Noob question about Officals collecting taxes VS boosting structures

[BrutalGlory]

I've been playing AOE2 for decades now, but i'm still new to AOE4. There seems to be very little information online on when to build a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th official and how to use them. I get the idea behind the first one going on food, but i'm unclear on when they're worth building otherwise. It seems wasteful to make more than the one if there aren't at least 15 villagers using a specific building (or maybe if you just want a 2nd one to actually be collecting taxes, but I can't imagine there's a reason to rush that when a villager would do a better job).

On top of that I can't seem to find any statistics for how much gold per minute they actually bring in (generally speaking) lategame. I can't imagine it's anywhere near something like French traders or British farmers? I did just do a game against absurd AI to figure out their mechanics and despite cramming 40 farmers and granaries around the Imperial Academy the amount seemed underwhelming.

[Xaphnir]

Thinking you need 15 for it to be worth it is fallacious thinking. You're just thinking in terms of cost effectiveness while thinking of it producing the equivalent of one villager. But another big resource is time. If you set an official to boosting 10 villagers, yeah, it might take longer to make back the resources you spent on him than if you'd spent it on a villager, but you also just got 2 villagers worth of resource output for the time of one. Also remember they're cheaper now if built from the Imperial Academy, and you've always been able to produce them from there, so once that's built it's not a choice of building villagers or Imperial Officials.

I do not have the answers to your questions, though. I have no idea when you should be producing them.

[Rabidnid]

they are relatively cheap so I end up with all of them and the upgrade. I don't use them to manage buildings since it is cheaper to just make more buildings. I have all the troop buildings and blacksmith around the imperial building since you get gold for making units and researching.

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by Rabidnid:

they are relatively cheap so I end up with all of them and the upgrade. I don't use them to manage buildings since it is cheaper to just make more buildings. I have all the troop buildings and blacksmith around the imperial building since you get gold for making units and researching.

Having them oversee a resource drop off building increases the resources dropped off by 20%.

[Rabidnid]

Originally posted by Xaphnir:

Originally posted by Rabidnid:

they are relatively cheap so I end up with all of them and the upgrade. I don't use them to manage buildings since it is cheaper to just make more buildings. I have all the troop buildings and blacksmith around the imperial building since you get gold for making units and researching.

Having them oversee a resource drop off building increases the resources dropped off by 20%.

Yup, only really worth it for gold mining.

[Cacomistle]

An imperial official is a 20% dropoff bonus. So, if you have 5 vills on a resource, an imperial official will collect at the same rate. If you have more than 5, imperial official will supervise for more resources than if you had built a 6th villager. Also its a dropoff bonus, so if you use one for say gold, that means you will get 20% more gold from your gold mine.

Generally, you want to build them pretty early on, if you can afford to. You generally want 1 for your opening build order. As base Chinese, you probably want them after Song Dynasty since you can just build them from the landmark.

As Zhu Xhi, generally if you've got like 7-8 on a resource, you probably want an IO. And you usually want one going around collecting taxes, so for instance in feudal if you have like 25 vills, you might have say 12 on food, 10 wood, 3 on gold, and 3 IOs (1 wood, 1 food, 1 tax and potentially supervising upgrades).

And no you shouldn't wait for 15 vills. If you could build 2 vills for the price of 3 and the time of 1 in aoe2, you'd do it right? Well you'd definitely do it in aoe4. So at 10 vills on a resource, you definitely want an IO. Its just debatable what point you want one before then.

There's no specific amount they bring in late game cause it varies based on where your buildings are and how much you're producing, and what you're producing (its 4 tax per unit regardless of the unit, so producing spearmen will generate a lot more tax than producing knights or bombards). But generally you can expect somewhere in the range of 300gpm from tax alone in imp. Maybe more maybe less depending. If you don't have your buildings close to a TC (or other tax dropoff point), then generally they just won't collect from that building, so if your production and/or resource gathering buildings are far away you'll get less.


And yes, it will tend to be less than English farms, or having a bunch of traders.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by Rabidnid:

Originally posted by Xaphnir:

Having them oversee a resource drop off building increases the resources dropped off by 20%.

Yup, only really worth it for gold mining.

No its worth it for all resources, as long as you have enough vills on it. The only one that's not really worth it is food in the late game.

If you don't agree, I look forward to you hitting rank 1 since you know better than every high level player.

[BrutalGlory]

Originally posted by Cacomistle:

An imperial official is a 20% dropoff bonus. So, if you have 5 vills on a resource, an imperial official will collect at the same rate. If you have more than 5, imperial official will supervise for more resources than if you had built a 6th villager. Also its a dropoff bonus, so if you use one for say gold, that means you will get 20% more gold from your gold mine.

Generally, you want to build them pretty early on, if you can afford to. You generally want 1 for your opening build order. As base Chinese, you probably want them after Song Dynasty since you can just build them from the landmark.

As Zhu Xhi, generally if you've got like 7-8 on a resource, you probably want an IO. And you usually want one going around collecting taxes, so for instance in feudal if you have like 25 vills, you might have say 12 on food, 10 wood, 3 on gold, and 3 IOs (1 wood, 1 food, 1 tax and potentially supervising upgrades).

There's no specific amount they bring in late game cause it varies based on where your buildings are and how much you're producing, and what you're producing (its 4 tax per unit regardless of the unit, so producing spearmen will generate a lot more tax than producing knights or bombards). But generally you can expect somewhere in the range of 300gpm from tax alone in imp. Maybe more maybe less depending. If you don't have your buildings close to a TC (or other tax dropoff point), then generally they just won't collect from that building, so if your production and/or resource gathering buildings are far away you'll get less.


And yes, it will tend to be less than English farms, or having a bunch of traders.

Thanks you answered the first half (when to build and if supervising is useful beyond a mill) so maybe I can answer the 2nd half (GPM from taxes) a bit more clearly as I ran some tests last night on farmers.(with all dynasties and techs)

10 Farmers with perfectly placed mills and without the 100% bonus landmark were dropping off 37-43 GPM (I turned off all other eco while I did this to ensure it would be accurate. So that averages to about 4GPM per farmer which is 1/3rd of Britons 12 GPM per farm.

10 Farmers with perfectly placed mills around the landmark straight up doubled to 8 GPM (74-86 GPM).

10 Farmers with granaries and the landmark was harder to calculate, but it did seem to be about 20% more gold, but if fluctuated a lot more given overlapping granaries (gold is dropped off every time food is deposited). Don't ask me to calculate what cramming 50 farms by granaries will do because the map wasn't set up for that - dropping ideally placed TCS for taxes would have taken way too much room here.

But I think it's fair to say they can get about 3/5ths of what the Britons do in the late-game, somewhere near 9ish GPM per farmer if it's laid out correctly.