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Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors Tactics & Guides -> Random Map -> The Saracen Scout Rush -> Page 1

The Saracen Scout Rush

This is a strategy I developed about 4-6 weeks ago (can't remember exactly when) after playing around with some of my resource gathering rate numbers. I'd read lots of posts at MFO and AOKH about using the Saracen market bonus heavily in ORDER to gain an economic advantage. However, I always wrote those posts off because they all either used the stone-for-gold-for-food method or went super-heavy on gold mining. Either way, they tried to completely avoid farming and got all of their food FROM the market. I won't go INTO a lot of details on why I think that's foolish; suffice it to say that there's a big long-term sacrifice made by spending all of your stone and gold at the market. However, I was in the process of trying to develop a feudal strategy for every civ so that I wouldn't be stuck not knowing what to do with a random civ (which had just happened a couple of times) and I decided to give Saracen marketeering another try. Here are some of the conclusions I came to:

1) The real VS cost of buying food FROM the market is much less than farming for quite a while. The buying price of food that is break-even FROM a VS standpoint with farming is 145, since it costs 2.84VS/g and 4.12VS/f. A Saracen can buy 2000 food before that method is no longer efficient. This can allow the Saracen to research horse collar before farming and delay needing to get wheelbarrow, allowing for more villagers early on and more efficient farms later.

2) Selling wood and using that gold to buy food is also more cost-effective than using that villager to go FROM lumberjacking to farming. The key to this is efficient wood pits. I have some DATA on the efficiency of woodchopping over time with different numbers of lumberjacks per camp (not on MFO yet, I'm not done with it) and with 6 vils/lumber camp and double-bit axe, the gather rate is 0.391w/sec as a base rate. Note: This is significantly higher than the values recorded in my Real Resource Gathering Rates because that value is for 12 vils at a lumber camp. At 0.391w/sec the VS cost is 2.56VS/w. Compare this to farming, which has a VS cost of 4.12VS/f. That's a 40% difference! Unfortunately there is still a 5% penalty so it's not possible to do a direct 100w=100f correlation. Still, my calculations SHOW that selling 1100W and buying 800F with that gold (43 gold left over, which would cost 122VS to mine) costs 2694VS (I subtracted 122VS since you get that gold free ), compared to 3296VS it takes to gather 700F FROM farms. This was the empirical break-even point where the VS difference between farming and buying food FROM sold wood started declining. Although selling wood for gold is more efficient than gold mining as a means of gold collection only for the first 3 trades, wood is typically not a resource that is exhaustible so the long- term effects of selling wood are far less.

3) The VS savings can be HUGE. The Mongols are considered the fastest civ with their hunting bonus, which gives them about 900VS savings compared to baseline. As a point of reference, this can lead to an extra 300+ wood if that's how the VS savings are spent. However, with proper marketeering the Saracens can save at least that many VS or possibly even more. Buying 1200F at the market using only gold that's mined costs 3972VS. Compare this to gathering 1200F by farming; it costs 4944VS. That's a 972VS savings, or more than the Mongol bonus. If you instead sell wood down to 76 and use gold mining to generate the rest of your gold to buy 1200F, it costs 4114VS, for a 830VS savings. The tradeoff for the reduced efficiency is that you save over 900 gold that can be mined later, and some of that lost efficiency is gotten back because you don't need to have as many gold miners all crowding around the gold mine.