Ultimate Trade Combo

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Assuming a 3v3, lets say on BF or god fobid Michi with easy tosetup and safe trade

1 Civ. Spanish, of course 25% trade gold is alwasy nice
2. Hindustani, they get 10% extra gold from trade, and can set up caranvansis that when fuly build up give another 25% gold bonus (multiplicative! to spanish)
3. bengalis, 10% of trade gold is food.
accoding to spirit of the laws

the typical trade route from one corner to another generates about 26.9g per minute per trade carts, i will contine with a calue of 26g.

a tyipical farmer is capped out at around 24f per minute.

that means, around 9 trades are euqal to one farmer that never needs to reseed.

back to our 3 team combo.
with spanish + caravans we can get 26g/min * (1+25%)* (1+25%) = 40.625
the hindustani can get get 26g/min * (1+25%+10%)* (1+25%) = 43.875
lets round that to 40g per minute per trade cart.

with the prevous assumed values, this means 6 trade carts can generate 24f per minute=1 farmer
and for hindustanis around 5.5 trade carts.

assumin a rly late game trade with 70 carts per teammates.
then that generates
70 x 40g per minute = 2800 (70x 43=3010 for hundustani)
and an additional 280 (301 for hundustani) food

now lets see how many trade carts and farmers an generic civ needs to match this

in order to generate 2800g/m the generic civ with 26g/min
will need 107 trade cards
additionally for the 280 food we need 280/24=11.66 farmers plus a bit a wood so i round it up to 12.
in total thats 119 pop for eco, for with the above team combo just needed 70, a whopping 49 pop advantage or 41% less pop needed.

but it becomes worse, lets see hindustanis with their additional 10%.
3010g/m requirres 115 trade carts and the extra 301 food per minutes requirres 12.54 farmers, rounded to 13 because of wood.
THats a total of 128 eco pop and a nd 58 more than the hindustanis require, hindustanis require 45% less pop than the generic civ.

Disclaimer: i know that these calculations are rough estimates and with good margin of error, but should be in the right direction. would love a spirit of the law video about it

if you ask me, if you let this team combo setup trade, its gg, as such a huge eco advantage will allow this team so either afford more units, or use less pop on eco and overwhelming with more millitary pop numbers.

I must say, i rly dislike bonuses that basically allow a civ win, with no skill or tactiv able to overome the stacked odds, if allowed to setup, and i think this is one such case.

you could always argue, “then dont lets them set it up”, but how realistic is that on maps like BF. with that argument even cobra cars would be balanced as long as they are getting wonder like costs.

non of these bonus are OP by itself, but stacekd together like this, i feel a huge problem arrising to premate teamgames.

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2

For 4v4, I think adding Bohemians will be great.

6 Likes
3

I’d add Bohemians in there for sure.

As you can see in the video, the Bohemian bonus is huge for setting up trade and even the Spanish need like 20 minutes to catch up. And that doesn’t even factor in the possibility of trade being raided and replaced afterwards.

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4

In a 4v4 instead of stacking another trade eco bonus, I would go for a siege onsger civ.

5

Who needs SO when you have Houfnice?

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6

One interesting thing about the Caravanserai is that it overproportionally increases the trade income with “crowded” trade routes. I think I saw a vid of Ornlu about that (was it Ornlu?). So it is seemingly especially good when other trade becomes way less effective cause of all that bumping.
Idk what causes this behaviour cause of all logic faster carts should bump as much as slower ones. And the caravanserai is an obstacle also.

It’s a bit weird to give that to a civ that already has one if not the most impactful lategame TG units in the game. And it’s now even stronger than it used to.

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7

Houfnice has longer range and it’s 33% faster with the UT, but it’s more expensive, has half the blast radius, less pierce armor and 50% less aoe damage, way more bigger minimum range (5 vs 3) and slower attack rate.
It’s not like you can always prefer Houfnice to SO. They complement each other well, but are not interchangeable.

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8

I think it was Age of Noob. I don’t remember Ornlu touching Hindustanis yet.

The only explanation I came up with is faster carts also manage to find the right path faster than regular carts.

9

If that’s the case, why aren’t they already doing pathfinding way faster?

10

I think they do. And that’s why gold generation is increased by a very big margin. They just can’t completely avoid bumping into each other.

11

So I actually played 2, 2v2 on michi with Spanish + hindustani with the same teammate once as Spanish once as hindustani.

The amount of gold is insane. My teammate was shocked.

Adding bengali on top would surely break the balance