Pro tips from a Noob

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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There are a lot of tidbits in this game that create micro advantages and most of these in themselves aren’t hard to execute.

For example you can have villagers drop off resources gathered at ANY depot, if you task said villagers to build the drop-off depot.

Another tidbit, building any structure with 1 villager is the most efficient in terms resources gathering opportunities.

Now let’s combined the top 2 concepts above into an actual scenario.

The common delhi opener macro is to send 5 of your starting 6 villagers to a straggler tree nearest your berries then send the 6th villager to lay down the mill blueprint. Once the 5 villagers have each gathered 10 wood, instead of them going to the Towncenter to drop off the wood, you task the 5 to complete building the mill!! Once the mill is complete the villagers will drop off their wood then go to foraging the berries.

But let’s go a little further in our analysis of what was just described and what opportunities we gained/missed.

Straggler trees are typically 2 tiles from the Towncenter,
and walk speed for a villager is 1.125 tiles per second. So NOT having the villagers walk BACK to the TC THEN to the mill saves you 4 tiles of walking which equates to, ( 4 tiles / 1.125 tiles per second ) × 5 villagers = 17.78 Villager-seconds!!

Note: Villager-seconds is a contrived unit that helps illustrate potential for work done. It’s quite literally 1 villager active for 1 second. But it can also be linearly representative of several villagers being active for fractions of a second. Its most direct use is to multiply it by an effective gathering rate and get a sense of resources you would have obtained. So take the 17.78 V-s and multiply by an effective gathering rate of 0.66 resources per second and get 'bout 11.7 resources. Another way to stating the above equation is to say: those 5 villagers NOT having to walk those unnecessary 4 tiles garnered you an extra 11.7 resources assuming an effective gathering rate of 0.66 resources per second.

But remember i mentioned the most resources gathering efficient ( aka minimum Villager-seconds) way to build any structure is with a single villager?

So what is the minimum Villager-seconds to build a mill? The minimum is only achieved by using 1 villager so by definition the moment you use more than one you start to lose more villager seconds!! Well in the scenario above you just cut out walking 4 tiles which garnered you 17+ V-s, the question becomes are you going to forfeit those saving by using more than 1 villager to complete the mill???

Let’s do th math. The formula for calculating build time of a structure is base_build_time × (3/[Villager-buiders + 2]). This formula works for all structure and all NON chinese and ootd villagers. One villager takes 20s to build a mill ( 20 × ( 3/[1 + 2]) = 20s ). 1 villager was active for 20s therefore expended 20 V-s. Meanwhile 5 villagers build a mill in 8.57s ( 20 × ( 3/[5 + 2]) = 8.57s). But that’s 5 villagers active for 8.57s which equals 42.85 V-s…Hmmmmmm. To b clear YOU NEED the mill so building it is unavoidable; this means at minimum 20V-s MUST be expended, period. But with 5 villagers you expended an EXCESS of 22.85 Vil-s?!! You not only negated the +17 V-s from before but choosing to build the mill from scratch with the 5 villagers resulted you a net NEGATIVE villagers seconds gained?? And to make matters worse you STILL didn’t build the mill the fastest possible because you could have had it up sooner by having the single villager build it up immediately… in other words… THERE ARE NO ADVANTAGES TO WHAT YOU JUST DID.

I need you all to vet this thru, because i watch a lot of replays and even the pros can be caught making this MISTAKE thinking they are gaining an advantage.

What you SHOULD DO to retain as much of your gained Villager-seconds by NOT walking those 4 tiles to the TC and back is to have the original mill villager build the mill all the way to a moment before completion. Then have the 5 straggler tree villagers tap the mil to completion.

CRUDE WHOLE NUMBER MATH:

Original mill villager spends 20s to start the mill BUT leaves it incomplete, THEN the 5 straggler tree villagers avoid walking back to the TC takes their payload to the incomplete mill to tap the mill to completion which take 1 WHOLE SECOND… The total Villager-seconds expended on building that mill would be 20V-s (from the first vil) + 5V-s ( from the 5 villagers active for 1 second) for a total of 25 V-s. Since 20 V-s is unavoidable, it means you’re only negative 5 V-s from the mill yet +17 V-s from avoiding the 4 tiles roundtrip for a net GAIN of +12 V-s!

MAFF is your friend!

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seems to make a lot sense, i highly doubt the post is “from a Noob”.

I play Abbasid and used to use 2 villagers to build a mill. The 2nd builder reduces building time from 20s to 15s.

  • the 2nd builder lost 15s of resource gathering
  • the 1st builder gain 5s of resource gathering, so it is a net loss of 10s.
  • for the other 4 villagers gain a little bit efficiently for gathering from berry instead of sheep. It should be 4 x (0.8274-0.66) = 0.6696 food. i.e. ~1s resource gathering. so the net loss is 9s.

The situation is more complicated as at the first few seconds, we may need to watch and control the scout.

Given that it is quite clear the best approach is to send only 1 villagers to build a mill, the question is, should the other food villagers be sent to the berry bush? Let’s say after aging, 4 villagers will be stayed on food, so it is likely at least 4 villagers should be sent to to the berry brush asap. The next question will be, how many extra villagers (more than 4) should be sent to gather berry before aging?

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I dont know what th game code saus about the gathering rates but old patches notes state that berry civs get a +30% gathering efficiency on berries; elsewhere in some patch notes it alleges base beey gathering rates are 0.66. Next we know that berry civs gather 13 units of food per trip and lastly is the walking from the berries to the depot and back to the berries.

Having your starting vils immediately on sheep means they need to walk about half a tile to the sheep and ALL perform th clubbing animation before any start to gather. Suppose the walk and the clubbing occurs in 1.44s. Next suppose we perfectly tuck the sheep carcasses under the TC such that the dropping off cache animation is negligible (0s). This would make the first drop rate equal to 10Food/(1.44s + 10/.75 +0/1.125) = 0.6769. That rate would improve ~0.75 beyond the first assuming the sheep carcasses are so well tucked that villagers don’t move (they merely stand up then sit back down).

Now instead of sheep consider the 6 to 8 tiles trek from TC to berries? Let’s assume 6 tiles, and assume the mill was prebuilt. Just to traverse the 6 tiles is 5.33s. Then if we assume the berry civ’s berry gathering rate is 1.3×0.66 we get 0.858 . Next assume the first berry bush is sandwiched along the mill such that the villagers while gathering sit on the mill footprint outline which appears to be 0.5 tiles from said outline to the inner abstraction where the villagers perform the drop-off animation . This amounts to the first drop rate to be 13food/[ 13/.858 + 1/1.125 + 5.33] = 0.608. Which will later improve to 0.810 for success trips!

a lot of assumptions were made but all of them were listed; nevertheless it appears berries in said ideal would overtake the well tuck sheep carcasses in about 70s? BUT, future vils will not all have to club the sheep nor walk to sheep carcasses meanwhile all new beeey villagers must make the initial trek! Next berries in the optimal position wil not last forever! You only have 350 per bush and in the most ideal case you’ll have 3 bushes neatly tucked against the mill. At this point we ned simulators to find out which scenarios would benefit from sending x villagers to berries as oppose to staying on sheep. However as a general principle the early villagers are likely to gain the berry advantages SOON enough if it only takes 70s for berry food to outperform sheep food, so don’t send any more berry villagers 70s before the age up timing you’re shooting for. If you want a 150s age up, send your last berry villager at 80s.

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Thank you very much for the analysis! Especially the 70s breakeven time and 80s guideline.

I’d like to add that, for Abbasid, it needs to make more buildings for Golden Age, so making additional Mill for berry villagers’ efficiency is not a big deal.

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CORRECTION!!!

I just checked in game and EVEN WHEN YOU TUCK THE VILLAGER UNDER THE TC… there is a NONZERO drop-off animation. One that I stopwatch clocked with my old hands at about 1.28-2s long. So with that new information it means berries pay overtake sheep even SOONER.

10_sheep_food/ (10/0.75 + drop_off_animation) vs 13_berry_food/ (13/.858 + drop_off_animation + walk_time); the latter is a better rate assuming a 1.28 drop_off_animation for all ROUNDTRIP tiles of 2.56 tiles.

the first 3 berry bushes assuming the ideal berry pattern will have less than 2.56 tiles roundtrip from berries to mill and back.

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