The cost of forgetting eco techs (AoE2)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- In this video we're going to try to quantify the resources lost by forgetting any of the most common eco upgrades.
1:15 Assumptions
3:02 Wood upgrades
4:42 Wheelbarrow & Hand Cart
6:31 Mill upgrades
9:04 Gold mining
10:15 Putting it all together
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Patreon: / spiritofthelaw
Background music from Epidemic Sound: www.epidemicsou...
Game: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition
Spirit out here laying down judgement on the double bit axe forgettors
Missed opportunity to say "laying down the law" smh...
@@RainbowDevourer hahahaha i felt it was too on the nose
@@TekoraX
Don't you mean it wasn't in the spirit of the artist? :P
but the axe already has one head, I ain't payin' for another one!
Double bit seems to be a must, because its cheap and pays off quick, horse collar isn't that necessary as it only improves wood conversion ratio. For 4-6 farms its fine to go without it.
Probably one of the best videos related to 1v1s I've seen from you ever, mainly because sometimes you wonder at your own elo how can someone pull ahead on resources collected so quickly (Aside from the obvious civ bonuses). Amazing work 🙌
Its funny how its all about the wood. Wood upgrade increase collection rate, farm reduce the wood investment into farms, gold upgrade allow you to finish earlier, focus then to farming which comes from wood. Woodcepion
Nicov taking notes.
Excellent video. The funniest part for me what the heavier math part putting those images that further made my attention worst. I like to try to really understand how smart you are!! Or math expert. What do you do for a living? Or how you did learn so much math?
In HC5 qualifiers the most common pro mistake was forgetting to remove reseed farm on islands, losing precious wood to useless farms instead of making more galleys/boats.
8:00 one of these pictures is not like the others: Euler.
I feel like the title is more of threat then an advice
Forgetting ? No I never forget anything, I just happen to skip it.
All threats are a form of advice. From a certain point of view.
*points spear at You while giving "adivise" *
Bro's is easily threatened
@@samfire3067 “sending your enemy 200 gold as tribute is the best way to keep their spears outside your body.”
Figuring out farm tech equations is more complicated than the question of life itself
42
SOTL: This question came from a viewer.
Was the viewer Nicov?
Sound like it's Nicov.
Yeah must be Nicov.
In my head canon this analysis will be forever known as the "Nicov analysis"
yeah I'm really disappointed there was not a single "NIIIIICOOOOOVV" in this video
Same... @@klericer Reading the title before clicking on the video, I was thinking about Nicov. What a legend
I don't have time to watch the video (will be doing it later) but came here entirely looking for NIIIIIICCOOOOOOVV comments and I'm so glad I did.
@@Coloscopixfunny thing is he doesnt even forget upgrades anymore, but still keeps getting trolled for it 😂
Pechov
The gold/stone upgrades makes you finish those limited resources you start with faster. But in most games you don't stop collecting gold and stone when you finish your nearby piles, you compete for the contested ones in the middle. Meaning that you'd start collecting those contested resources faster than the opponent. Those could be considered the extra gold and stone you can earn from those techs in a long game.
yeah that's what I thought too. And also not every map is arabia. Sometimes there's a lot more gold available.
@@IanMainBliss 'not every map is arabia' - HERESY!!! You need to research Atonement NOW!
If you play like some true LEL you know you have to take the neutral gold first.
@@IanMainBlissif we are considering every map its gonna take more than a few hours of video time to fully explain them, and the math will get tougher too cause we havent even mentioned fish traps yet
also worth mentioning that the surface area of gold and stone places a hard limit on collection rates, although farms and wood do also have some degree of surface area constraint as well. After a certain amount of villagers collecting gold, more villagers will just add congestion.
My favorite part is "loosed basely"
time stamp: 1:16
Was my favourite too
It's called a Spoonerism :)
Haha I was wondering if I actually heard that 😂
based
I appreciate how the meme at 5:43 works with both 8 and 9 thousand, matching both the original Japanese and the English dub meme.
It's under 9000!
A victory. That is the cost.
Either you get them too early, or forget them utterly. There is only a tiny band of players that get them on time.
2.7k hrs played here, took me ages to get this down but what I did was create a habit where as soon as I hear the Feudal age up sound I immediately press the hotkeys for Lumbercamp, then mill and instantly queue the upgrades. It's impossible to forget if you wire your brain to do this after every age up.
@@SirQuantizationits not always best to get them immediately after feudal
I get them right after clicking the age-up button if I have rez floating, or I click them right after I've advanced unless I need to hit a timing but I'm not really good enough to be concerned about such timings so that is rarely the case, maybe if I'm supporting a team member with a reasonable amount of units
@@FullOilBarrel it’s not always the best, but, more often than not it would probably be better to do so this is a pretty good habit to get into as opposed to arbitrarily getting them.
When you try to improve a game like this, without structure to your play, it’s hard to determine where things are going wrong just like in real life.
TLDR, it’s a good habit to build, and if there’s any variance from it, it should be occasionally done to break away from the habit, rather than occasionally getting it as soon as possible
I think one of those players is Gandalf.
The fact that the gold mining upgrade actually helps you get more food and wood blew my mind
It's such a good point though, and I'm glad you talked about it!
This is why math exists. To figure out the most efficient eco in games xD
Oof, those numbers were higher than I expected, and they seem to have been difficult to calculate.
May I suggest a topic that is hopefully easier to calculate: how many land units of a type do you have to hit with the demo ship line ships on shallow water or shoreline in order for it to be cost-effective?
I know that the two demo ships required to take down a single trebuchet are cost-effective, and, based on the cost of the single units, a small handful of arbalests should be enough too to make the demo ship worth it. Where it gets more interesting is in stuff like cavalry who have higher HP and don't stand as closely together, so fewer of them get hit by the blast radius.
You made a video about cost-effectiveness of petards and flaming camels some time ago, and I think that on hybrid maps, demo ships, with their greater attack damage and blast radius, could have a good chance to get some cost-effective uses against land units in the shallows.
An additional benefit to blowing up half of the enemy army with a few demo ships is that the enemy's momentum gets completely messed up, but that can probably not be calculated in terms of cost-effectiveness, so you can pretty much skip that part imo.
They all basically only need to hit 2 units in most cases. Extremely consistently .
I think all the epic demo shots actually make players underestimate how good they are against smaller number of troops.
Demolition ships cost 70 wood 50 gold. Scout-line costs 80 food, knight-line cost 60 food 75 gold, camels cost 55 food 60 gold.
Heavy Demos have 130 melee attack (140 attack would only be on the same exact tile like with flaming camels) so they can take out most units besides cavalier, paladins and heavy camels in one shot.
Its probably not worth ever using demos to target an individual unit since it take to many of them to take out the more expensive units and units like hussars are just too cheap to justify it.
Something to consider is the subsequent cost of not destroying a particular unit or group of units. If the units you just ignored are able to push your villagers off a resource, even temporarily, it could more than offset the resources saved by not blowing them up with a demo ship.
@@LoreTunderin that's a good point but there's another side to it - should you even make demos instead of regular units to fight off an army? There's always the risk of making the demo but failing to get value out of it, so you wasted the resources AND you will get harassed afterwards anyways. That's the beauty of the game and of demo ships though, high risk high reward, and why it is always exciting to see it being used, independently of the outcome
@@voidgods Your two demo ships in the dock that you let your enemy scout will make them wary to use this particular river crossing. Instead, they take the long way and lose the fight.
:)
The game has some nice nuances that go beyond "this was a mathematically valid move".
I would blow some demo ships just for the shock value and to unnerve my opponent, and because it is fun.
Remember kids, buying eco upgrades are like paying your taxes. It can confusing, and you might not know why you even do it, but it tends to save you a lot of trouble.
it's actually a good comparison - taxes usually give more benefit than cost but it only pays off over a long time (though generally not in money but in timesavings, quality of life and safety).
@@BayWa4eva Taxes is the gov't mafia putting a gun to your head and saying, "You're going to accept my 'protection' whether you want to or not".
Spirit of the Law. Though he has serious statistics, has a sense of humour I enjoy very much.
I laughed out loud twice while eating my breakfast this morning.
Missing the farm upgrades also costs some food as your farmers are busy reseeding more often.
Ehh the food loss is negligible. I think delaying the farms reseeding is more important (and thus having much more wood to use in feudal)
@@zachrowe6271 this
Paying 300 wood to reset farms when youre in castle age with 60 vils is peanuts
Paying 300 wood to reseed as you hit castle age with 40 vills either means you idle your food eco or delay whatever monastery, workshop, uni or extra tcs you were aiming for
Loosed basely
9:55 I'd suggest gold's scarcity on the map implies that it's collection is better mapped as a zero-sum game. Thus, instead of allotting 14.4k to each player, we should consider players as deducting from the 28.8k gold total, and then comparing the difference in total gold collected by the end of the period, upgrade vis. upgrade.
This way you can model how much gold a player loses out on, since the only other party that could have obtained it was the enemy. The same concept can be used on stone and it's upgrades to arrive at totals for both stone and gold difference, these can then can be added to the tally given at the end of the video.
Lastly, it is important to realize that, when modeled this way we do not have to account for the opportunity cost of wood and food collected; since, if there is gold or stone to be mined, then both players will be mining them, and when no more of those resources exists both will begin farming and chopping wood - at the same time - meaning, there is no additional "opportunity" to be had by either side, it is already captured in the gold difference.
A fellow data analyst.
Yeah, wood as being fairly hard to run out of, and most food gathered in the game being converted wood makes your supply of wood be limited more by villager time, than world running out of resources.
Being able to sneakily mine more gold reduces your opponent's ability to make up the difference by forcing you off a patch of gold tiles.
The eco techs all costing similar amounts of resources over a long game makes me wonder if the devs also did these calculations and designed them to have that outcome
Quick, someone tag Nicov
lmao i was searching for this comment!!
After watching this, Nicov will be a major contender for Hidden Cup 6!!
I really really hope we get 1st april video this year from Spirit. Those were cool like for example that one about cobra cars.
My favorite was "Should you build Houses?"
I'm still waiting for the follow-up to the Top 5 Sheep Stealing civs he said he'd do, the Top 5 Goat Stealing Civs.
I really appreciate this video. This question has been burning a hole in my mind as I've played for years, and I'm really happy to see someone more qualified than myself go through the mental gymnastics to put my mind at ease. It makes the question such as "why do people go for double bit axe so early" easy to answer for example, and gives us another way of looking at the question of why crop rotation isn't often picked up.
There's another interesting tactical application to mining speed upgrades, and that's when you want to strip mine an area before you lose control of it. If you only have 3 minutes to mine out an area before enemy siege, tech, and army push you out, you want to be mining that limited gold pile with everything you've got.
1:16 "Loosed Basedly" is how gigachads fire their arrows
"But how much gold did I miss out on by not getting Fervor while my monk was running to the first relic? Or should I have made a second monk to get the second relic instead??"
SOTL Can you look into different Civ's potentials for 1 TC all ins? For example, I've been sticking to 1 TC all ins with Persians because of their faster TC work time, and I'm curious what the actual impact of that bonus is for my strategy. I'd also love to know about other civs that work well with 1 TC all ins. Just curious! Love your vids!!
love u spirit btw
As to quote a wise, spanish 25 year old
"He has a very balanced economy guys
0 Wood
0 Food
0 Gold"
I'm just starting this game on solo/easy, trying to learn wtf is going on. Don't know why I'm watching all this advanced stuff, but I find it fascinating anyway.
Same. The big takeaway is important for everbody - "get dem eco upgrades, especially the first ones"
Something that i would love to see you looking into is an analysis on the cost and benefit from mining neutral gold before mining your own as a way to deny it from other players. I think it would be challenging for most people but you appear very capable :) Great work on these vids.
Neutral stone is the real gold my son...
I think its just not worth the risk early on?
Unless you found a cozy little corner sonewhere at the map edge its just risky. Feudal and most of castle age tend to not have defined frontlines so the fight moves all over the place and can easily catch those vills as they migrate or randomly find them during routine scouting
Plus, you just really dont want to lose vills early. If some hussars kill your 15 gold miners at minute 40 you literally just go "damn, the gold :(" as you ignore the dead vills and pump 30 more out of your 5 tcs
If you lose like 6 vills on gold in mid castle age thatll likely destroy your army production for a bit and be a genuine dent in your eco as you only have 2- 3 tcs with 70 vills. Each man counts here, cant sack 4 of them for a bit of gold.
Not to mention that a majority of your games wont even empty the maps gold supply, in each of those games you just took an unnecessary risk
I once had a very intense team game. Things kinda calmed down in early imperial and then i realized to my horror i missed horse collar 😂😂
Now this is firmly in the category of "video only SoL could make."
I love this form of analysis
Idea for a video: how big of a discount needs fully upgraded halbs to be cost effective against teutons TK?
Fascinating. And now once more with every eco civ bonus..
Spirit of the Law: You'll be 1000 wood behind by min 30 if you forget double-bit axe
Hoang: (Laughs) I eat TC by min 16
Hi SOTL, I respect your attempts at trying to calculate these and thanks for awesome work. I feel we need more videos for different scenarios. How many more galleys I have on Islands at minute 20 if I take or not take double bit and stay feudal in a galley war and similar scenarios. :)
I used to sit and analyze the math and spreadsheets, but now I'm just trusting SotL to have it right. That farm equation was complicated, I 11-ed when the memes started showing.
I have a silly question about aoe.
Assuming infinate space and populate cap, how much time would it take from a one villager start to repopualte the entire planet if he was able to boom forever? Always adding new tcs etc.
brother, thx soo much for all, you truly are a bless for the aoe world, this video is amaZing, i am waiting for your new japanese overview, since we need some update on them, because of all the small changes to them, saludos desde chile hermano y perdon por mi ingles
Great video as always
It would be really nice to know how many resources you get in that hour long game so we can see how much you would miss out on as a percentage. I think the percentages are a more useful figure that just the straight value of 25,000 resources. Are you missing out on 5%, 10%, 20%, or 50% of the resources you would have gotten?
Dang I can't believe Nicov manages to win games 25k res behind over the course of an hour
Would be interesting to see data from shorter games as well, to see if there is any truth to the thought that getting upgrades when you can't really afford them can cause you to lose the game.
Would be amazing if you did deep dives like this for Age of Mythology once Retold comes out.
What percentage of expected resources is 25k in a 1h game?
20% roughly or more
@@kartiksaraf4676 That is a big number, I suppose it makes sense considering the level of the boosts they give. Thank you for the reply btw.
I'm definitely not good enough at this game to get hand cart before my first farm reseed
Please make some Age of Mythology videos like this! If not soon then maybe once Retold is released?
7:10 im getting integral calculus and related rates flashbacks
Finally, now I can optimize myself to be the lowest of the low elo players.
Please do a video on the new dlc? Or don't
That’s just a campaign DLC
7:50 I have never seen Sotl at such at high RPM lmao. I was like how does he compute? My brain was scrambled instantly.
The greatest cost of missing eco is the massive slap mark on my forehead.
😂
Imagine the "Mortal Combat" announcer : Vikings Win.
Fatality!
Thank you for making this critical video.
Nicov should watch this video
Why do I keep so eagerly watching videos about a game I haven't played in about 20 years is beyond me...
7:35 the feeling when you listening only, on 2x speed, and that moment kicks in :O
Eco tech is probably the tech that I forgot most often, especially when the game often make me focus on military techs. Usually I only remember about them when I realized I don't have enough resources to do more military upgrades (usually when the enemy is already knocking on my gate)
How polite is them to knock. My enemies just stroll right into my base, rude.
How did you come up with the underlying collection rates displayed at min 3:01?? I try to simulate some things myself and it isn't easy to get reasonable real collection rates for different resources and upgrades...
I am wondering if with Burgundians is better or not to pick up some eco upgrade when housed or not. I kind of thnk it is occasionally.
Are we sure that the Double Bit Axe + Bow Saw graph is correct? Unless I'm much mistaken, the two techs should compound slightly when both are grabbed. Starting from a 100% baseline wood collection rate, Double Bit Axe would raise it to a theoretical 120%, while Bow Saw would increase that by 20%, giving us a theoretical 144% collection rate. This is also in line with the theoretical increase from Double Bit Axe to Bow Saw collection rate being a 20% increase of the DBA rate.
very good video! One question though.. 25000 resources? What's the percentage? The number is actually kind of useless without the other number, how much WITH all the res.
experience of over 3500 ladder games: forget double-bit axe, after 30 mins you are missing about 1200 wood. if you forget bone saw and compensate by making more vils (I play a lot of cumans) you can go to 35 mins no problem. just some thoughts out of experience that fit with the data from the video. to put it simpler: if you forget double bit axe you cant expand with 2-3 tcs at 30 mins
So wood upgrades > farm upgrades > wheelbarrow/hand cart > mining upgrades?
(wheelbarrow/hand cart lower because they need TC work time which is precious, the others don't)
Something I never really questioned...why DOES "Horse Collar" boost the amount of food farms give? Where are these collared horses???
With all of these complex calculations, maybe it is about time to create a sort of Monte Carlo simulation code for Age of Empires II. In my field of research, we always create Monte Carlo simulations of our detector and the physics happening, in order to estimate our sensitivities to certain physical questions before we actually measure them. Your in-depth analysis of AoE2 questions are maybe at the point where that would be beneficial as well: Instead of calculating everything by hand, create a (more or less detailed) simulation of the game with some randomness to it, which you can run several times. This then gives you a non-analytical result to any question you might want to ask, that is probably:
- way faster (shouldn't be too difficult for a modern computer to simulate something as simple as AoE2)
- more accurate (because it includes second-order effects that you'd leave out otherwise)
- and less error-prone (because you could't accidentally forget about some effects)
... than doing calculations by hand. I'd love to have the free time to implement this...
Love the idea of this video!!
One thought for us newbs: is it possible to describe deficits in terms of common units? Or at least note that? Things like being down by 8000 wood is kinda nebulous for me. And yeah, I could go look it up, I do know how to google, but it would be kind convenient if you said "8000 wood or x number of archers" for example.
EDIT Ah, commented to soon, saw you did it at the end. I still think I would have preferred the trash units comments along the way as well, but it was really cool to see at the end :D
Forgetting the upgrades means your wood-lines don't move back as quickly wither so I'd always allow for about 5-10% swings downwards on those values.
But in previous videos, wasn't it shown that you should research wheelbarrow at like 45-46 villagers? At 17 minutes, I would guess you are at around 35.
The video was very interesting! Thanks for sharing. I guess it always bothers me that people try to maximize everything. Every possible. Second, every possible resource. I don't know ... I feel like people take the fun out of the game. They turn it into a job
I haven't played in a while, but I played a lot of cavalry from pocket in TGs with buddies. And there my rationale for getting horsecollar or not was wether the extra little bit of time in getting the first let's say 4-8 knights out would impact the game in a way that would put us significantly in the lead. Especially if one of the flanks already has good pressure. I would feel the wood cost exactly when I want to make TC's as the farms would start expiring and this would delay the boom behind. If playing fuedal, I would always one way or the other squeeze in horse collar.
"Y'know they say all eco upgrades are created equal, but you look at two-bit axe and you look at gold mining and you can see that that statement is not true"
hi spirit, I have a question, if you are japanese should you quickwall with mining and lumber camps rather than houses? their camps cost 50 wood which is more than 30, but they have +2 melee armour in feudal
Dang... that's a lot of skirms and halbs at 11:11 haha. Love that visual; such an impactful way to "show, not tell" the cost of forgetting eco techs. Wouldn't there be interaction terms between forgetting multiple eco upgrade lines though, if you forgot more than one -- so it might not just be the sum of the differences from forgetting each one individually while remembering the others?
Hey! Economist here - do you ever provide your raw data for others to work with? I'd be curious to refine these results with the addition of adding a discount rate to resources collected later as, for example, 200 resources in feudal can be more important than say 1000 in late game. Or is that something you've considered yourself?
I think you should explore more on the farming situation, as through a game you will be strained on all resources until imp & pop limit hits upon which you will start stockpiling resources one of which is wood in usual excess so I think you should try and compare the value of reaching this point as after it further reseeding cost becomes negligible and if horse collar & heavy plow make a difference in reaching this point or not (Like farms expiring in the middle of it vs 3 minutes after). Particularly this would be nice to see in a comparison of straight arena boom (should I weaken my boom now for heavy plow?) and for a normal Arabia game. Both of which will have vastly different results.
The true men of culture know the original line was "It's over 8000!!", and only changed to 9000 in the English dub.
Age of Empires is a cool base building rts with some historical info and trivia..no it isn't a mathematical fight with your opponent that is purely an equation of micro and mouse clicky speed why.
T_T
Do you do 23 pop feudal and get wheelbarrow immediately? I would only get wheelbarrow as Burgundian or if I do something with a lot of farms. For many early game tasks walk speed seems to not impact much, like wood lines are close, gold/stone/berries always near drop off.
For hand cart it was recommend to get it around 100 pop, thats what I do. Its very expensive and often better to get Imperial running first then the economy should be good enough to get the resources quickly. But at least 4-5 TCs, ideally even 5 to have 4 pumping while Imperial gets researched,
Sometimes my parents walk by my bedroom and they are like "Dufaq? Are you listening to Math lectures !? "
I find it shocking that people can forget eco upgrades because I always feel massively starved of resources without them. With the possible exception of the farm upgrades that take a while to feel the deprevation.
I think about this every time I watch my recs and I see I've forgotten, for instance, Double bit axe: it's 15% faster collection. But let's say I send 15% more vils to wood. Why would 6 vils with the tech collect more wood than 7 without it (" in da ballpark ''). Don't tell me that one extra vil is much more bumping. In some hypothetical levels, eco techs are dog sh*t and I prefer a faster and stronger rush rather than an eco nerd approach. Skill over sitting. Please read this, I've edited it so many times...
It'd be cool to do a follow up on this where the comparison isn't amount of resources but instead # of villagers to account for the missing tech
So for example at 4:24 where the difference is 1000 wood - how many vills at that time would be necessary to make up that difference?
Imagine it's something like 10 vills, so stating that difference would drive the point home
"Distracted with all the heavy microing"
You mean there is something other than patroling into a fight???????????
So you're saying that I should just call GG the moment I realize that I was playing without horse collar for 90 minutes.
Just a short and easy question for the farm upgrades: Are there 1,2 or 3 rows of farms around the TC? 11
Nice Video, love your input 🙂
So the moral of the story is, if you're going to forget eco upgrades, make sure to use that extra 1700 resources to build army and finish the game early.
Seems like pretty sound advice.
Faster collection, especially for gold & stone, also means denying your opponent those resources. You're not just increasing your own eco but 'attacking' the opponent's
So many years playing AOE just to realize that all eco techs are for SAVING WOOD! xD
Ecotechs are much more helpful based on civils like the Chinese, who do research at a discount. Free econtechs upgrade at TC for the Vikings.
Have you ever looked at the effect of sappers on lumber income? It makes chopping trees down faster by ~15% (but not resource collection part)
Weren't wheelbarrow and handcart already included in the calculations you did for the other resources (wood and food)? Because if that's the case I don't think the 8k they provide should be counted in the total missed since are already taken in account for in the calculations of wood and food. Might be wrong, I only watched the video once
So what you're saying is: If you're going to be bad at the game, do it within the first 15-20mins. That's your window.
i would gross down even more 3:03 i weigh highly on those 'scores' sadly xD; the non Maths version (suits me 11) -> pick Vikings
this might be one of the most important aoe2 eco analyses ever.