There must be some people coming to against me and say I am crazy. They may say that I want to destroy the well balanced game again.
But I am serious.
Food is too expensive from feudal age to early imperial age.
Even thought in post-imperial age, food is only cheap if you have advantages. Food will still be expensive if you are beaten hard.
In the past post, someone gave me a comment that “Using archers is not easy. Comparing with using scout, which only 1 stable is needed, using archers need 3 archery ranges.” Oh, dude. The reason that only build 1 stable is because you cannot keep creating scouts in 2 stable, hence you only build 1 stable otherwise you will not have enough food to keep creating villagers. But it doesn’t mean that 1 stable is enough! You will be beaten hard if you use scouts from 1 stable against archers from 3 archery ranges. Don’t forget he must have a Barrack so he can make a few spearmen. But you don’t really have an archer range to make skirmishers. Even though you have an archer range to make skirmishers, without upgrading Fletching cannot counter archers. On the contrary, spearman without upgrade anything is still effective to against cavalry.
We can see that, archer cost 70 resources and scout cost 80 resources, not a big difference. But why you can keep creating archers in 3 archery ranges but feel exhausted by keep creating scout in only 1 stable? It is because gathering food is too heavy burden! If you want 10 villagers to mind gold, you just send 10 villagers to do it. However, if you want 10 villagers to farm, you should first pay 600 woods to build the farms before you start gathering the food! If you use scout, you will still feel free to create the initial 3-4 scouts because your deers or barries are still not run out, you can get food will no cost, also you have spared some food during advancing to feudal age. However, once you start farming, you will feel very exhausting. Not mention that almost all technologies in blacksmith cost food only in feudal age.
Both houses and farms are the most mass buildings in the game. Every civs need them. Why farms are so expensive which limits the players to use melee units?
Knights are so much better than scouts, so it always makes sense to not invest in more than one stable in Feudal age and try to get to castle age fast. On the other hand, archers just upgrade to crossbows, so going to castle age later is not that problematic. The archer player can keep making archers to maintain the pressure. This is more of the reason why we see only 1 stable play. The only time it makes sense to go full scouts is as a follow-up to a successful tower rush. Scouts are very effective at denying unwalled resources and at protecting the towers.
Also as a non sequitur
I think of a unit’s cost in wood equivalents instead of total resources. In Feudal age, the going rate is usually ~1.2 wood for 1 gold and ~1.5 wood for 1 food. So according to this metric, scouts are 120 w.e. and archers are 79 w.e. . Your suggestion would bring food closer to 1.25 w.e.
This doesn’t even counter the OP’s argument. They are saying if something needs more wood, it so easy to just assign a couple of villagers to wood in comparison to building a farm for every extra farmer that you need. At any point in Feudal age, you can easily make 100% of your villagers into lumberjacks, so anything costing wood would have zero impact on being able to train more archer.
In a sense, wood is a liquid asset like cash which is easy to acquire and spend. Food is something kept in the supermarket for which I have to make investments to go and get. Gold is the easily acquired commodity with just a call for home delivery but which has limited stock.
Your change would destroy the well balanced game we have!
Whoops
if you want a serious response: Your understanding of the game seems to be lacking in various areas. Scout rush is a perfectly viable strategy. Going 2 stables and fully upgraded scouts in Feudal Age is a viable strategy (if the opponent is not fully walled).
3 Archery ranges at the very beginning of Feudal Age is not a viable strategy. 2 is all you can sustain (unless you go all in, which is not that viable at this point). So you would need to compare 2 ranges vs 1 stable or 3 ranges vs 2 stables - that would be more accurate.
Also the Scouts vs Archers matchup is very well balanced. Scouts win early and in lower numbers. Archers need to get to higher numbers and they need upgrade to be decent. Scouts you can just produce 3 or 4 and you have a decent early game force. It is important for the game, that you cant spam scout as easily as you can spam archers at this point.
Then, once you got to a decent number of archers with upgrades, you will be rewarded by having the stronger fighting force - which again is good for balance. Now the Scouts player has 2 options: he either goes for upgrades and a 2nd stables (which he can afford at this point, but not earlier, which is good). This way he will get the military upper hand once again (even against some spears), but he will be later to Castle Age. Or the scout player accept not being able to fight, but will be able to click up earlier. This decision making comes down to map layout, players being walled etc… There’s no clear best decision for all situations (one might argue that the going up to Castle Age faster option is a bit too viable right now). But what we can get from this is that Feudal Age military has a very good and very specific design with timing windows for both sides.
You should honestly invest more time understanding those nuances before you think about changing a game you dont even seem to understand. That’s not to be rude, but rather to hopefully show you that the design of the game is very good right now and everything works together very nicely. Don’t try to fix a problem, which doesn’t even exist and then come up with examples, which don’t represent how the game is played (on a high’ish level) and which therefore are just useless.