How many trade carts should you have?

When gold mines dry up.

In team games of 4 vs 4. Personally I like to have at least 30 to 40 trade carts with gold heavy civs such as Franks, Persians, Khmer, Turks etc.

With a rich influx of gold I can buy stone, to make castles and spam bombard towers much more easily. And unleash gold heavy units such as paladins and elephant related units, siege etc. Since gold units generally beat trash units population efficiency wise.

You can be super annoying with the Turks by spamming so many bombard towers.

One vs one a paladin will beat a halberdier for example. Same with a war elephant/battle elephant vs their counter unit.

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If there is spanish then 60 is fine. But if not then may need 80 or even more.

When the gold dry up normally you already have enough military building and you don’t need too many lumberjack like early imp age to build the military building. Say 40 lumberjack + 80 trade cars can enable you a nice HCA + siege unit combo

80 trade carts is unrealistic. You need lumberjacks, and farmers. Knights need food, farms and bombards need wood.

The game is over 200 population.

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If your going for Palas or eles, 60 is the minimum number. Archers, CA or Siege you can make do with 40 - 50.

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My combo does not need food and what you mention is the weak part of knight in late time in terms of resource. Just like the Persians War Elephant in Michi which need to be slang so that it is viable. If you go for knight line in late game then 60 farm 60 cart and 10 lumberjack are fine. 30 to 40 trade cart is not enough for substaining the knight line production giving that your opponent have equal skill in macro

Usually you want 50-60 carts and some 50-70 villagers to keep producing as soon and as much needed. If you start to float on resources you can sling or delete a bunch of villagers/carts. As said before, 30/40 carts is not enough. It also depends, though, on your team’s bonuses, like Spanish trade and Hindustanis’ Caravanserai, how clean is your trade route and how many markets you have on the corner (the less the better as they will bump at each other lesser than with 4-5 market at the same location - put the extra markets somewhere else that is not further away than the one in the corner)

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For me…

200 pop - 50-60 carts

300 pop - 80-100 carts

400 pop - 100-120 carts

500 pop - 100- 150 carts

Depending on the map, and population limit, I’ll sometimes go 50% pop on trade carts until I rack up enough gold for spies, then delete the count to a more reasonable amount. Cuz it’s worth it :wink:

Btw, spamming bombard towers is one of my favorites. Lots of players call it a noob tactic. I call it an Art.

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