Hi everyone, so just some questions regarding the Market usage.
Scenario: You are in Castle age with 3TC and booming, but you’re low on food and soon you won’t have food to keep the third TC running (maybe you needed some fast spear or a scout, unimportant).
You have to resort to the market to keep it running. Question #1: would you buy wood to make farms or directly food? Question #2: at which rate is still time efficient to buy wood/food with gold and what should you prioritize to generate food with?
If you are booming don’t hesitate to buy food when needed while creating farms as much as possible.
You don’t have to look into ratio because if you are booming thats in in early game so you don’t have to anticipate gold amount for late game, just think about now , you need food, so buy food
If you attempt to buy wood and make farms your tc will still be idle until those farms are up to working speed. Buy food. The most important thing when going multiple TC’s is to make sure they keep running so the investment pays off quicker. Idle TC is delaying that eventual limited advantage.
Asking the wrong question. Rate is a function of availability. If something is scarce and cheap, it’s probably an efficient trade. As for “what should you prioritize to generate food with,” Farms? Fish traps? There’s a very limited number of renewable food sources, and they’re the only long-lasting sources of food in the game, so as soon as fast (deep sea fish for ships, shore fish for villagers, deer, boar) and free (berries, sheep) food sources are expended, those.
Abuse the market as much as possible BEFORE THE ENEMY(or your teammates) do.
Keep an eye on it in super late game for players buying this or that, you might be able to sell that little bit of stone you found for 500+ gold. Then get 100 food x20 for only 20-30ea.
IF there is the necessity, buy food. The conversion from wood to food is too slow to overcome it.
There are some exceptions like if you have not enough lumberjacks because you were pushed from your woodpiles, but usually the rule is: Buy directly what you need.
In a previous thread I made a calc which told me that in terms of a full boom buying 100 food at about 130 G is the optimum. So if you exceed that you will damage your eco in the long term. But usually I wood say buying up to 160/170 isn’t a big deal, not working tcs is worse than what you lose from changing at that price.
BTW you can also sell wood at the market if you desperately need to, but I wouldn’t make it too often, maximum 2-3 times in a game before gold gets scarce.