it’s a difference, but not huge. people even lose a vill or get lamed in the dark age and still manage just fine.
Maybe TC Idle time isn’t the biggest deal. When I calced it, it showed that TC idle time is worth about 3x of vil idle time, which surpriesed me too, but either ofc can’t be compared with losing vills. Yes.
I thought TC idle time would be much more impactful.
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TC idle time > vil idle time, by bucket loads, dont idle your tc unless you are specifically doing something (like getting a super fast scrush)
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Realistically the decision comes down to how often you get housed. Do guarantee a loss of some villager time now (you save 12.5s + some walking time at the cost of 1/10th-1/6th of a villager) in exchange for having 1 extra house around for the early game? That depends on the player. Unless you’re spanish in which case there’s no downside and you should always build 3 houses.
E.g. if you get housed on average a duration of 4 seconds or more each game then the extra house would be worth it if you never got housed.
Of course you can also just build 2 houses at the start like everyone else and when you go to drop a 3rd house, also drop a 4th which also gives the same extra house.
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I think it would be hard to sustain vil production with less vills on food, isn’t it?
I think the common buildorders are already quite tight… maybe with britons you can get away with 3 houses in the beginning?
I never tried that, but I think it will be hard to sustain vil production with 3 houses at all time.
Edit: Spanish, lith and persians should also get away with 3 houses in the beginning.
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it’s in the first post. I never stopped a vill production and i still got 6 on food quickly:)) That’s not the problem, the 3 sec (if you are fast) TC idle time is…
Makes sense, except for the 4th house along with the third. The entire issue was that you lost 13 sec of vill time by going for 3 houses and then saved 25 by building the 3rd…the 4th and further houses do not matter since they are always built with 1 vill 11
You have a double chin! 
Lol. Or a typo.
I must try that, but… As I usually don’t have idle time with the common buildorders i can’t really see the beneift. Aswell as I see that it may cause more problems than it solves…
How often do you have to drop your food to sustain vill production?
You’re missing the fundamental trade-off. If you never get housed it is always suboptimal to build 3 houses (unless you’re spanish). I mean saving even 25 seconds of villager time will still be worth less than 1/10th of a villager after around 5-6 minutes depending on villager efficiency.
That’s why if you are repeatedly getting housed the way to do this is at some point build an extra house where you normally wouldn’t do it. Whether you do it immediately to start or later on is up to you.
you’re not removing idle time by building early or late. you’re just shifting it around. also the place you want to housewall probably isn’t where your villagers start
we made 2 houses for 20 years because force-dropping sheep food was very difficult with lag. on DE you don’t have to worry about that, so do whatever you want. it doesn’t matter
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I always build 3 houses with mayans. 2 houses with other civs though. cause it’s really really not worth the TC idle time.
It should be three with Spanish, as well as Mayans.
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oh yeah you’re right
If you try queuing the vill before building the house, can you reduce the TC idle time below 3-5 seconds?
Otherwise the 3 house build could be better for you. I think I end up with more TC idle time if I don’t build a house with 2 vills.
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Yes I always queue vill before going to build the house, I would probably even do it when trying to build three houses. Reason being you can press the hotkeys while moving mouse to first vill and achieve 0-1sec tc idle time.
Obv with three houses idle time will be there but it won’t be less with building the house first imo.
I only read the first ~15 comments, so sorry if someone already said that, but: you trade 5seconds of TC idle time for 25 seconds VILL idle time. And yes, 5 seconds of TC idle is much, much worse than 25 seconds of idle vill.
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then read the rest and you’ll learn that 1 sec of tc idle time is roughly 3 sec of idle vill time;) And more importantly, you’ll learn that the 2 houses were built thanks to the pre-de lag when dropping off food was much more difficult, so now you can easily build 3 houses;)
besides, it’s not 5 sec, more about 3.
Sorry for late reply - i force dropped maybe 2 or 3 times on average, idk now…but i always check out vill queue regardless;) Anyway, i always move my sheep to the bottom left corner of the TC so that i could shorten the walk distance and start getting food about 1-2 sec sooner 
Regardless of whether it’s 3 or 5 seconds, I think @RookyJupiter539 is right. Suppose you have 3 seconds TC idle time and your opponent has 0 seconds TC idle time. For 3 out of every 25 seconds, they have one more villager than you do. So after 9×25 seconds, they’ve had 27 extra seconds of villager time than you, so have more than made up for the 25 villager seconds they lost building their third house. 9×25 seconds is 3 minutes 45, so although they’re somewhat behind you while building their third house, they catch up very early in the game.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I did actually read the thread, and can’t find anything that contradicts this. Idle TC is worse than idle villager time, its effects just get felt later (though not that much later) in the game.