The cost of forgetting eco techs (AoE2)
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- Опубліковано 17 бер 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.epidemicsound.com
Game: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition - Ігри
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
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.
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!
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!
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
This is why math exists. To figure out the most efficient eco in games xD
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.
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 🙌
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
Now this is firmly in the category of "video only SoL could make."
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
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.
Fascinating. And now once more with every eco civ bonus..
at 7:43 my head literally started to form a pain. bless you Sotl.
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 😂😂
The ammount of spreadsheet magic in this video is worth at leas double the amount of likes! sharing to my friends! LOVE the math and effort you put into this!
Why do I keep so eagerly watching videos about a game I haven't played in about 20 years is beyond me...
A time value of resources analysis video would be AWESOME. Great content as always SOTL!!
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
Great vid as always. For several years I've wondered if you'd make a video about the actual food collecting rates compared. E.g. when you include the villager time it requires to collect the wood to actually build / and reseed the farms, and when you include the common walking distances for hunting deer etc. I hope that'd be an interesting topic for you to explore 🤞🤞
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
Great video as always
I remember a tournament game on Team Island where one of the players forgot to research any farm techs, he lost the game by running out of wood pretty quickly because of it. His farms were reseeding more often and he burned through his wood and had none left to make more navy to defend himself.
Hey Spirit, remember back in the day when you made a video about crafting the most OP civs possible? That was a ton of fun, and since then, many new units, techs and civ bonuses have been added, meaning there are even greater possibilities now. Just for your consideration, I would like to drop two OP infantry civs:
Tech tree: Incas (full barracks)
Unique units:
Centurion (Romans) for boosting Swordsman line, though it will be weak without armor upgrades.
OR
Kamayuk (Incas) for being overall great when massed.
PLUS
Warrior Priest (Armenians) for being a great support unit also affected by infantry bonuses.
Unique Techs:
Garland Wars (Aztecs) Infantry +4 attk
Wootz Steel (Dravidians) Infantry/Cavalry ignore armor.
Team bonus: Barracks work 20% faster (Goths)
1. Men at Arms Rush from Hell:
Civ bonuses:
*Militia line upgrades free (Bulgarians)
*Barracks techs available one age earlier (Armenians)
*Melee attack upgrades free (Magyars)
*Infantry armor upgrade effects doubled (Romans)
*Infantry upgrades free (Malay)
2. Late Game Raw Power:
Civ bonuses:
*Infantry gets cheaper with age (Goths)
*Infantry armor effects doubled (Romans)
*Infantry attacks faster (Japanese)
*Infantry moves faster (Celts)
*Wheelbarrow, Hand Cart free (Vikings) (to help you get to the late game much easier)
Any thoughts?
This also explains the benefits of applying pressure on your opponent or the cost of not applying pressure, if you can make them forget their eco upgrades because of micro (while remembering your own) you can gain this significant advantage
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?
Loosed basely
Thank you for making this critical video.
Amazing and important video for learning, thank you man!!
this might be one of the most important aoe2 eco analyses ever.
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.
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!!
Would be amazing if you did deep dives like this for Age of Mythology once Retold comes out.
Great work! Another way to look at it maybe is, rather than holding villagers constant, you could hold income constant. Most people who get popcapped seem to prefer removing villagers to build more army rather than banking resources. With these upgrades you can get a larger proportion of your population as army while maintaining the same income.
You clearly had a lot of fun with that farm math!
you never run out of ideas daddy spirit
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. :)
These are the videos I subscribed for
I love this form of analysis
"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??"
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"
Amazing content. Legend
love u spirit btw
Attempt number 7 of me asking Spirit of the Law to create civilisation review series of Romae ad Bellum mod. Thanks Spirit, keep up the amazing work :D
It would be really interesting to see a video on the effects of the burgundian bonus in the same vein as this one!
7:35 the feeling when you listening only, on 2x speed, and that moment kicks in :O
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
Damn spirit, great video, cant wait to watch it.
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 would add to the gold calculations that finishing up your available gold a few minutes faster is the possibility of sniping your opponent's gold assuming they have not kept pace.
As to quote a wise, spanish 25 year old
"He has a very balanced economy guys
0 Wood
0 Food
0 Gold"
7:10 im getting integral calculus and related rates flashbacks
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...
The gold upgrades have another advantage : you can take some of your opponent's most vulnerable gold, denying that gold while taking it.
Any "stolen" gold thus should count double
Quick, someone tag Nicov
lmao i was searching for this comment!!
After watching this, Nicov will be a major contender for Hidden Cup 6!!
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.
Great information!
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
Thanks for the video, I thought it was great.
I thought it was great that you included about how many trash units that would be in an hour long game, I would be more interested to know how many trash units that would be in a half hour long game probably more games and in around that margin .
Really, people understand generally that the upgrades are good, but they’re trying to debate when they should get them. And you kind of touch on this saying, well, if you get them instantly, for a few minutes, you’re gonna be at a military disadvantage.
Military disadvantage might be pretty tough when defensive structures like the town center start to lose their potency, such as in castle age
That's the beauty of the game, I don't think there is a correct answer for "when", it's always going to be "it depends", as anticlimactic as it can be. It's a mix of being able to afford the price + being able to afford the potential loss in tempo + being able to recognize the opportunity costs + thinking ahead in your own strategy and what units you will make/what resources you will need the most on the next 5 to 10 minutes. And as we know, it's often better to invest in eco upgrades sooner rather than later, so the game is all about finding (or creating) these opportunities to stay ahead of your enemy either economically or military or both
I feel like the town center upgrades are actually the easiest to justify because either way you are investing in future income whether you are building villagers, or researching efficiency.
That will have a smaller shock to the rest of what you are doing than building villagers consistently, and getting additional upgrades on top of that. I mean economically, it probably makes the most sense to do all three as soon as possible, but terms of balancing your economy and military in a game where you are not ahead already it might be the safest bet to do the town center upgrades
Dang I can't believe Nicov manages to win games 25k res behind over the course of an hour
Would have been nice to see what is the total amount of gathered wood in a 60 min game.
Beside of that, another great video of you. I love your videos.
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.
Thanks for a math modeling article, chef
Idea for a video: how big of a discount needs fully upgraded halbs to be cost effective against teutons TK?
Sometimes my parents walk by my bedroom and they are like "Dufaq? Are you listening to Math lectures !? "
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.
You can also quantify gold upgrades by assuming a 1v1 where the players are constant mining gold but only one of them has the upgrades. Then look at the difference of gold collected by each player when the gold runs out on the map.
Thx for the dragon ball reference Spirit ❤
the only reason I picked hand cart was the extra movement speed. I think that was also the reason I was interested in using the bohemians, their villagers zips around like knights.
'tis one of my reasons for always researching loom when it's time to lure boar. Sure, I'm good enough at this point to not lose my villager reliably, but that one time where I mess up (or the enemy sends a sneaky scout to finish of that one damaged villager) is such a big deal that I'd rather avoid it alltogether.
Oh look a video directly for me
Thanks for breaking you head on this one!
Nice, u did it :) thank you!
It's interesting because since the effects scale with number of villagers, it seems like in _most_ cases it's not too bad to forget a tech until you start having about 30-40 villagers and start actually booming, aka minute 25-30.
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)
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 🙂
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.
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
Spirit of the La Hire!!
Some proplayers really need to see this before every tournament (looking at you, Viper...)
This video inspired by Gregory VII in Hidden Cup. Running out of wood on the map after not having gotten your farming upgrades.
This is like those graphic anti-smoking infomercials: changing behavior through disturbing facts
That is a great break through, now the question is how much time to do all that calculations?
The most important power of running an empire is those of an actuary.
I rememeber a game where I forgot bow-saw. I kept wondering how I was low on wood the entire game.
The greatest cost of missing eco is the massive slap mark on my forehead.
😂
Wow, you definitely have a math degree now... you've come so far from the early days.
This happens to me embarrassingly often. The universe is telling me something.
I try to get the eco upgrades when they are available. Sometimes when I'm going for a rush, I'll snag them while going to the next age.