To all our “Math Geniouses”:
1 boar steal saying is 120 Wood and saying its no huge deal is just wrong, so I gona make you the exact math and explain its consequences in the context of a game:
(Didnt made the exact before because people dont care normaly for these exact things. Simply said you gain a 340 Food boar and an enemy loses a 340 Food Boar, simply said 700 Food Advantage.)
Detailed right Math:
1 Boar steal is a 2 Boar Advantage, because your enemy loses one for the one you gain. Same with Sheep.
First we need gather rates: We gona take the Gather rates of the Vil itself taken from this website:
(which means gather rates without any walking, 100% efficiency, except for the Farm at which we take the estimated value of 0.32 noted in the details)
To make comparable Math I gona make it with the 600 Food of 3 Sheep and ignore its Decay. With Decay the 600 Food will still be less Food then from a well saturated Boar for comparison. Its 600 because one wins and one loses 300 Food.
Also it doesnt matter if a Resource is Food or Wood, in the End any Resource is just a conversion of Vil working Seconds, and by this a Resource. Also any gathering can be seen as Vils working Seconds no matter the number of working Vils, because 10 Vils working 10 seconds is the same as 1 Vil working for 10 seconds mathematically.
The Math:
1 Vil has a Gather rate of 0.41 for Boar and 0.33 for Sheep. To make the math for both we take the average Value of 0.37 for our Food income form Boar/ Sheep.
A Dark Age Farm has a gather rate of 0.32 Food and a Lumberjack has one of 0.39 without walking.
To make 1 Dark Age Farm with 175 Food you need to collect 60 Wood first.
To make this in perspective for every 2.916 Food you gather you need 1 Wood. In other words around 1 Wood for every 3 Food, which means for every Second a Farmer works (collecting 0.32 Food) you need around 0.11 Wood. Wood has a collection rate of 0.39, which means you need ~extra 0.282 seconds.
In total you need 1.282 Seconds for 0.32 Food of a Dark Age Farm, or in other words you effectively collect 0.249 Resources per second of a Dark Age Farm (0.32 Food per Second / the 1.282 Gather Seconds needed for this Food value)
Our Value for Boar/ Sheep gathering was an average value of 0.37 Resources Per Second.
If we gather from a Boar instead of a Farm with our values we make 0.121 more resources per Second with our found values.
We said we would have 3 Sheeps/ 1 Boar, which is around 300 Resources per Player, or in other words a 600 Resource difference in Sheep/ boar collecting.
Now we have to get the number of work Seconds we Safe by collecting Boar/ Sheep instead of Farm and then translate that into the Resource advantage:
The Actual Resource Advantage:
The time we spend working on the Sheep/ Boar is 1621.62 Vil working Seconds (600 / 0.37).
In these working Seconds we would get 0.121 more Resources from working from a Boar then from working from a Farm, which is 196.21 netto more Res (1621.62 * 0.121).
Ofc it wouldnt be absolut 600 more Resources, because your Vils wouldnt Idle in the time they could normaly gather from the Boar, but just gather worse (but ofc might Idle for soem time).
Now lets get these Numbers into context:
the 196 Resource Advantage would be the one that one player would have when he ate all his Boar/ Sheep. This Number can already cause a later Age up time.
On top of that ~ 200 Resources is more then the cost of a Stable/ Archery and by this most likly cant produce a Stable/ Archery at the start of Feudal Age and even if you could you would have less Resources for military.
200 Resource Advantage means ,5 more scouts in a Scout Opening or 2,85 more Archers.
In an actual Game this means you gona have a situation in which one player fights with 5 Scouts vs 2 Scouts or with 6 Archers vs 3. It also means tight Build orders like M@a are impossible to play, because you need some extra gather Seconds to get these 200 Resources you would have had later, meaning you wont have them at the start of Feudal game, making it impossible to produce. On top of all of that this advantage only happen if both Players played perfect which often isnt the case. If you get lamed you often have to click up later, because you first need to get some farms up which need some time to pay for themself and could also cause some idle time.
So on top of the absolute Resource advantage a lot of meta advantage/ disadvantage happens like a slower Age up, low Food income in the beginning because of low Farm count, weird Eco balance because of the need for many wood as well as the situation that one player cant afford Military right away, causing situations like 5 vs 2 Scouts, which then can snowball massively.
All in all shown in the perspective of a Game and what not being able to afford a Stable means or having to spend much more resources on Dark age Farms without Horse collar, which could have been with eco ups otherwise and so on is a massive impact in the Game that snowballs out of control very easily.
Also in Feudal Age with a 21 Up Scout Build order you have 20 Vils and as mentioned before you have a an effective resource difference of 200 Resources. With our collection Values for Dark Age Farms of 2.49 this would mean that with 20 Vils (which is the number you have while Ageing up) you would need ~ 40 Seconds to get these 200 Resources as Food if all of your 20 Vils would be Farmers. Ofc in a real Game you would have much less Farmers, which is an important point, because the Resource type you would have gotten from the Sheep/ Boar would have been Food, and Food has the by farm slowest effective gather rate of all resources in Dark Age if we account for its passive Wood cost (which we must do to get a realistic value).
With a normal Value of maybe 6-8 Farms you would need ~100 Seconds to get these Resources. 100 Seconds is a lot in an RTS Game. In the context of the Game this would also mean it would take you 100 Seconds to get the same scout Number your enemy had 100 Seconds ago, which now will have even more, and the snowball continues.