Skript is also attached here
I want to cover the cards affecting the hacienda and take a detailed look if they are worth it to use! First we will cover the cards Jalapeno and habanero Peppers, which increases the gathering at haciendas dramatically for a short duration and also marginally in the long run. Then we take a look at ranchero and charreada, which enable your haciendas to produce bandits and cavalry. Lastly I will take a look at barbacoa, which enables your hacienda to automatically kill and gather from fully fattened livestock.
Jalapeno/Habanero Peppers
Jalapeno peppers is an exploration age card, which increases the gather rate at haciendas by 5% permanently and 250% for 30s. Habanero peppers is the industrial age equivalent, which Boosts the gather rate by 10% permanently and 100% for 60s. Temporary bonus only affects villagers. Haciendas only get the permanent bonus (5%/10%) and livestock are excluded as always :(. All those increases work off the base rate, so it is not a stacking bonus like karni mata or French consulate.
With the temporary bonus of jalapeno peppers, each villager working at a hacienda will gather 37.5 additional food or 23.25 coin during those 30 seconds. With habanero Peppers each villager will gather 30 additonal food or 18.6 coin in this one minute. The one time bonus of the Jalapenos is therefore better than the habanero bonus. Not only do you get more, you also get it twice as fast. Jalapeno peppers could be used as an alternative to the commerce age shipment of 700 food, saving a age 2 slot for something more powerful. The Maximum Value you can get is 3000 food or 2400 Coin with 80 villagers on haciendas. These cards are best used when in transition to haciendas while also giving a nice small permanent bonus.
Next stop are the cards, which enable your haciendas to produce military.
These are the Age 1 card Ranchero and the Age 4 card charreada, which allow you to train cuatreros and chinacos respectively. I measured how long it takes for them to produce, depending on the amount of villagers. They both start at 70 second train time and it goes down to 13.54 seconds for cuatreros and 10 seconds for chinacos. If you are wondering, those train times cannot be further reduced by cards or church upgrades.
Is it worth it to send those cards and produce the units? For this i calculated the Food Equivalent gather rates by calculating the Food equivalent cost of the units and dividing it by the corresponding train time. Food equivalent is a helper metric, which I commonly use to adjust for the fact that resources are gathered at a different rate, food being gathered the fastest while wood the slowest.
Food equivalent gather rate = Food equivalent cost / Traintime
For better comparison I put in the graph for the gathering rate of x villagers at haciendas (without upgrades and in postindustrial) and compare them to the food equivalent gather rate of producing the military units. Note that these values are always the total gather rates of the hacienda and the villagers working on the hacienda.
The cards seem very underwhelming, Training Cuatreros barely outperforms unupgraded food gathering at haciendas (which is not something you would do in the first 15 minutes of the game ANYWAY), so yeah i would say that card is pretty trash. If going for outlaws you are better off sending âadvanced saloonâ and gathering the coin yourself. Then you are also flexible in the type of bandid you want to train.
For Chinacos: there is a clear value in using your haciendas to produce chinaco. For an age 4 shipment this seems to be too weak though, since the alternatives are factories or heavy unit shipments (which this card clearly does not outperform). Maybe as an age 3 card this could be decent or in deathmatch, but other than that this card also seems bad.
Did you know? According to Wikipedia the term barbecue originated from the mexican term barbacoa, which generally refers to meat [âŠ] being slow-cooked over an open fire or, more traditionally, in a hole dug in the ground covered with agave (maguey) leaves.
In age of empires 3 barbacoa is a mexican card, which allows your haciendas to gather from livestock corpses. With this card your hacienda will automatically kill fully fattened livestock and collect food from them with an insane rate of 8 f/s (same as villagers with fulling mill and same as settler on crates)
They gather additionally to their normal work rate. So they can harvest the cows and produce cows at the same time or harvest the cow and produce food ânormallyâ.
Cows take about 10 minutes to fatten to 500 Food with the selective breeding upgrade researched and barbacoa sent.
This means for the Lategame Cycle:
You need to dedicate 2 haciendas to producing cows mainly for these two reasons:
At 20 cows one cow tends to bug out and runs around and doesnât fatten at the Hacienda (slower fattening).
Your production of cows with one haciendas is not sufficient and you will have situations where you have less than 20 cows. That means you need two haciendas and around 3-5 Villagers in total working on the haciendas. 4 villagers split up between the two haciendas seems to be working fine, without to much inefficiency. The inefficiency I am talking about is, when you have 20 cows and your next cow is already finished producing and waiting to spawn (it can only spawn when you have less than 20 cows). The Number of villagers needed on Haciendas also depends on how many upgrades you have. Fattening time is the bottleneck when using barbacoa and cows for food income. So if you can further reduce the time to mast your cows (with Cards, Teamcards or native upgrades), then you can greatly increase the food gather rate with this strategy.
Because the math is not straight forward, I decided to test it out with an empirical approach. That means I ran a test with 2 haciendas, 4 villagers and all cows and let them work for 25 minutes and looked at the collected ressources to measure a realistic gathering rate. The case I tested was with Barbacoa being sent and selective breeding being researched. For transperency Iâll quickly show the raw numbers, you can pause the video if you want to. Dont worry though, no need to bring out your calculator, i will show you the gather rate soon. But first letâs talk about what you are actually investing to get this going.
The scenario for not using barbacoa is the following: Use your cows to regularly produce ressources and never actually eat them and investing the 2 haciendas and 4 villagers into Gathering normally. Alternatively i also include the 20 sheeps, which you realistically cant use in lategame anymore. I am also assuming postimperial gather rate with 100 % gather rate improvement (Estimation, Value might vary depending on deck /map and teammates). So depending on how you look at it (1 hacienda = 1 vill; postimperial Gather rate = 100%):
OpportunityCost = 6 postimperial villagers + 20 cows = 1 f/s * 6 + 20 * 0.17 f/s
OpportunityCost = 6 postimperial villagers + 20 cows + 20 sheep = 1 f/s * 6 + 20 * 0.17 f/s + 20 * 0.1 f/s
In Supremacy:
This card is best used, if you already have other livestock, either by using the 20 sheep Shipment or by scouting the available livestock on the map. By the way, you should always do this as mexico anyway, because Livestock gives you a good economic bonus. Then you can use this card to prepare for a very powerful timing, when your Livestock are already fattened quite well. With this card each livestock basically becomes a crate, which can be gathered by haciendas automatically. To sustain the value for this card you can use the other livestock cards or getting into the lategame cycle by using 4 villagers on two haciendas.
Once you have this cycle going, with only 2 haciendas + 4 villagers + selective breeding you will have better than postimperial gather rates, so this seems very strong on paper.
Okay to summarize this Thread Iâll rate the analyzed cards Starting with the worst card:
F Tier: Rancheros. I canât think of a situation where i would want to use this card over advanced saloon and just play normally. The value you create is just too small, there is effectively no mid/lategame bonus and you dont have the flexbility to use other bandits
D Tier: charreada: This card would be really strong as an age 2 card, niche as an age 3 card and as an age 4 card it is underwhelming. There are just better alternatives (like factories) and overall the value you can create doesnât justify the age 4 shipment investment.
B+ Tier: Jalapeno / Habanero: These cards can be used in a lot of situations, giving you value immediately and in prolonged games. Best used in transition and a lot better than most late game economy cards most other civilisations have.
A Tier: Barbacao. To be honest, I am surprised this card is as good as it is. This card can be an absolute game changer in situations, where your strategy builds up to using this card and can still be decent in a lot of other situations. I am not putting it higher, because I havenât tested it much, but the math checks out and this is a card you can base your strategy around. Also bonus points if you use it in a treaty match and you have nice teammates who feed you sheep or other livestock. Also let me know in the comments what combinations you can think of, where this card becomes really good.
What are your thoughts about these cards? Let me know in the comments ;).
