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Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors Tactics & Guides -> Road to Expert -> Step 3 - Economy Upgrades -> Page 1

Step 3 - Economy Upgrades

Written by Ralber (THuG_Ralber_Mh)

Formatted, Edited and Additional Material Added by Karl (StorM_Country)

Step 3: Economy Upgrades

AoC economy is based on inversions and rentability. What I mean is it is necessary to invest a certain amount of resources and of time to develop them and they have a very certain impact on the game. It is good to understand how they work to be able to decide which and when to upgrade them to suit your purposes best. There are a lot of factors that affect this matter. Some are random such as the distance between the town center and the resources you are going to gather, the way the villagers spread to collect the resources etc that make the mathematics to evaluate them very complex (at least for myself), so you have to use your common sense/experience to analyze their impact on the gathering, others are always fixed such as the villager walk or gathering speed which I'll try to explain the best I can.

Feudal age -> Double Bit Axe in Lumber Camp:

+20% raw (with raw I mean the villager works 20% faster when a tree is cut down). This upgrade doesn't affect the time it takes to carry the wood to the drop point (lumber camp/TC) or the time it takes to cut the tree down. So to evaluate it's real impact on the economy you have to analyze the 'hard to evaluate' factor I just talked about which is the average time it takes for your villagers to carry and drop the wood. Through a few experiments I have decided that in normal conditions (not too many choppers on the same forest, not too far lumber camp) the improvement is around 15%.

It helps me a lot to think in terms of "villagers" and "turns". Understand turn to mean basic time unit in aoe (25 seconds), which is approximately the time it takes to make a villager in the town center and to collect 10units of a resource. In reference to the Double Bit Axe upgrade, the way I evaluate this 15% is that with the upgrade 7 woodcutters do the work of 8 woodcutters without the upgrade making it a substantial investment if you have a lot of wood cutters.

How to take advantage of this?

Imagine we go up to Feudal Age with 30 population and we have 100u of food available to invest in either making 2 villagers or upgrading to Double Bit Axe when reaching it. If we had 14 woodcutters Double Bit Axe would mean these 14 villagers are doing the work of 16 woodcutters, which accounts for the 2 villagers we could have made. If we had more than 14 villagers upgrading to Double Bit Axe becomes the obvious choice as the villagers are now doing the work of more than 2 extra villagers. If we only had 8 woodcutters it would be more efficient just to make 2 new villagers and make them chop. Of course this is just an example. Generally in the Feudal Age it is better to make new villagers since even if it is less efficient in the beginning, later on when we can finally afford the upgrade these additional vills will give us more wood than the amount we lost in the beginning. This kind of thinking is good for Castle Age instead where we might have to choose between getting the upgrades and making new TCs first.

In Reference to turns: Double Bit Axe costs 100f and 50w. If for instance we had 10 woodcutters they would do the work of 11.5 vils, gaining around 15w extra per turn (0.25, time to make a vil) so it would take 10 turns till we would start having more resources (100f, 50w to upgrade it) than someone who didn't purchase it.

Imagine the following: in a 1v1 match 1 player purchases Double Bit Axe and the other player decides to use these 150 units making 2 scouts extra and waits 3mins before purchasing Double Bit Axe. If the player with the scouts can use them in these 3 minutes to inflict more damage on the enemy than the benefit he gained from upgrading to Double Bit (vils doing work of 11.5 instead of 10 vils) then he will have gained an advantage, otherwise it will be the player who upgraded Double Bit Axe who gained it. The enemy waiting 3minutes until getting this upgrade means you will gain 7 turns (7x15 = 105 wood) on the enemy. Quite a substantial amount to have extra.

These examples are of course extreme situations. If you are saving resources (for castle upgrade for instance) it is almost always better in mid to long term to invest them in economic upgrades (such as Double Bit Axe, Wheelbarrow, Horse Plough).