We kinda are in a time where trade is either going to be the strongest or worthless without much in-between. IIRC Gold per distance is a square function and the distanced traveled (Barring obstructions) is vaguely linear, which makes any good trade extremely predictable due to there being no with how trade posts might be placed. If we could re-do the formula for gold carried, we could probably give it some wiggle room so you could place things slightly suboptimally to hide your trade but you still get a decent result we could probably have less overtuned trade. By overtuned, I don't mean we change its peak, just that imperial efficiency is held off till castle or something rather then feudal if we give trade some techs (IE: Like trader pop cap before a castle upgrade.) As things stand, I am fairly sure the devs are going to get frustrated by the game bouncing between onlytrade and no trade and just leave it alone if they keep the current formula and returns on investment. Sadly, making trade balance maintainable is a boring in the math stuff rather then a dramatic balance change that will make a small vocal part of the community very happy.
I am guilty of using this trick but i believe it is a exploit and not a feature. The trade value should be penalized based on the current position from the home market when you command to trade with the target neutral/ally market so it can detect if you are doing less than a full roundtrip. Or just do an outright tick from market to market instead of roundtrips so that trade is more viable or broken lol
The best way to protect your trade is to wall the sides and create a choke point in the middle (where your base should be) so the most accessible place for your enemy to fight is always the middle, remember you are not playing bots but rather people, who may know you are trading, so it's all about misdirection, which can be a relic, a sacred site, a forward keep, etc. as long as you keep your enemy busy with some immediate problem they will forget about the real problem, even if you smash some low-level units into their base to their death, when you have a trade going you can keep making units. Remember not to overcommit as your opponent can overwhelm your base, and be sure to have units backing up when aging up. Now if you are at a point where your enemy is reaching your trade it means you already did something wrong. The first thing I'd recommend would be to go with your own army to defend and re-wall asap to cut their reinforcements, have enough army to make sure you can kill their's and some reinforcements that may arrive but have some army in your base to try and raid them to shift the focus, try to not have an all in so close to your trade. Not everyone has the multitasking ability the pros have, so if this is all too complicated at first you can also place 1 tower on each side to deter an early attack from your opponent, that will not last long but again, trade is all about staling, the longer you trade the more advantage you will get. And last but certainly not least, you will be getting a lot of gold so don't be afraid to trade that gold for other resources such as stone to stone-wall the sides.
It's not only that those otoman keeps are gonna buff your trade, if you farm near them, you'll have food and gold perfectly protected by the keeps, completly impossible to raid that
@@BuggyDClown-pc7sc yes you can but you'd waste a lot of stone doing so. The ottomans just have another reason to do so and that makes it cost effective.
The last three team games I've played in Quick Match all had opponents doing this "trick". We played French Pass and the opposing team got rewarded MORE for staying in their base and trading than my team did for playing for map control and taking gold in the middle. Just waiting for Company of Heroes 3 at this point.
My game seems to have a bug. I cannot get my traders to trade with any market or trading post. They either go to it and then go idle or after clicking the trade button I cannot click on the market or trading post it says "Cannot use this ability on this site"
calculate from corner to corner: small card: gold/(delivery time/60 seconds) Very big map: gold/(delivery time/60 seconds) and you will get the same values!!! regardless of the number of cells
just calculated mongol trade and wanted to share: without yam and traders >= 7 130 % with yam and traders >= 7 130 % * 1.15 = 149.5 % with stone commerce and traders >= 9 140 % * 1.15 = 161 % with improved stone commerce and traders >= 9 150 % * 1.15 = 172.5 % with your base value of 57 ressources/min for 91 tiles (full map along the map border) mongol trade nets you 57 ressources/min * 1.495 = 85.215 ressources/min without stone commerce 57 ressources/min * 1.725 = 98.325 ressources/min with improved stone commerce
I experimented with this yesterday, and it does not seem you gain anything from clicking both trading posts (like you did at 3:00). They must have patched it?
hi i'm from russia and figured out the trade. see trade income does not depend on the number of cells. trade income is envy of what percentage of the length of the card the trader passes! i.e. the merchant brings 72 gold per minute (Abasid with upgrades + 30%) when you go from corner to corner regardless of the size of the map!!! - on a small map in minutes it will bring 72 gold per minute and on a big map it will bring 72 gold per minute !!! if converted to income per minute.
anyone know why my gold per trip is maxed at 73 with both markets being as far apart as possible as demonstrated in the video? Same map and micro aswell.
So I just noticed, apparently the boost for trader speed from the Seagate castle dosen't work on trade ships... even though it specifically says it does... give it a try and let me know if I'm wrong....
if the merchant goes halfway through the map, then he will bring 72 * 0.5 = 36 gold per minute. regardless of card size! this means that trading on small 1v1 cards is more profitable than trading on 4v4 cards
Worst thing about trade in team games is your ally saying I’m going trade hard. Then expects you to protect their open trade routes. Or they always begging for a market when I used my wood strategically
You definitely want to put down a market for your team. It's a minimal expense for what could be an extremely powerful and valuable asset for your team. Plus you can always trade back, too.
@@Murasame13 trust me dog, early trade sucks. Trade after 25 mins if the game is stale. When you trade you lose. Unless the map is easy to wall off. Telling people who are noobs to trade is also a huge mistake. Setting them up for failure. Make units early. Trade later. Only civ that can trade early are mongol. That’s it.
@@Fantasygod19999 Oh yeah early trade is definitely terrible. Even if it's a really good trade, it's just not worth the up-front expense that could be used on unit production. Not to mention if you're not French, the only thing you get is gold... early game gold should be plentiful.
Well you can evaluate it yourself. A trader cost what,120 ressources (60w, 60g)? So you made a net return for one-trip trader between 50 and 60 ressources (assuming trade for 170-180g). If you cared less for wood, you make up to 120g net profit. Obviously, deleting before reaching your preferred trader count (or pop max) doesn't make sense. The value of deleting depends now on the distance the soon-to-be-deleted trader has traveled. Easiest case to consider is you delete the trader right after she deposited the last trip and the new trader immediately pops up. Then your gain in term of gold per second is the maximum net profit. The further the old trader is to her home market or the longer it takes to replace the trader, the less you gain from the net profit up to the point where the old trader picks up a new batch of gold. From this point on deleting would be detrimental to you. The gain of course increases with your net profit. So more gold per trip (e.g. team games, civ traits) or less trader costs (Abbasid). So weigh this gold gain against the con of an up-front payment (meaning you first lose gold before you make gold from this transaction) and much more importantly the focus you waste on this intensive micro. I would say: Don't bother in 1vs1... Any corrections of my thought process is welcome :)
That's inefficient, why you delete him? if you play multiplayer game you can try to seek your allies market to do a two side trading, and lets the poor trader being used.
@@maxmustermann3811 keep in mind that population is finite though ;) From a resource point of view the one-trip gives you roughly 60 resources net of standard building costs. Deleting a two-trip trader for a one-trip trader is then benifitial as you gain this 60 resources only by deleting another trader. Nonetheless, from a total perspective it is too tedious to be really worth it. See my first answer to have a more detailed answer.
Hey I left this comment on another video but for Ottomans I'm thinking place your market extremely close to the neutral market and go up with trade bags so ,+ 40 gold no matter the distance. Your traders will make tons of trips per minute with a 40 gold drop off each time.
I'm not sure why the devs thought early trade was a good idea. I was hoping they'd make it stronger in Castle age but it just seems silly like this. Obviously it's not going to work all the time on open maps but on closed maps it will be impossible to stop.
I guess trade could be balanced by increasing the population cost of traders. I like the different gameplay style Trade introduces but it's pretty OP in this patch.
You want to balance trade ? Scout and kill the traders. Goddamn not everything needs to be nerfed or buffed. Wall the trades postes, patrol around etc…
Offense is the best defense in that case, been researching many Mongol players this patch and I even see a couple build Silver Tree but not produce traders til a bit after age 3. So it's dark age aggression into castle boom then constant aggression with age 3 tech/MAA-Crossbow
Thing is if you position your army offensively near your opponent's base(outpost/Khan to scout ambush) if the opponent attacks your trade it's likely way more value for you if you react by invading their vulnerable spots. Rather than playing solely defensive you can attack while their army is away, have outpost along the trade too for garrison.
Trade can be absolutely crushing the enemy. Two questions: 1) can the Mether even further enhance the speed of traders too? @Aussie_Drongo @AgeOfNoob 2)will walls finally take over maps? ps. Nice show once again!
We kinda are in a time where trade is either going to be the strongest or worthless without much in-between. IIRC Gold per distance is a square function and the distanced traveled (Barring obstructions) is vaguely linear, which makes any good trade extremely predictable due to there being no with how trade posts might be placed.
If we could re-do the formula for gold carried, we could probably give it some wiggle room so you could place things slightly suboptimally to hide your trade but you still get a decent result we could probably have less overtuned trade.
By overtuned, I don't mean we change its peak, just that imperial efficiency is held off till castle or something rather then feudal if we give trade some techs (IE: Like trader pop cap before a castle upgrade.)
As things stand, I am fairly sure the devs are going to get frustrated by the game bouncing between onlytrade and no trade and just leave it alone if they keep the current formula and returns on investment.
Sadly, making trade balance maintainable is a boring in the math stuff rather then a dramatic balance change that will make a small vocal part of the community very happy.
I am guilty of using this trick but i believe it is a exploit and not a feature. The trade value should be penalized based on the current position from the home market when you command to trade with the target neutral/ally market so it can detect if you are doing less than a full roundtrip. Or just do an outright tick from market to market instead of roundtrips so that trade is more viable or broken lol
It only has influence on the first trip, after that no change, and the devs confirmed that it is purposely working
It's a minimal efficiency that only works on the first trip anyway. It's definitely good but not super duper important in the grand scheme of things.
Insane information, Drongo. Always wanted to learn how to position the markets to boots trades. Thankss
Can you discuss how to properly defend your trade and how that changes your playstyle?
you dont defend trade, you keep map control and it is usually enough
The best way to protect your trade is to wall the sides and create a choke point in the middle (where your base should be) so the most accessible place for your enemy to fight is always the middle, remember you are not playing bots but rather people, who may know you are trading, so it's all about misdirection, which can be a relic, a sacred site, a forward keep, etc. as long as you keep your enemy busy with some immediate problem they will forget about the real problem, even if you smash some low-level units into their base to their death, when you have a trade going you can keep making units. Remember not to overcommit as your opponent can overwhelm your base, and be sure to have units backing up when aging up.
Now if you are at a point where your enemy is reaching your trade it means you already did something wrong. The first thing I'd recommend would be to go with your own army to defend and re-wall asap to cut their reinforcements, have enough army to make sure you can kill their's and some reinforcements that may arrive but have some army in your base to try and raid them to shift the focus, try to not have an all in so close to your trade.
Not everyone has the multitasking ability the pros have, so if this is all too complicated at first you can also place 1 tower on each side to deter an early attack from your opponent, that will not last long but again, trade is all about staling, the longer you trade the more advantage you will get. And last but certainly not least, you will be getting a lot of gold so don't be afraid to trade that gold for other resources such as stone to stone-wall the sides.
It's not only that those otoman keeps are gonna buff your trade, if you farm near them, you'll have food and gold perfectly protected by the keeps, completly impossible to raid that
You can farm gold and food next to a keep with any civ except mongols??
Yeah I tried that and it actually works pretty well
@@BuggyDClown-pc7sc yes you can but you'd waste a lot of stone doing so. The ottomans just have another reason to do so and that makes it cost effective.
this trick is very knwon in aoe2 - imo should not be in the game to do that but yeah not suprised its doable in aoe4 aswell ^^
Kinda sounds like a bug/glitch...
The last three team games I've played in Quick Match all had opponents doing this "trick". We played French Pass and the opposing team got rewarded MORE for staying in their base and trading than my team did for playing for map control and taking gold in the middle.
Just waiting for Company of Heroes 3 at this point.
My game seems to have a bug. I cannot get my traders to trade with any market or trading post. They either go to it and then go idle or after clicking the trade button I cannot click on the market or trading post it says "Cannot use this ability on this site"
what I ask myself the most tbh: is the "trade trick" intended, or are we expecting to having it patched sooner or later?
my guess is the latter!
It is intended
I think it's been patched now(?)
very useful
calculate from corner to corner: small card: gold/(delivery time/60 seconds)
Very big map: gold/(delivery time/60 seconds) and you will get the same values!!! regardless of the number of cells
just calculated mongol trade and wanted to share:
without yam and traders >= 7
130 %
with yam and traders >= 7
130 % * 1.15 = 149.5 %
with stone commerce and traders >= 9
140 % * 1.15 = 161 %
with improved stone commerce and traders >= 9
150 % * 1.15 = 172.5 %
with your base value of 57 ressources/min for 91 tiles (full map along the map border) mongol trade nets you
57 ressources/min * 1.495 = 85.215 ressources/min without stone commerce
57 ressources/min * 1.725 = 98.325 ressources/min with improved stone commerce
Thanks for the video. This cleared alot of my questions up.
I experimented with this yesterday, and it does not seem you gain anything from clicking both trading posts (like you did at 3:00). They must have patched it?
hi i'm from russia and figured out the trade. see trade income does not depend on the number of cells. trade income is envy of what percentage of the length of the card the trader passes! i.e. the merchant brings 72 gold per minute (Abasid with upgrades + 30%) when you go from corner to corner regardless of the size of the map!!! - on a small map in minutes it will bring 72 gold per minute and on a big map it will bring 72 gold per minute !!! if converted to income per minute.
anyone know why my gold per trip is maxed at 73 with both markets being as far apart as possible as demonstrated in the video? Same map and micro aswell.
Damn bro, aren't you from Australia? 7ºC is cooold! (saw on your windows taskbar when you opened reddit :D) Outstanding video, thank you!
So I just noticed, apparently the boost for trader speed from the Seagate castle dosen't work on trade ships... even though it specifically says it does... give it a try and let me know if I'm wrong....
Thanks ausie for your info on trading.
How about trade with specific landmarks that acts like a Market ? Like trade wing and Chamber of Commerce ?
Nice to be shown tricks of the trade 😅
Tl;dr trade is high risk high reward
All this time I've been doing the 2 markets but manually changing the home market on each trader😂😂 .
if the merchant goes halfway through the map, then he will bring 72 * 0.5 = 36 gold per minute. regardless of card size! this means that trading on small 1v1 cards is more profitable than trading on 4v4 cards
Interesting, so it's not technically about distance traveled but only specifically the % of the map traveled?
If you're pop capped you can just kill traders after they drop off and make new ones
question, im new to aoe4, how do you automatically build the markets, it seems not to take any time, same to produce traders?
He uses cheats here, building markets takes time usually just like any building
If you trade resources in the market, the price goes up / amount gained goes down. What is this based on and how quickly does it regenerate?
Thank you for linking the reddit post in this video. I didn't see it on reddit last week but there is a ton of good data in there
Will you ever do any more Age 3 videos Drongo?
Which civ benefits most from trade? Malians because they can produce mass units with gold only?
He literally said it in the video, Ottomans, Malians and French benefit the most
@@chilemetodista1446 maybe strongest trade but I feel that Malians benefit so much more from the gold trickle
@@tutzmeister9446 Exactly, Ottomans seems to have pretty nice trade but I don't think they use intensively gold at any age.
What about french pass? Is trade recommended there?
Trade is always recommended no matter the civ. Trade only becomes not so useful for very high level play. Which means for most people, use trades.
Thank you, Drongo! This is awesome.
Trade on ancient spires is great
Worst thing about trade in team games is your ally saying I’m going trade hard. Then expects you to protect their open trade routes. Or they always begging for a market when I used my wood strategically
You definitely want to put down a market for your team. It's a minimal expense for what could be an extremely powerful and valuable asset for your team. Plus you can always trade back, too.
@@Murasame13 trust me dog, early trade sucks. Trade after 25 mins if the game is stale. When you trade you lose. Unless the map is easy to wall off. Telling people who are noobs to trade is also a huge mistake. Setting them up for failure. Make units early. Trade later. Only civ that can trade early are mongol. That’s it.
@@Fantasygod19999 Oh yeah early trade is definitely terrible. Even if it's a really good trade, it's just not worth the up-front expense that could be used on unit production. Not to mention if you're not French, the only thing you get is gold... early game gold should be plentiful.
Thank you 💯❤️💪
Does the trade trick still work?
I was wondering the same...
Is there a point when it's better to delete trader after first trip and just make another?
Well you can evaluate it yourself. A trader cost what,120 ressources (60w, 60g)? So you made a net return for one-trip trader between 50 and 60 ressources (assuming trade for 170-180g). If you cared less for wood, you make up to 120g net profit. Obviously, deleting before reaching your preferred trader count (or pop max) doesn't make sense. The value of deleting depends now on the distance the soon-to-be-deleted trader has traveled. Easiest case to consider is you delete the trader right after she deposited the last trip and the new trader immediately pops up. Then your gain in term of gold per second is the maximum net profit. The further the old trader is to her home market or the longer it takes to replace the trader, the less you gain from the net profit up to the point where the old trader picks up a new batch of gold. From this point on deleting would be detrimental to you.
The gain of course increases with your net profit. So more gold per trip (e.g. team games, civ traits) or less trader costs (Abbasid). So weigh this gold gain against the con of an up-front payment (meaning you first lose gold before you make gold from this transaction) and much more importantly the focus you waste on this intensive micro.
I would say: Don't bother in 1vs1...
Any corrections of my thought process is welcome :)
That's inefficient, why you delete him? if you play multiplayer game you can try to seek your allies market to do a two side trading, and lets the poor trader being used.
no
It is never good to delete, cause that one trader will get infinite resources but if you continually reinvest you won’t get much value
@@maxmustermann3811 keep in mind that population is finite though ;) From a resource point of view the one-trip gives you roughly 60 resources net of standard building costs. Deleting a two-trip trader for a one-trip trader is then benifitial as you gain this 60 resources only by deleting another trader. Nonetheless, from a total perspective it is too tedious to be really worth it. See my first answer to have a more detailed answer.
So clear and concise
Hey I left this comment on another video but for Ottomans I'm thinking place your market extremely close to the neutral market and go up with trade bags so ,+ 40 gold no matter the distance. Your traders will make tons of trips per minute with a 40 gold drop off each time.
not +40gold but +40% gold
Tradebags does make your traders carry 40% more gold not 40 more gold
Ohh I see. Thank you
Would be incredibly broken if it was 40 gold base haha
I'm not sure why the devs thought early trade was a good idea. I was hoping they'd make it stronger in Castle age but it just seems silly like this. Obviously it's not going to work all the time on open maps but on closed maps it will be impossible to stop.
I guess trade could be balanced by increasing the population cost of traders. I like the different gameplay style Trade introduces but it's pretty OP in this patch.
i think the devs should reduce the amount of gold carried by traders the more traders a player has
You want to balance trade ? Scout and kill the traders. Goddamn not everything needs to be nerfed or buffed. Wall the trades postes, patrol around etc…
trade is difficut to defend on open maps like dry arabia, etc. theres only a few maps where trade is viable, altai is the best atm.
Please dev make updates more often, I love this game but it’s still in early access…
What? It isn’t early access.
imho 1v1 Mongol trade suck cause u have no walls...
Offense is the best defense in that case, been researching many Mongol players this patch and I even see a couple build Silver Tree but not produce traders til a bit after age 3. So it's dark age aggression into castle boom then constant aggression with age 3 tech/MAA-Crossbow
Thing is if you position your army offensively near your opponent's base(outpost/Khan to scout ambush) if the opponent attacks your trade it's likely way more value for you if you react by invading their vulnerable spots. Rather than playing solely defensive you can attack while their army is away, have outpost along the trade too for garrison.
Trade can be absolutely crushing the enemy. Two questions: 1) can the Mether even further enhance the speed of traders too? @Aussie_Drongo @AgeOfNoob 2)will walls finally take over maps?
ps. Nice show once again!
Mehter only buffs speed in formations. I doubt you can have a mehter in formation with a trader
@@Hansjebiertje agree, but could it be. Is there an exploit?