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

Step 3 - Economy Upgrades

Building An Economy

In this part of the article we're going to analyze how the economy works in aoc and how to build it most effectively.

Our first task is deciding what do we want to do. For example, the pocket player in an arabia game decides he wants to go to castle age and make knights from one stable while booming. It is good to know that for making knights he needs 60f and 75g per turn. This is about 6 farmers and 8 gold miners just to supply the knight's cost. At the same time he will need around 6 farmers more per town center to pay for the villagers.

How does Upgrading an Age work?

When you go from one age to the next it affects your economy in this way: imagine player X upgrades to Feudal Age with 22 villagers and player Y goes up with 26. Through the 2:10 of upgrading time (around 5 turns of villager building) player X had 4 less villagers collecting resources so by the time player Y reaches Feudal although both will have the same villager pop the first player will have 5(cost of 2.10 of going to feudal) * 4 (villagers he had less) = 20 turns less of village work (minus 200units of resources).

You have to take away from this amount the effect of the technological upgrades: when you upgrade faster you get benefits for longer so for example if you do an upgrade and your vils are working faster (14 working as 16 etc) 4 turns earlier the difference will be the 100units instead of 200 (cost of upgrading early above). At the same time, reaching ages faster allow you to produce certain units earlier and so you can get economic advantage through military wars. In case you reach castle age faster you can also make TCs faster and so get extra villagers. The balance is very subtle and so very hard to evaluate. Generally the best thing to do is to adjust our times so we can go up as fast as possible but always having the minimum amount of resources necessary for the strat we have in mind. So you must learn what strats you can do in situations and tailor your economies for these strategies as best you can. Keeping total balance

Resource pack

Understand a 'resource pack' to be the following: imagine a player plans on going to the Castle Age and make knights from one stable. He needs 75g per turn. Now he doesn't wait till he is Castle to place 8 villagers to mine gold but he had 5 gold miners since the beginning of upgrading to Castle Age. By the time he reaches the Castle Age he has 5(miners) * 6(turns Castle Age upgrade takes) = 30 turns of village work = a 'resource pack' of 300gold by the time he goes castle. Now even keeping 5 gold miners only he can produce knights non-stop using the resource pack he has: he needs 75g per turn --> he collects 50g per turn with his 5 gold miners --> 75g - 50(the 5 miners mine this much per turn) = 25g per turn he needs to take from the resource pack --> 300 / 25 = 12 turns or 12 knights he can produce before this "resource pack" empties. So its good to put units on a resource before they are needed if they are not needed elsewhere, such as going to feudal age putting 3 villagers on gold just before you click up thus having enough (200g) to click up to castle age.

Town centers

Town centers are expensive buildings (275w and 100s) and slow to build (2:30 with 1vill 1:15 with 4vill) so just by using 4 vills to build them we lose 4 * 3 (1:15) = 12 turns of village work (-120u). You also need 6 farmers just keep the vill production from that one TC. This is why it is not good to make too many TCs when booming. Through my personal experience and talking to some great players such as kkab or geek I have come to the conclusion it is not good to make more than 4 TCs (3 with persia) when you are making boom + army or more than 5 (4 with persia) when you are aiming for a long and massive boom (lets say 140 vills or more). This doesn't mean you can't make more than 5 TCs. The TC has other applications such as ground control, villager defence, pop redistribution, etc. Just understand that in economy terms making too many TCs are not an improvement.

Some advice at resource gathering

Usually the amount of mine resources that we need is very even (75g per turn for knts, 100s for a TC etc), that's why I like to place a certain amount of miners and focus on the gathering of wood/food. It's in the way we play with the wood and the farms where I think the key of building a good economy is. The trick is in making the farms we need as soon as possible (remember farms require wood for maintenance) and using the wood excess to build the TCs we will need. It is not good to build new TCs before we have the necessary food to keep them working (except for military purposes). It is important to control woodcutting because providing close drop points improve the efficiency greatly. Be warned about stone gathering, it weakens the economy considerably. It is usually better to collect as much as we will need and sometimes it is even better to just buy it on the market (once again these advices come from an economic point of view, if you plan to use it for military purposes such as castles, towers, walls, etc by all means mine it!).

Recorded Game Attached: I add an example game of how Ralber built a 3v3 arabian pocket as Hun. Download

Pride and honour.

And that's all we have to say about this you are now ready to move onto Step 4, Saludos.

Karl & Ralber