As I already showed in another Thread I evalueated all Booming potentials of the most civs in a Time when they can stop booming if played “optimal” with a given Strategy (FC into 4 TC + boom).
Here are the results again:
For the Cumans I used my Savegame with the market abuse, so there is no “potential” of improving by an adjusted build to the civilisations strength (marked orange in the graph).
After doing this I figured out I made a mistake in approxing the market abuse potential of the generic civ, as I accidently compared the wrong gather rates. I compared all upgraded gather rates instead of comparing the upgraded wood to the non-upgraded gold gather rates and step-by step look into the effect of the gold upgrades in Terms of Booming.
After correcting this, I got a Food/Gold ratio of 1.31 for the castle age (food + wood + wheelbarrow upgrades). So it is basically neutral to sell 130 G for 100 F once in terms of booming. The Gold upgrades can only pay back about 30 % of their investment in terms of booming, so it’s definetely not worth to go for Gold at any time to improve a greedy boom for most civilisations.
But there are some exceptions to it.
First here are the values for the Food/Gold Value with the corresponding upgrades. It is assumed you already have wheelbarrow+Farm+Wood upgrades.
A) No Gold Upgrades: 1.31
B) Gold Mining: 1.51
C) Gold Shaft Mining: 1.73
If you have these upgrades for some reasons, you can improve your booming transition by selling food up to the values given above. The first doesn’t improve your Boom much, but the second one is basically equivalent to 150 free Food if you are able to completely abuse the market unchallenged.
This coul be very interesting for archer civs since it allows them to play way less farms in the early to mid game without being punished, as they can buy up to 700 respectively 1200 food from the market by actually improving their boom. Very interstng for Civs like Britons or Mayans.
But there are some civs which can actually indeed improve their booming directly without any conditions:
Malians: Get the first Gold Upgrade for free.
Turks: Gather Gold 20% faster, which is even better then the Malians bonus. Haven’t collected the gather rate yet, but the result should just be a bit better than Malians. You may almost be able to pay back Gold Mining upgrade cost just with the market abuse potential with them.
Saracens: Even without any Gold upgrades you can buy up to 1100 Food from the Market resulting in a bonus of 60-70 free food. With the first Gold upgrade you can buy up to 1600 Food and it almost pays back its investment just by the market abuse itself. Gold Shaft Mining can’t be payed back completley, but about 75 % is possible. I think it’s a good enough Reason for Saracens to actually only make feudal farms for military purposes, buy the food for booming first and then transition into farms with upgrades later. Of course this play is risky because you if you need to make a camel transition, it can easily cost you the game. The F/G values for Saracens are the same as for the other civs, just their OP market allows them to make use of this specific strat.
And then there are the two other exceptions, which are exceptions for a different reason: Cumans and Malay.
Their Castle Age boom is actually nothing different to the other civs. But their advantage is their better eco. Cumans (Feudal TC) and Malay have the best eco when reaching Castle age, so they can actually, opposed to the other civs, somewhat damage their eco to get a faster castle age and secure their advantage over the other civs with a faster start of their castle age boom. But for the cumans it stll needs to be figured out by trying how much market abuse is possible without damaging the boom in castle age. I think if you only plan to make a 3 TC boom you actually could get away with almost no feudal Farms, but for a 4 TC boom you can’t get away with that, it would hurt your eco too much.
As this is heavily depending on the build and cannot be approximated well I can not calculate how much market abuse would be too much for cumans. I think my play with 4 deer + 8 feudal farms might, retroperspectively seen, be quite close to the optimum for a 4 TC boom.
But I will try to now make a 3 TC boom Guide for them for team games with market abuse. Be aware that this guide will only be viable if the others don’t abuse their market, too and the cuman player isn’t delayed by the enemy. I think this is actually the most useful application of the whole theoretical consideration, as cumans are actually mostly played exactly that way in Team games:
Feudal TC into 3 TC + Cav spam.
The other one, as described above, is the transition from archers into boom, where you could try to hit the values given as good as possible. IDK if it’s really possible to perfectionate it, but it’s actually good to know that you can actually improve that transition by not transit too hard into farms at first and can leave many gold miners actually where they are. (IF you researched the mining upgrades)