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blackforest is absoulutely not guarenteed to go late game. maybe we have different interpretations of late game. but with all the fun of sneaking vils (magyar specialty) vill wars for those choke points, funny map starts with lots of open spaces, mangonel rush on weak little stone walls, khmer tree cutting, basic onager cutting at start of imp age... sooo many ways the black forest games are won relativly early.
( and games with under 1900 elo players. you are LUCKY if all borders are walled before feudal age. ( i asume higher elo players can wall, dont have any experience up there. though, i recently saw a 1880 ish elo player reck his own 200+ cavaleer/ paladin repeatedly charging into kamyuks.... so elo is plenty decieving...)
im stil not certain on the math, because if you spend 50 gold on a cart and get 100 ish from first trip, thats a fast return on investment.
also, as an investement that pays off later in game, thats a strategy, just like anything other strategy.
theres plenty of times when players resources arn't gathering exactly what they're spending, and since techs and vils cost lots of food, gold is often abundant if your just booming your econ. so its convinient to get a trade line going.
^^^^ certainly times when its more convinient to spend 1000 gold on 20 carts than 1000 food on 20 more' vils., Opportunity costs are a big part of efficiency.
That's fine, but then again no one is playing vs 2.4k's, so what works for those top level players doesn't necessarily translate down here. IOW let the man have his video, or, by all means, give criticism but make it a bit sharper than this.
- He says that it takes about 14 minutes for the trader to break even on his investment. But the trader actually has a massive advantage on the seller at this point since he now has a much greater rate of gold income - enough to constantly spam paladin, or the gold of his choice. The seller has probably mined out of gold by this point, and selling resources generates no where near enough gold to sustain gold based armies.
- A much simpler way of measuring the cost effectiveness of tradecarts is to just work out the amount of time it takes for one tradecart to pay off its cost. As noted in the video, it more than pays off after just one trip. There is no need for a player to spam 40 tradecarts all in the space of ~8 minutes, so his test isn't a fair comparison. (15-20 minutes is a more realistic scenario.)
- Setting up trade is not nearly so great an investment as he seems to think. At the point when players start trading they should be almost fully boomed with 120+ vils. With their now huge economies, setting aside few thousand wood plus gold over a period of 15-20 minutes takes relatively little out of their military production capabilities - in fact its a natural transition since they will likely be surplusing wood at this point. Setting up trade does however have have a massive impact upon a game after it begins to pay off.
- He says the resources saved could be spent on 40 mangudai, but we are now talking about 40 extra mangudai over a period of 15-20 minutes which is hardly likely to decisively win a game before that time is up - after which there is a massive advantage to the team that set up trade. (His example isn't even a good one since mangudai production is limited by the number of castles a player has, and they should be producing constantly from each one anyway.)
- In fact, players should be close to pop-capped when they start trade, so the notion that you can just add more army with the resources saved doesn't even apply. Its about transitioning your eco-balance (deleting villagers when needed) to a point where you can maximise your military population (by having less population taken up by economy). Selling food/wood for gold is highly inefficient, and it will end up taking a huge number of villagers to support only a tiny gold-based army.
- All in all, this is basically an all-in strategy with a somewhat minimal pay-off, but massive repercussions should a game not be won in the short period of time before trade would begin paying off. Setting up trade late once the gold is mined out requires selling food/wood to buy gold to buy tradecarts to get gold which is crippling to an economy. Selling resources long term is not an option - it takes about ~6-7 villagers on food/wood and selling to generate as much as one tradecart.
- Quoting from a top player: "I think even if it was proven to be more resource efficient to sell resources rather than trade for it, I would still set up trade. Because when the fighting begins, the minimum amount of micro you need to spend on making sure you are always building trade carts the better. Having 30 early and forgetting about them is so much better than getting a huge stockpile and then having to micro army and trade for next 5 minutes." (Melkor)
- This game has been played competitively at a high level for decades. For example, there is a tournament currently taking place with a $60,000 prizepool sponsored by Microsoft, so there is plenty of incentive for these players to figure out the best strategies. No team has followed his suggested approach to trade in this event, nor in any previous tournaments. These players spend countless more hours practicing and strategising for these events than was spent researching this video, and therefore this is compelling evidence - whether or not he respects the fact.
Now of course games can be won without teams having to set up trade, but this is just because the games were already If this happens in most of your games, it is likely because there are large differences in skill between the teams (which is unfortunately common in low-level team games.)
This video has already been discussed at some length on AoEZone. He was quite vocal in responding to the initial criticism, but suddenly went quiet once the more detailed and considered responses came in. I dislike that he now continues to defend this video, since it does the opposite of help players who genuinely want to learn the game (hence why I took the time to post here). I suspect he now realises his thinking is deeply flawed; still, I hope my argument is "complex" enough to merit a response.
Well, seeing how euphoric and condescending (despite understanding very little of the subject matter) he is in the video, that really shouldn't be a surprise.
By the way, quoting a top player saying that hed trade even if it was proven to be a bad or slow investment sort of makes my point. If this was your witness in a courtroom the judge would throw this case out immediately. "Even if it was proven that figuratively mugging internet dorks was dangerous, my client would do it anyways" isn't exactly good debate.
Even for the single paragraph which you did respond to, you (deliberately) avoided the point - which was that there are other advantages to trade than pure efficiency; player attention could also be considered a valuable resource. Still I'd enjoy hearing your explanation for why my response can be properly summarised as a "flat earth argument". But I'll summarise my arguments in a different way:
It is unnecessary to set up trade in a way that corresponds to your model. You could just make 10 carts and then stop. A fairer method is to just calculate for one trade cart - and one trade cart more than pays off after one trip. Of course if you immediately reinvest your profits into more trade, then it is going to take longer to pay off!
Nevertheless even if the 14 minutes is totally fair (which I dispute), this is not really the problem here. The problem is in the conclusions you then draw from this figure, when actually there are numerous other questions that need to be considered, including:
- Is the cost of setting up trade significant enough to be a decisive factor in losing a game? (Unlikely: it takes about 7 vils to keep a market pumping out trade carts. Hardly any more than it takes to keep a TC producing vils, and really not all that much once you are fully boomed.)
- How much of an advantage are you likely to gain as a result of not setting up trade - bearing in mind that that this advantage will apparently be cancelled out after 14 minutes.
- How likely are you likely to be able to maintain this advantage once the team has full trade.
- Is 14 minutes really too long to wait? How will your maths tell you the answer? You can keep saying "maths doesn't lie" as much as you like, but this won't help you with drawing adequate conclusions from them.
You can't reduce these questions to simple equations. This is where you'd need to collect data/statistics from actual games to begin to make conclusions on how/when setting trade is beneficial/detrimental.
Since the meta (as you acknowledge) is to set up trade, the burden of proof is on you here to address the above points. And to be clear: this is not about 'maths vs the meta'. Its the opinion of one (relatively low rated) player that the resources saved by ignoring trade will give him a big advantage, and that 14 minutes is too long... vs the opinion developed over some 20 years by the entire professional scene (and others) based on the experience of who knows how many thousands of games.
That said if you are trading when you have more than a few tiles of gold left, then yes you are wasting resources. Trade is designed to replace gold miners once the mines run out, not at minute 15, or even 30 necessarily.