How useful are farm upgrades?

[@SpiritOfTheLaw]

There were some great questions in the comments here, so I made a followup video to address some of them: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bJXbg42Pd5xoo9k

[@cpthobbit4490]

Nice!

[@samraa1878]

Spirit ruuuuuules jajaj pls reply

[@atocanboi409]

2:47 Aztecs: *excuse me sir?*

[@MegaBrasilien]

Personally I prefer leaving the dead corpses of my villagers on the fields from the last scoutraid. Their rotting corpses are perfect fertilizer

[@M0rdFustang]

🤣💀

[@BinnyNair]

What is wrong with you? 😆😆

[@caturviriyananda9586]

god bless this man

[@miserableadolescence6183]

*efficiency*

[@derikaem8021]

well, if the scouts are able to kill villagers on farms, which are usually next to your tc, you probably doing something wrong

[@-Raylight]

Pretty sure farm upgrades are important for your sanity Because you're going to hear the -cursed sound- farm expired sound less

[@jefffinkbonner9551]

レイ·ライト -Raylight ^the Real reason we upgrade farms. *That* sound must be avoided at all costs.

[@Halvtooth]

@@jefffinkbonner9551 also you save wood because you pay for the wood later when you have a better wood eco.

[@BlueFlash215]

@@Halvtooth you should watch the video again

[@Halvtooth]

@@BlueFlash215 You should understand my comment better. if you have to reseed 10 farms at min 20 it's going to be more painful than reseeding farms 10 farms at min 24 when you have a better eco.

[@BlueFlash215]

@@Halvtooth you save on the costs for the upgrade and furthermore Hidden Cup was a perfect example that a lot of farms techs weren't even researched until castle or imp. Those are the world's best players. You can balance your eco ahead of time. It's not like you have no clue on how much wood you'll need after placing your farms Edit: Furthermore, the earlier this upgrade comes, the more impact on your economy it has in a negative way. This results due to having very little villagers to produce this amount of food and wood which could be spend otherwise

[@TheCrafter89]

"7 minutes about farms?! MEH!" 7 minutes later... "Wow, this guy sure makes farms interesting"

[@sebastianschmedes5355]

I Like farms

[@breadsmoothy]

Prove it

[@Qfungi]

I love lamp

[@RG001100]

They're not rough/irrirating, and they don't get everywhere.

[@aoecaviler943]

@@RG001100 they do get everywhere tho

[@TheLibermania]

I like trains

[@JewelManDLN069]

1:27 My favorite part, it makes my day. 11 "The sound of maracas" Can't find a better description for that annoying farm dying sound.

[@krakenloco]

I just honestly always thought it was supposed to sound like a dry bush

[@JewelManDLN069]

@@krakenloco Just found a meme about AoE2 farm memes few minutes ago, it said "Farms dried up? Stand there and shake maracas!" xD

[@bungalo50]

My and my friends have been calling that sounds "the maracas" for years and I'm so glad SOTL agrees with us

[@Devalation]

DE's reseed option is worth buying the game all over again

[@swamplife3148]

you know the situation is dire if you hear that sound

[@martinhoude3518]

An Important thing left out: multiplier effect. The gain (in saved wood, mostly) increases by the number of farms you have, and so is re-seeding time. When you get to the last upgrade, you usually have quite a few farms going, and the amount of wood saved (which needs to be collected far outside the base, especially for wood-based civs (like the British) and trash units) matters.

[@IanMainBliss]

Also the graph makes sense with 2 farms but in reality you are slowly seeding farms through that whole time span. It just pushes all the reseeds of lets say 20 farms laid over a period of 10 minutes or so back by roughly 4 minutes. So from minute 22 to 32 you are pushing farm reseeds back by 4 minutes.

[@sebastiao2700]

"Farms don't so much generate food but just let you convert your wood into food" My mind just blew, I lived based on a lie since I was 9 years old 😂😂😂 Love your channel, congrats from Brazil.

[@planescaped]

I keep scattering wood chips on the ground but nothing is sprouting plz halp

[@AdNecrias]

@@planescaped burn the wood first, add seeds. That way the ground won't run out of nutrients so you can plant farm in the same spot for longer

[@shukterhousejive]

If you're from Brazil you should know how much wood goes into making farms lol

[@sebastiao2700]

@@shukterhousejive damn man, you've made me cry in deforestation.

[@archerj2010]

Ive been playing for game for damn near 20 years - never once considered converting wood to food.

[@Self-replicating_whatnot]

Multiplication by 1 is perfectly expected for a coder like myself. It's just a leftover from the time they planned for an upgrade to also add an increase to farm rate. You can find such things sometimes if the decision was made at the last junction, and then whoever wrote it didn't have a time or, more likely, inclination to pretty it up since functionality is the same anyway.

[@daarom3472]

there is a special 256x tech mod on HD where farm upgrades also increase farm rate :)

[@jahrazzjahrazz8858]

They might even leave it in on purpose to allow modders (or game designers making the next patch) to easily tweak it to something better, especially since doing one unnecessary multiplication whenever someone researches a farming upgrade is not going to tank performance

[@MrNovotny999]

Lazy coders, that is the answer... myself I also count as one.... but multiplication by one is good thing to consider :D :D

[@Vendavalez]

Another possibility is that multiple techs call the same function and you have to pass the parameter no matter what. And so, to have it not affect the farm rate, they just pass one. Yet another possibility is not just that the decision was made at the last junction to not have a particular tech affect the farm rate, but that they considered the possibility that they might want to have it changed in an expansion/update, and it is easier to have it ready to do it from the get-go. I would not assume that it happened from laziness or because they were not following good practices, to be honest. It IS pretty funny when you see something like that though. I can grant that.

[@balintmecs6567]

My favourite is the train-headed npc from Fallout 3 :D

[@sebastianreining5060]

4:19 Isn't this analysis a bit flawed and Horse collar pays off much quicker as you generally have more than one Farm? As you save the wood per farm, I think you would reach break-even sooner the more farms you have... But besides this, great video as always!!

[@zoroark567]

I agree the way it was presented is a bit misleading, but if we scale up the test to each player having ten farms all started at the same time, it takes the same amount of time until the non-collar player is paying for an extra round of farms. It’s true that you get more value the more farms you have though - in this example it represents a swing of 600 wood, as opposed to 60

[@sebastianreining5060]

@@zoroark567 True, i noticed that as well, that my point is maybe also a bit misleading. But still, I would say, that it pays off much sooner as you are also delaying your wood expenses which are your bottle-neck in Feudal Age. So in conclusion, no matter how you put it, Horse collar is worth it.

[@SpiritOfTheLaw]

Kondrathe has the right answer. More farms doesn't change the timing, but it does mean the payoff when it finally happens will be larger.

[@shlokdave6360]

I couldnt agree more. How can you spread the entire overhead of the research over a single farm? The research cost is a fixed cost. Spread it over 20 farms and the breakeven is much, much lower.

[@Nata-ch2bk]

@@zoroark567 Yeah, and in my opinion it's much more impactful than the video seems to suggest. Because this savings in wood start to kick in as soon as the first farms need to be resseded, which is around 20 to 24min according to the video, and that's around the time you get to Castle age and need wood to add more forums or militatry buildings.

[@TheWiz4rd]

Pro tip: If you need food in a x256 mod game, you can research supplies multiple times and eventually adding militia to your queue will generate food for you. You can even cancel the unit while it's being created and keep the free food as well as the gold.

[@ZKP314]

Wat

[@petyw]

3:21 - You're actually handicapped by farm's food generation rate (0.4 f / sec), not by farmers' gathering rate (0.53 f / sec). (See a reddit post 'The Slav Farm Bug: Cause and Fix' on that topic.) This means you max out at 24 f / min after hand cart or something like 3 wheelbarrows. I re-ran the test with 10 and 20 wheelbarrows researched to receive exactly 24 f / min, not 23.25 f / min. Also, heavy plow impact depends on other upgrades and civ bonuses. Noticeable boost of +3-4% is only true for unupgraded non-Aztec/-Khmer farmers. 3:00 - Interesting. So for farming, +carry capacity impact (+10% speed is roughly equal to +1.5 carry capacity) is lower than for other resources, as in 'Villager Gather Rate Formula' (6:58), you calculated that +3 capacity = +30% walking speed (+10% speed = +1 carry capacity) if villager is 3 tiles away from the tree. However, from what I've observed so far, Berbers civ bonus is marginally worse than generic unupgraded farmers with heavy plow while it should be the opposite. Freaking farming mechanics and its randomness.

[@samraa1878]

But the calculate will get ruined if we dismiss the bonus haha

[@nvmtt]

I honestly thought this was another April fools video like the "are houses useful" vid.

[@eLsain]

not really if you're the huns

[@neanderthales5594]

Spirit of the Law, you forgot something about the refresh time. By increasing how much food a farm has, the villagers spend more time collecting the farm while they spend the same time refreshing the farm, making the %of time refreshing lower in comparison to collection. Yes, this only happens once so often, as you mentioned, but it also offers a slight boost on a longer game. With this in mind, you can argue that increasing villager building also increases farm production slightly. The impact is minimal, I know, but would be nice to know how little it is 11. I would do the maths but I don't know the numbers and I'm unnable to test right now.

[@Mermaidkilla]

Isn't there even a crappy team bonus for "farms reseed faster"? I forgot which civ...

[@meneldal]

@@Mermaidkilla It would be better if it was something like cheaper reseed. Still have to pay the initial cost but reseed for less wood would be nice.

[@eliteteutonicknight1]

@@puppieslovies ...Incas really need a better team bonus. I'd say it's worse than the Saracens, since theirs can become dangerous with massed archers or chu ko nus.

[@rubricance9617]

I also wanted to mention how he forgot to talk about the initial cost of researching farming techs. The payback is not just 3 farms later because the initial tech has a sunk cost in itself. A decreasing factor proportional to how many farms you have but should have been a covered point nonetheless i feel.

[@jcpkill1175]

@@meneldal Thats an excellent bonus idea, anyone think we should try it out on magyars?

[@lucianoluciano5478]

1:25 : No male farmers. 2:35 : Equally male and female farmers.

[@NeonLine]

eye for detail, huh

[@novakrabby]

When we were 8, we used to play this with my sister, she would put all women on farms, the men to hunt because she didnt want wolves eating the women lol

[@ericklauridsen9353]

@apocratos Jesus H Christ

[@lucianoluciano5478]

@apocratos I was praising the development of society and then I saw your comment

[@Progeusz]

@apocratos based

[@Nata-ch2bk]

That carry capacity boost in food gathering speed explains why Aztecs (villagers carry +5 ressources) and Vikings (free wheelbarrow and handcart) eco bonuses are so good.

[@creepy3ric]

or Khmer who don't need to carry that stuff at all

[@samraa1878]

@@creepy3ric how lol

[@kevintrang3007]

@@samraa1878 Khmer farmers drop food off instantly

[@KenshiroPlayDotA]

A truly missed opportunity to say... "Thanks for watching guys, and I'll seed you next time !"

[@Kruppt808]

Ummmmm your missing the forest for the trees on this one..... Or your barking up the wrong tree with that comment Maybe you've logged to much time on the Internet today Knock on wood I don't make another unfunny pun

[@HazmanFTW]

I always thought you want about 8 farms for horse collar. You place 2 in dark age, then 6 in feudal with horse collar, and then you reseed the 2 dark age ones.

[@SpiritOfTheLaw]

Yeah, I also like to put down a couple farms in dark age to diversify my food income, and then try to get horse collar before any more. My personal justification was always the long-term wood savings, though, so it was interesting to have that intuition challenged by the numbers.

[@MajdFreiji]

How are these comments from 13 hours ago

[@hendriksan6809]

Harry is a wizard!

[@siremental]

Same, for me the most important thing in having some dark age farms is less villager idle time, when they finish harvesting/hunting and just stand there before I queue them in building farms.

[@Joker-yw9hl]

@@MajdFreiji patreon magic I think

[@marcomongke3116]

Got 2 tests tomorrow, its 00.35 am.. i dont even play aoe2 that much but my mind "i wonder how useful are farms?..🤔

[@mercadonor]

I like how he keeps an old style of narration even though his channel grow so much. It makes me feel like I'm listening to the old videos while maintaining the high quality of the present. I wouldn't want it otherwise!

[@NiDe500]

Frankly, it makes him sound like *the* professor of AoE2, and I mean that as a compliment. It says a lot his homage to Khan Academy on the (now ancient) Mongol analysis still sounds very much like Spirit of the Law.

[@hansoskar1911]

the interesting thing about the 4 minutes of farm time you gain is in a normal scouts build with some feudal age fighting your first farms run out about the same time you want to build TCs (and drop some more farms!) so getting horse collar. at this point you dont replace 1 farm but more often than not 4-6 at the same time. man that hurts. The moment you do Horse Collar in a scout build should be the moment you hit feudal and at this point you are not struck on food or wood, but on stable worktime so the 150 res you could invest in military cant be invested there for other reasons. Crop Rotation is more like a long term insurance. if you have free res you are probably not in a bad position(otherwise you had to invest into military) so why not give yourself not an even better chances to win in the lategame.

[@FeAbou]

Great video, as always! I just want to point out that: 1. After finishing your eco development, you must have about, let's say, 30 farms. So every advantage you get by saving wood must be multiplied by 30 to be fairly considered; 2. Making the farms last longer allow you to keep a smaller number of villagers on wood, which means you'll have more villagers collecting other resources such as gold and stone. By this POV, mill upgrades not only save you wood but also allow you to get other resources faster.

[@whuzzzup]

1) "every advantage you get by saving wood ". You do not save wood until 38 minutes (in this example). It does not matter if you pay x wood now or x wood in two minutes. 2) better point and I'd like to see it addressed.

[@FeAbou]

@@whuzzzup Actually, there is a small difference if you pay a certain amount of wood in a moment or later, because the game mechanic has economic inflation. Wood in the early game worth much more than in late game.

[@bierwolf8360]

@@whuzzzup ten wood now are worth more than ten wood later, etc. That's a core aspect of finance.

[@bluenicholasbf2142]

The other thing to note when comparing farm upgrades to wheelbarrow is that wheelbarrow takes time away from the town center training villagers, whereas farm upgrades do not, so it does make a huge difference in affecting your villager growth (and thus resource income) to get wheelbarrow

[@ThangHuynh10]

I love all your videos, analysis and the work you put into each video. However, as someone else has pointed it out and u have acknowledged it, u missed the scalability of the wood saving due to the number of farms. I wonder how big is the diminishing return in the later upgrade, and how much the slavs or Khmer has it better than other people. Anyways, thank you very much for your videos. I always look forward to seeing them.

[@TheMetallingOne]

good vid, totally unrelated tho; what happened to the channel intro song?

[@sebazpereyra9431]

Please, give us the intro back! Idk why he's not using it anymore.

[@hakupi3439]

For some reason.. The first thing that came to my mind when you mentioned Farm upgrades speeding up collection rate is the time saved from reseeding the farm...Now i think about it, the effect is kinda(very) miniscule.

[@eccentrichorse11]

That kinda sounds like the effect that the Incan team bonus has

[@michaeltaylor8698]

@@eccentrichorse11 And the Incan team bonus has a less than 1% impact on your farming rate. I wish they'd get a new civ bonus already

[@eccentrichorse11]

@@michaeltaylor8698 Exactly. it is almost pointless. Even spirit makes jokes about it though he does not pick on it as much as the saracen one. Maybe they should get something like allowing multiple farmers to use one farm. That might have to put a limit to stop it from being OP

[@michaeltaylor8698]

@@eccentrichorse11 Saracen one is actually useful now that they have a civ bonus for archers against buildings, and it stacks with Mayan Obsidian arrows which makes them really good at taking down most buildings. Chu ko nu with a Saracen ally can also shred through buildings which I did not expect until I actually had a game where I tried it. As for the Incan team bonus, I've suggested in the past that A) they could get a bonus that increases the Eagle Warrior los by +2 (obviously only benefits 2 other civs but still more useful than their current bonus).

[@eccentrichorse11]

@@michaeltaylor8698 Increasing Eagle line of sight by two seems kinda OP since that is gonna make them incredible at darkage scouting combined with their extra llama

[@phdbot4483]

I learned that the wood upgrades are no doubt the eco upgrades to go first, considering farms need wood for resending, but the farm upgrades become important too when you wanna make a ton of farms. They may not directly speed up the food production, but they make it easier for players to put more villagers on farms without running out of wood. ^^

[@Alias_Anybody]

Contrast with AoE3 where every single upgrade for mill, plantation, field and rice field speeds up collection speed considerably and every little boost will pay for itself pretty quickly.

[@khankhomrad8855]

Just like Age of Empires online :)

[@nanoboso3656]

Or Age of Mythology

[@Alche_mist]

@@nanoboso3656 Age of Mythology has to do it with the infinite-food farms (if my memory serves right).

[@nanoboso3656]

@@Alche_mist Yes, like in AoE3 in fact

[@TheNovicek]

This seems very very misleading. Even if it "fully pays back" after x minutes, the very first time you need to refresh farm, well, if you push it back by another minute, that's a minute during which you can use the wood for other uses, whereas without the upgrade you'd have to spend it on a farm instead of a barracks or houses. Plus, as others mentioned, with many farms (which you have to make every game), the savings are massive.

[@leemon2677]

Wait, you say that farms are essentially just Wood -> Food Machines. That got me thinking, could you use a market instead of farms, and use the extra villagers freed up from the farming to bolster wood gathering?

[@beastmasterbg]

I do that when I'm in siege mod. I don't use the farms at all. Just convert gold into food all the time

[@lewisedwardson7776]

You could, but the prices change as you sell wood and buy food. You'd end up gaining less food than the wood that you sold, instead of gaining more food than the wood spent. Or worse, if you didn't sell wood, and just converted your gold to food, you'd likely be spending more gold for the food than you would have spent wood on a farm.

[@Neonblue84]

This mills are so hypnotic. XD

[@kelloggswag]

I don't feel like the horse collar test is very fair since players aren't going to have 1 farm in feudal. How do those figures look when you have 8 farms simultaneously.

[@awkwardcultism]

Multiply them by 8.

[@FirstNameLastName-tx6td]

Read top comment's first reply

[@matthewmcneany]

Nili taught me that heavy plow gives farmer +1 carry capacity.

[@sacker987]

Would be awesome to see a similar analysis about feudal age blacksmith upgrades. For example, in a small archer battle where one player has fewer units but they are upgraded, how many more un-upgraded units does the opponent need to make up the quality difference?

[@ranchyeezys5735]

If Age of Empires 2 is so good, why isn't there an Age of Empires 2 2?

[@leonardocarvalho7306]

Funny enough that's probably what AoE4 is going to be

[@olegdragora2557]

@@leonardocarvalho7306 I think it still going to feel very different because it is not in 2D. Which means much less precision and clarity in moment to moment gameplay.

[@sandrotan]

Love you SOTL

[@marcoalbertogrimaldi]

@Spirit Of The Law I think the best way to put it is by splitting the result in two: 1-the benefit from having to pay (same amount of wood) but later (hard to measure and kinda independent by number of farms) 2-the benefit from paying "relatively less" because natural inflation of the game (easy to measure, if u have a inflation rate already computed, and dependent by numbers of farms) Let's say for simplicity that 1 of any res has a value at time t of v(t) = 1 / n(t) where n(t) =: num. of vills at time t, maybe approx by a parabola or a statistic(the num of vills). then if u research horse collar at time t0 you are spending 150 * v(t0) value of res and at time t2 = t0+12:15 u will have to pay f*60*v(t2) for a total equal to the sum of this to terms, instead if u don't research HC u wll have to spend f*60*v(t1) , t1 = t0 + 8:30. So the diff is D(t,f) = f*60*( v(t2) - v(t1) ) + 150 * v(t0). This take into account just the 1st expiring of farm but it still prove that getting HC can payoff even after only one rotation. Now you can do the math and tell us all the breakpoints for making it worth :P

[@Caution2TheWind1]

Lol, KZbin links timestamps even if they fall after the end of the video

[@MrPsilva95]

2:48 "unfortunately, +3 carry capacity is NOT a civ bonus" *Astecs sobbing*

[@luggy9256]

Haha it wasn’t at the time of making this video, but I guess that explains those Aztec tears xD

[@bitzkitgordon2505]

Vilagers reseeding are not gathering and upgraded farms reseed less

[@Henrique-hl3xk]

Thats true for a single Farm...If you make 20 that payoff happens 6 times at the First cicle

[@namensklauer]

yes, but also no. they payoff is temporary at first. while you certainly have more resources during the time perion between 20 and 24 minutes, after 24 its back to being one horsecollar behind again until the non horsecollar guy starts his third farms. or to put it differently: the first 510 seconds youre behind. (-1 horse collar) the next 225 seconds you have an advantage (-1 horse collar, + x farms) the next 285 seconds youre behind again (-1 horse collar) followed by 450 seconds advantage (-1 HC, + x farms) a short 60 seconds behind (-1 horse collar) and then finally the permanent payoff. ignoring that 60second negative window, it pays off after 17 minutes, 13 of which you are behind

[@boosterh1113]

No. SotL could have made it clearer, but he is completely ignoring how MUCH of a payback the techs will get you, he is only talking about WHEN that payback happens. Obviously, Horse Collar will be 6x more valuable with 30 farms than with 5, but you still aren't going to get any of that value until after 3 reseeding cycles (about 20 min) later.

[@Matt-ln7lb]

You have more wood to spend in the time before the reseed happens. A better way to look at it would be: "In the additional time that it takes the upgraded farm to expire, how much extra wood is collected?" Each farm cycle nets you a portion of that permanent advantage, since you are able to use that extra wood you collected on other things without being unable to reseed the farms immediately when they expire. It's especially relevant if you're using auto-farm reseed. In that first cycle, horse collar will pay for itself if you have 10+ farms, because it will enable you to spend more wood elsewhere than it costed in total resources in that minute where, without horse collar, you would have already spent the wood on reseeding farms. It takes 3 cycles for your upgraded farms to "lap" farms with 1 less upgrade and be permanently on a different cycle. That doesn't mean you don't get an advantage from it much earlier than that.

[@amitvishwakarma7210]

For this.. Go Vikings!! And yeah its the best way to say "it depends..!!"

[@rogeriocardoso8258]

The point in researching crop rotation is the convenience of not having to refresh the farms so frequently.

[@Eldrahak]

Hey Spirit of the Law, I am fairly certain that your conclusion of "it only pays off after three reseeds" isn't quite right, or at least isn't the conclusion that should be drawn. Your model of when the wood investment pays off, acts as if all the farms are built and rebuilt at the same time, which they are not. Suppose there are two players, each of them build a new farm every "tick", a "tick" being however long it takes a villager to gather 25 food from a farm, both players capping at 30 farms. The only difference is that player A does not have horse collar, but player B does (before they build any farms, for simplicity's sake). Player A builds a farm at tick 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and als renews a farm at tick 7 (7x25=175, the first farm has ran out). He has spent 8 x 60 = 480 wood at tick 7. Player also builds a farm at tick 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, but does not need to rebuild yet. He has spent 420 wood on farms at this point (plus the cost of Horse Collar). Then it goes on: at tick 8 player builds a new one and refreshes one: 600 wood. Player B only builds one: 480 wood (120 wood ahead). Tick 9, Player A: 720, Player B 540. At tick 10 it is A: 840, B 660 (his first refresh, but he is already 180 wood ahead). Now for tick 11 through 13 both players build a farm and refresh a farm (so both 120 wood extra per tick). At tick 14 however, player A now has to reseed two farms and build one, while player B has to reseed only one and build one, so he is again saving 60 wood per tick (he is now 180 wood ahead, minus the cost of Horse Collar). Tick 15 through 19 player A builds one and reseeds two, player B builds one and reseeds one, saving 60 wood per tick. By tick 19 player B is 540 wood ahead. Only at tick 20 will he have to start refreshing two farms per tick. When Horse Collar "pays off" depends on how you express the cost of the 75 food in wood, which will depend on the map, the civ and the situation. I think a case could be made that in the early game when you have sheep and boar food is not much more valuable than wood, so if you use a 1:1 conversion rate and count the cost of Horse Collar as 150 Wood, it pays of after 9 ticks, so the time it take one villager to harvest 225 food from one farm. So just a bit over 1 cycle, not the three cycles you claim. And the benefits keep getting better and better, plus you don't have to reseed so much (which costs time, clicks and mental energy), plus you have the wood available earlier when you need it most. And that's only Horse Collar, you also get access to Heavy Plow with that. Even if you act like player A planted 30 farms at tick 0 without Horse Collar and player B planted 30 with Horse Collar (that's kind of the model you are using), while you are right that the investment only "pays off" after three cycles, player B has a lot longer to come up with the 1800 wood need for the first refresh and can use fewer villagers on wood and by the time that the pay-off comes in your scenario, it is huge: 1800 wood. But it doesn't come in one cycle: it starts paying of right around the first recycle of the first farm. I hope I don't make a silly error in my math. The model is in this google spreadsheet: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fLc95ydFXiIDM2ZF0o-yGreu8fnZL2MVQnbHu9Mgm68/edit?usp=sharing

[@lazyidiotofthemonth]

okay, this concept is flaw, first when I start making farms, I make at least eight and Ill have over thirty if the game gets to imperial age, The more you farm, the more the upgrades pay off. basically if a crop rotation farm has to regenerate, its already paid for itself.

[@printermodeler8889]

This is what I was thinking. Wouldn't the benefit increase exponentially with each farm you add to your base?

[@MB-pc1xp]

Is it just me or is the math on this completely off. Well obviously if you only build 1 farm it's gonna take FOREVER to make up for the upgrade. But you build multiple farms, and the cost of the upgrade isn't scaled up. It's fixed no matter how many farms you buy. And he made it seem like there's no benefit of having to pay the wood later during the cycle. I would at any point in any game prefer to have 70 wood now, rather than in 2 minutes. Farm upgrades are way better than the video makes them look!!!

[@danielafonso9050]

With one farm, yes, horse collar takes 3 farm cycles to pay off. But that also means that it pays off in one farm cycle with 3 farms, or some 20 minutes. Usually a player will easely have over 12 farms, which brings horse collar paying for itself in roughtly 5 minutes. Got 20 farms? It pays itself in one minute.

[@allinaxford]

Longer farms times, reduce a different cost, the cost of changing ones attention to and from farming, especially before the auto infinite replant feature.

[@16Gym]

u dont just do 1farm.. its definitely huge considering you probably have at least 35farms everygame.

[@hotjavalava]

Should crop rotation also give +1 carry? Kind of silly that the last upgrade isn’t very useful. You would think that it is essential to get all the farm upgrades like the wood upgrades.

[@bastokrepublic]

for 11 minutes, 15 seconds of the 36 1/2 minutes it takes two horse collar farms to run out, the player with horse collar has extra wood (from 20.30 to 24.15 and from 29.00 to 36.30). Just because things come back even periodically doesn't erase that advantage. That advantage could be pressed in additional military that snowballs out of control. 4:50

[@timon753]

You get the resources from the tech back after 3-4 reseeds, but that's only when you have one farm. Doesn't it become a lot more efficient when you have tens of farms like in usual games?

[@sweater7630]

these upgrades made more sense when you had to manually re-farm. I remember post imp, no farm upgrades was a nightmare

[@kjdavid]

1:59 When you finally realize why farmers get +1 food compared to other resources after more than one and a half decade of playing.

[@Flavourius]

Food is hard to get on 256x Tech? Malay fishing ships with gillnet want to have a word with you.

[@funny_liquid7111]

I think farm upgrades speed up the collection of berrys, I hope you can check that out

[@levih.2158]

Was this video inspired by the frustration of having 256x tech vs. 7 hardest AI and never having enough food?

[@kommo1]

So according to this.... what is better? Researching horse collar first, or wheelbarrow?

[@bear2699]

This guy could literally turn anything you might think of into a math video

[@michaelgordonsaxophone]

Yet his maths is all wrong

[@carlosn3511]

Maybe it has something to do with the youtube algorithm but I miss your openning, Good Job Chief!, Keep the great Work.

[@NaterTater182]

Love the videos man. Love how aoe is getting popular again. Especially with aoe3 def. I hope you make videos on that too!

[@christayah]

I can't even imagine how fast I would lose playing to this guy

[@M0rdFustang]

Lose before you build your second house 😂

[@christayah]

@@M0rdFustang 😂😂😂😂 he will have full army and castle age

[@kastellan1324]

I almost always play Franks but I stayed because sometimes I also play Teutons

[@spartanmk2]

This: Moo,MooMOo,Moo..Moo..MooMoo..Moo.Moo..Moo.MMooo!..Moo. Or this: Moo..Moo...............Moo...................................MooMoo.....................Moo...Moo.........................Moo. Moo.

[@aaronmorrow4957]

Wouldn’t the wood savings be multiplied by the number of farms you have? Having to wait 3 resends to be permanently ahead by 60 wood sounds like it would take forever, but that’s one farm. With 50 farmers in late game, that’s 3000 wood.

[@SpiritOfTheLaw]

Definitely. The payoff is massive when it finally happens.

[@PTroy84]

@Spirit of the law: when an why you stop using your iconic intro song? Miss it!

[@photosneverdie]

I never imagined I'd find farm upgrade videos interesting until I discovered SOTL

[@BadNeighbour010]

I've thrown games where I forgot to get either the lumber camp upgrade or the farm upgrade. You can feel it when you don't get either, your wood is always at zero.

[@hagensauer1204]

ähm, doesn't he forget to scale the effect with the number of farms? i mean, when i build a lot of farms, then the number of farm cycles after which the upgrade paid for itself should lower right? because i save more wood if i have more farms. and if i do not do very few farms the upgrade is pretty useless and saves me very little wood. or do i overlook something? usually SOTL is super precise and i don't think he overlooks anything but this time i am not a 100% sure. can somebody explain to my how the number of farm cycle is 3 regardless of the number of farm ? is it related to the times the upgrade is done? > he referenced short games in which the upgrade is useless; is that how we get to 3 cycles ?

[@pawetrawinski2336]

I m suprised thata nobody mentioned that. It seems that he experimented with just one farm, but in real game you always make more of them, so the effect of the upgrade scales with each farm you make.

[@scout4996]

"+3 carry capacity isn't a civ bonus" It is now, ha

[@michaeltaylor8698]

On the subject of farms, can the Inca's get a new civ bonus already. This is a post I made on the Steam forums about some ideas I had for a new Inca civ bonus: Suggestion for new Inca team bonus - Farms cost -10 wood The Incas have hands down the worst team bonus in the whole game. They effectively don't have a team bonus since, as Spirit of the Law pointed out in his Inca overview, the Inca's farming bonus equates to 1 extra farmer for every 200 farmers. It's completely worthless. Team bonuses are meant to be weaker than civ specific bonuses, but some civs have really good team bonuses like the Aztecs, Spanish, and the civs with creation speed boosts like Britons, Huns, Goths and Turks, not to mention civs with unique team units like the Berber's Genitour etc. I still like the idea of Incas having some sort of farm bonus so here's my first idea: "Farms cost -10 wood" A Dark Age farm has 175 food and costs 60 wood, meaning it has a food to wood conversion ratio of 2.92. A dark age farm with a Chinese ally gets +45 food, so farms now have 220 food and cost 60 wood, so they have a conversion rate of 3.67. With the new Inca bonus, farms would have 175 food and cost 50 wood, so they would have a conversion rate of 3.5. So the Chinese bonus is actually slightly better in terms of food-to-wood, but the benefit of the Inca team bonus is the saved wood in Dark Age and early Feudal Age. As another comparison the Slavs team bonus can also save wood with its +5 pop space on military buildings. With Slavs a dark age barracks effectively saves you 25 wood (1 house) and in Feudal Age 2 archery ranges or 2 stables (combined with the dark age barracks) would have saved you 75 wood (3 houses). With this new Inca bonus you would save roughly the same amount of wood as a Slav player in the early game. As the game goes on and people get Horse Collar etc. the bonus will become less significant just like the Chinese bonus so its more of an early game bonus than a late one. I really like this idea and is my main suggestion, but an alternate idea I had was this: "Eagle Warriors +2 line of sight" The idea for this one came from the fact that the Mongols' +2 LOS bonus for scout cavalry doesn't apply to Eagles, so American civs with a Mongol ally don't benefit at all. The only problem with this bonus of course is that it only applies to the American civs so its utility is very limited, but it still says something about the Inca's current team bonus that this one would still be way better.

[@eccentrichorse11]

I like this idea.This bonus sounds quite useful without being OP. But incas already have a great win rate in 1v1s. See this vid kzbin.info/www/bejne/n5Syg2hrpp6XZ9k So the developers probably did not want to buff them anymore.

[@michaeltaylor8698]

@@eccentrichorse11 I know balance is always a concern but does it really justify saying Inca's basically don't need a team bonus since they do alright anyway. The same could be said for quite a few civs like Magyars, Malians etc. It's not that their bonuses aren't good, but you could make the argument that they'd be fine if they lost it.

[@Kertal1]

Yo Spirit, i have few questions and one challenge for you. 1. I notice that Gaia in creation maps give monks +15 more health and +3 more range also archers and cav. archers buildings and all that get +1 more dmg when u make them post-imperial in the player section, i don't have DE so i don't know if that was fixed. 2. Could you check for me a units like, Amazon archer, Amazon warrior, Nordic warrior, Something warrior, Bronze swordsman, Legionary and Centurion, where i know Centurion have +10 bonus dmg vs infantry but i just wonder does any of these unitse get other bonuses and also i know they benefit from civ. bonuses Challenge: Could you play any civilization vs any civilization with difficuly starting lowest then go higher as you win but, Rules: you can't mine trade self or get gold from anything litterally from anything you can use only gold that you start with but, you start on highest ressources. You can't play the mode where you get 10k all ressources or something like that Thank you ^^

[@edumanz5044]

I dont know i just upgrade because i like it

[@jwddwj9]

I really want to see a 256x pro tournament...

[@The_Room_2_Doggys_Revenge]

I always thought it could be interesting to have farming rate upgrades, and instead of lowering the base rate of Mayans and Khmers you don't give them the last upgrade

[@Caution2TheWind1]

Rate upgrades are tricky, you'd have to give them to almost every civ because of what a powerful bonus they are (for balance reasons), and then rebalance the civs shortly after the update since some of them would get a bigger buff than others. Dev's probably won't go that route

[@The_Room_2_Doggys_Revenge]

@@Caution2TheWind1 But then Spirit of the Law could make a video about upgrading the farm or the farming rate first

[@Maximitus96]

The thing about farm upgrades is how indirect the benefit is, i usually try to get Horse Collar before i start to get all my income from farms because that few extra minutes of not having to pay the first wood reseed will allow me to expand my economy enough to absorb the cost without having to sacrifice economy development elsewhere. Also in the late game, were trash war starts, being able to develop Crop Rotation and shift villagers from wood to food (or just have surplus of wood if you need to) gives you a slow but important economic edge. Of course that in an aggressive early game you shouldn't even think of getting the upgrade because you don't know if you will be alive to reap the rewards.

[@zharkabat]

I see those techs as wood tech, no food techs

[@tkzsfen]

Spirit, you are like Martin Luther, nailing your discoveries on the gate of the AoE church. And those discoveries are brutal...

[@beastmasterbg]

And Hitler when he's your enemy

[@tkzsfen]

@@beastmasterbg Or even worse, when he hates you - Hoang :D

[@ThmSphone]

If anyone got curious, in order to increase the work speed of farmers you need to change the work speed of farms themselves, not the farmer. That's kinda weird.

[@mattutter3525]

Very odd, is there any specific reason why this is?

[@PregnantOrc]

What I get from this video has nothing to do with farming. It's that we need a video on the offensive power of the plow upgrade in a *256 upgrades game when it comes to supremacy villagers. What does that movement speed boost open up?

[@richardlittlejohn8184]

Amazing video! Classic SOTL!!

[@John11747]

So technically, we should get horse collar only if we expect the match to go on beyond 40-50 mins...🤔...perhaps i should start priortising wheelbarrow more...counterintuitive but cant fight with numbers....🤔

[@yorib.4014]

John 117 If you get wheelbarrow then the payoff for horse collar will be faster since you finish the farm faster. So, get both.

[@Dark0Clone]

No. If i piggyback on SotLs example, so 20 minutes w/o horse collar and 24 with. In these 4 minutes you have an advantag. Lets say you have sufficient gold eco and about 20 farms at 20 minutes. In theses 4 minutes you have around 1200 more wood in the bank and can plop down a few military buildings (for military, because you have the gold for it), houses or simply 20 more farms. After the 4 minutes your eco will be stronger, because I at least hope you have more villagers at that point and this will reduce the stress on your eco (because now you have to reseed 20 farms). It doesn´t give you a huge wood bonus in the long run, but buys you time to do other stuff with the wood instead. Its a rather indirect bonus, but still a huge one.

[@awkwardcultism]

You have to judge whether more wood in a while or more resources now is better. That wood could be converted into gold through the market or populations space by killing a few of your lumberjacks in the late game. But you might be able to accomplish even more with the resources right now.

[@MaaxMarc]

the TYRELLS approve this message and send their regards. + 10 Age Of Empires points if you got the reference.

[@Bzhydack]

They are Growing Strong.

[@koppanypardi998]

Before I watch the video I would say they are extremely useful!

[@JSTM2000]

I suppose if you were a "perfect" AI you would get the farming upgrades just a moment before your farms expire, so Heavy Plow just before a large number of Horse Collar farms expire.

[@ahmxtb]

nobody: SOTL: *everything you know about Age of Empires II is wrong*

[@JaPkCubo]

Does the fact that Heavy Plow is a better upgrade and needs Horse Collar as a requirement makes Horse Collar worthy a bit earlier? Keep up the good work! :)

[@Halvtooth]

Depends on what you want to do, if you want to fight in feudal, you should get horse collar as first thing in feudal and then place farms. If you go for a fast castle you will probably have to place farms in dark age (3-4), then you don't do any techs until you clicked for castle. Then while you are going up you can do double bit axe (1st) and then horse collar, Then prioritize; getting up new tc's > wood upgrade > heavy plow. (Wheelbarrow ( at around 35 vills) from one of your tc's or in an extended feudal you can do it while you are housed ;). )

[@xtronicgaming1911]

This guy reminds my childhood times. Age of empires is still my favourite computer game since I was 7

[@JallenMeodia]

Is SotL throwing a little bit of shade on the practice of certain people's Google doc tier videos? Let's find out, first we'll have to calculate when the first google docs reference appears in one of his videos and then divide that by the time between the first google tier video..... Asuming the answer is 33% faster.

[@zealox1148]

This suddenly comes to my mind. Wouldn't it be interesting if after you research 'Wheelbarrow" for example, you can see the villager carrying a wheelbarrow around.

[@Sholto_David]

Since upgraded farms last longer villagers spend less time building and more time gathering, therefore all the upgrades increase gather rate... But timing without including the building time won't show you that.

[@bacigalupotomas2754]

Plis can you greet "la tumpandria" in your next video?

[@empty5013]

because of inflation making less farms over time is always saving you resources because paying 100 wood at 25 minutes is spending more 'value' than paying 100 wood at 28 minutes. this multiplies with farm count, 1000 wood at 25 minutes might not even be affordable but 3 extra minutes of woodcutting can make it entirely reasonable.

[@LilAlfiq]

If I had to guess, I figure they were going back and fourth on whether or not the upgrades should affect gather rate and by how much... and keeping the multiplier but changing its value was faster adding, removing, re-adding, re-removing the multiplier? I haven't edited AoE, but I've done that kind of thing before tinkering with other games.

[@DiegoAlanTorres96]

There are lots of other things you ignored in this one. In the end you only made me believe these upgrades are useless but its NOT true. For the love of god, it's only 75 wood 75 food for +75 food on ALL your new farms. Doesn't that add up to anything?

[@o2Tenka]

But what about the price and quantity? Let's say what if we have 8 or even 20 farms... Would that still be bad? I mean, when the ammount of farms change, do the outcome remains the same?

[@ethanbaker8534]

Hey Spirit, great video as always! It'd be neat to see the math behind monks healing other units.

[@DrZergling]

You shold compare like 10 farms with and without this "horsestuff" upgrade..!!!

[@aliochr7046]

So, what about francks ? They ''get'' around 60w for free for each farm up every 20 or so min.... If i got it right.

[@yannastra]

Ao3 is such a departure from Ao2 in so many levels but one of the main ones is the finite nature of the resources. Barring the Malay and the Portuguese a typical player only has access to trading for an endless stream of a resource, and that’s only if the player has allies. In contrast a solo player can have many options for endless resources in Ao3. I think I like the meta-aspects of both games but the resource urgency of Ao2 is certainly very appealing.

[@firockfinion3326]

Aha, so I was right about the wheelbarrow effect when researching it a bunch of times. The total collection rate over time is technically increasing, but the drop offs become more spaced out, making the income less consistent. It could be mitigated by telling your villagers to drop off manually of course, but that requires attention and micro time.