temporary at first. while you certainly have more resources during the time perion between 20 and 24 minutes, after 24 its back to being one horsecollar behind again until the non horsecollar guy starts his third farms.
or to put it differently:
the first 510 seconds youre behind. (-1 horse collar)
the next 225 seconds you have an advantage (-1 horse collar, + x farms)
the next 285 seconds youre behind again (-1 horse collar)
followed by 450 seconds advantage (-1 HC, + x farms)
a short 60 seconds behind (-1 horse collar)
and then finally the permanent payoff.
ignoring that 60second negative window, it pays off after 17 minutes, 13 of which you are behind
No. SotL could have made it clearer, but he is completely ignoring how MUCH of a payback the techs will get you, he is only talking about WHEN that payback happens. Obviously, Horse Collar will be 6x more valuable with 30 farms than with 5, but you still aren't going to get any of that value until after 3 reseeding cycles (about 20 min) later.
You have more wood to spend in the time before the reseed happens. A better way to look at it would be: "In the additional time that it takes the upgraded farm to expire, how much extra wood is collected?" Each farm cycle nets you a portion of that permanent advantage, since you are able to use that extra wood you collected on other things without being unable to reseed the farms immediately when they expire. It's especially relevant if you're using auto-farm reseed. In that first cycle, horse collar will pay for itself if you have 10+ farms, because it will enable you to spend more wood elsewhere than it costed in total resources in that minute where, without horse collar, you would have already spent the wood on reseeding farms.
It takes 3 cycles for your upgraded farms to "lap" farms with 1 less upgrade and be permanently on a different cycle. That doesn't mean you don't get an advantage from it much earlier than that.
I like how this channel's name makes it sound like a legal channel but its actually all about AoE2
Awesome.
p.s. I like the background music in this video very much!
4:28 few day ago i was playing so aggresively on a nomad tg as celts and forgot to take even horse collar upgrade but never felt out of food or wood. now this video explains why...
Greetings to you Mr. Spirit
Always nice seeing your videos.