Here and there I’ve seen people commenting that pros use the market to buy food and reach Castle Age sooner. Can someone explain how that works? For one, buying isn’t a 1 to 1 relation, so you actually lose resources. Then, you need more villagers on gold, villagers that you could be placing in farms. Why aren’t those villagers being put to gather food instead of gold? It can’t be due to the time it takes to build the farms; it’s a very short time.
You sell 200 stone that you dont need or wood and buy food, saracenes have great conversion.
The 200 stone isn’t nearly enough. You don’t get 200 gold in selling, and you get even less food in buying.
It’s used in this way because of extra resources. Sometimes it depends on an outcome of a battle.
It’s because farmers are slower to gather food than the miners are to gather gold/stone, which can then be converted into Food. Each farm requires 60 wood, and can only have one vill working on it at a time, so you need quite a few to stockpile the food for Castle. Gold/stone however can have a lot of vills saturated around it at once, making it collect much faster. It’s not about losing the resources, it’s about getting the timing. Because either you do it so you kill the opponent fast enough with your Castle Age uptime that the lost res won’t matter, or you do it because if you don’t, you’ll be too far behind to Castle to survive long enough for the lost res to matter. Also, if you have the food from farms, you can just sell your stone and click up without having to mine gold, as long as you haven’t spent the remaining 50 gold after getting Loom.
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You are all missing one detail. Farms do not extract food from thin air, but they spend wood for this. This is a two step process. When you get food, you have 1 worker on lumber and 1 on farm. But they both work for you on gold or stone which makes it almost twice as profitable.
this is a very good point. thank you.