For 70 food each.
Title.
This is basically useless ^^ (Cause WAY too expensive)
But automatically training sheep instead of garrisoning at a slow speed could indeed be a nice addition to a non-vegetarian civ.
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Absolutely no. They already can garrison sheeps to get a trickle of food, and giving them this second effect would have a dreadful synergy.
Having the ability of spawning more, especially costing food, would allow them an unrestricted exponential boom, without the limits that pop limit forces on villagers for example nor the risk of exhausting resources.
Food (from garrisoned sheeps or farms) => produce more sheeps => More production from sheeps => can produce even more sheeps => repeat ad infinitum (well until the map is fully covered with mills filled with 10 sheep each or you run out of wood for mills)
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it’s locked behind a 100w building, you need to pay for the sheep, and also currently 8 garrisoned sheep have a payback time of ~20min and are equal to about 1.5 “food relics” iirc.
Don’t see this idea as bad.
Imagine a long match, on black forest for example. Playing defensively, a player is able of withstanding his enemy while saving 25% of his food production, invested toward sheeps.
20 min later, he now has +25% food production. Still 75% of the base on the enemy so now he can reinvest 50% of the base
40 min, +75% food production. 75 goes into units, 100 reinvested
60 min, +175%. 200 reinvested
80 min, +375%. 400 reinvested though at that point you could steamroll this enemy with one hand, also deleting most of your villagers to account for a larger army
I simplified a lot but the exponential growth would be very possible. Also, yes mills need wood but you only build them once, a mill is less than 2 farms.
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If the gurjara player is constantly reinvesting food into sheep, he will have less resources till 80 min. Also, 8 sheep gathers at the same speed as about 1.5 vils, not great except in very long games. You would need a lot of sheep and consequently a lot of food for this to get significant. Compared to Slavs faster farming, if you have 80 farmers, slavs farming give the equivalent of 8 farmers for no investment.
The moment you stop reinvesting, 20 minutes down the line you’ll have made your food back and then profit from it.
Now you can definitely invest too much, but a careful management will be unstoppable over time.
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While it would probably take time for Gurjaras to get infinite food like that and their tech tree is ill-suited for BF shenanigans in general, I don’t see the necessity for them to be able to do that either. Like not everyone agrees how to use their bonus but so far the consensus seems to be that it’s decent.
Maybe it’s not even that complicated. Maybe it’s just “open mill, put your sheep in, play normal from that and when youre food income is insufficient just eat as much of the sheep as you need while adding a few farms behind”.
Maybe this isn’t the “perfect” solution, but it’s an “always working” solution.
Training sheep for 70 food would be a horrible trade. Even if you reduced it to 50 that still would be bad. Essentially that’s like producing vils from a second tc that can only make farmers but you need like 6 or so to have gathering rate of a regular farmer. To make this bonus useful you’d have to make the food cost increadibly low I assume.
But then it would be hard to balance. I guess you could abuse it for some crazy fc builds because you don’t need farmers. Or in late game when you’re pop capped this way you get indefinite food vils.
Honestly, I don’t see what’s wrong with the current gujaras eco bonus. It’s really good and hits way earlier than other eco bonuses but has a lower effect long time.
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It would indeed be absolutely pointless for any of the 41 other civs.
85 food harvested give or take (depending on the number of villagers) - the training cost of a sheep, would be awful compared to farming unless the sheep is very cheap, and I’m not even counting the micro required for villagers instead of just letting them farm. In AOE3 it’s worth it since 2 mechanics come on top of that (unit limit and fattening cattle) and the game is balanced this way, but not in AOE2.
Thinking about it, I only see one scenario in which this bonus would be useful (except for the Gurjaras for who it would be awfully overpowered) : when you completely run out of wood, allowing to reinvest your food into slightly more food. But it happens so rarely it’s not even worth balancing the game about it.
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How so? I really struggle to see how that can remotely be useful even for gurjaras. So let’s say you can train one sheep for 30 food. In order to get the equivalent of one farmer you need to invest around 180 food. Then look at civs that get more vils. Chinese get like 2,5 for 200 food. Malay get 2 before going up for 100 food, bengalis even get 2 for free.
And it’s not even like you save the wood for the farm you’d otherwise make because each equivalent to 1.6 or so farmer you invest 100 wood for new mill. That’s your farm per vil right there.
What makes it even worse in comparison is a civ like cumans that gets a new vil for 50 food. The investment for a tc pays out extremely quickly if you compare it to that sheep production “bonus”. Also if you knew your opponent does that you just go fc (because with that heavy investment you don’t need to fear early aggression) go boom and your eco will be miles ahead.
So to make that bonus useful a sheep probably would need to cost like 10 food. You might produce 2 more to fully garrison your mill but then I bet you make more sheep to eat 2 sheep at once with like 5 vils each under tc and be super fast up to castle. You have a lot of wood to wall up make defensive units and military buildings.
the key is, sheeps do not count in the pop limit, neither do mills, contrary to villagers, any extra villager you make means one fewer military unit. So by constantly reinvesting some of your food production into more sheeps, and garrisoning them in mills, you can grow your food production without limit. Should a game take long, you could get an overwhelming economic advantage.
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In the very late game this would be a joke. You basically have infinite food, without the need of replenishing farms.
Even in the early game it could lead to some ridiculous endless scout spam.
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To add insult to injury, they have fully upgraded hussars
Train livestock from TC/mill is left to add to another civi like Swiss.
It would mitigate the problem but it would reappear if you pair this civ with the Gurjaras in a team game
Would it be any better if the cows trained cost gold and not food?
Yeah. At least that won’t affect 1v1.
The question of trading gold for food would be highly questionable. In practice it would be limited to the early game.