economy secret mechanics?

[Jebe]

i have 99 workers and all economic upgrades + economic cards and still have the worst economy in a teamgame. How?
playing as aztecs

[Catalytic]

That's not really a secret. Aztec caps out lower than other civs. It's power is front-loaded. It's better in the early game than the civs with the best economies late-game.

[Jebe]

where can i find more information about that?

[Starcret]

Originally posted by Catalytic:

That's not really a secret. Aztec caps out lower than other civs. It's power is front-loaded. It's better in the early game than the civs with the best economies late-game.

thats not inherently true, they have good eco card upgrades for mills and plantations.

[Starcret]

Originally posted by Jebe:

i have 99 workers and all economic upgrades + economic cards and still have the worst economy in a teamgame. How?
playing as aztecs

use eco cards that scale with mills / plantations for lategame resource collection. also dont forget your imperial eco upgrades (gvies +50% resource collection rate)

[Jebe]

Originally posted by Starcret:

Originally posted by Jebe:

i have 99 workers and all economic upgrades + economic cards and still have the worst economy in a teamgame. How?
playing as aztecs

use eco cards that scale with mills / plantations for lategame resource collection. also dont forget your imperial eco upgrades (gvies +50% resource collection rate)

I had all of this.
My deck is all about cards that increase gather rate for farms and estates and I had the imp upgrades that cost 2k resources.
And I was still the worst economy by far.
I had 99 workers at 27 minutes. (Because there was a lot of fighting)
I just don’t get what the others did to get such a strong eco that fast, that’s why i asked if there are mechanics that are not that obvious for „newbies“

[pope henry viii]

Not sure how 'new' you are to RTS in general so pardon me if I explain things that you already know. If you tell us what you're doing, what you're prioritising, when you're sending things/aging up/researching things, in what order, etc., we can probably identify inefficiencies more easily than by speculation.

You can consider universal villager productivity using the unit 'villager seconds' ('vs'). Essentially, this is the amount of work that 1 villager does in 1 second. This concept allows comparison between otherwise distinct quantities, as well as quantifying opportunity costs (or the value of not having to take such costs).

You can use this to compare the value of unit, crate or other shipments, you can plan around the time it takes different cards and technologies to pay off compared to just gathering or shipping resources, and you can use this to allocate your limited number of villagers (and hence their productive time as vs) efficiently.

-

So, for example, gather rates are different for different resources and for different sources of resources. Without upgrades, chopping trees produces 0.5w/s, so 1w is worth 2vs, while mining produces 0.6c/s, so 1c is worth 1.67vs. So if you need both wood and coin, suppose you can ship 300w or 300c. If you ship the wood, you will after 37.5s (as crates gather at 8r/s) have 300w worth 600vs, so the wood crate shipment is worth 562.5vs, while if you ship the coin, you will only derive 462.5vs of value. Knowing this, you can plan to allocate your villagers to resources that gather faster, and fill gaps with shipments (especially of wood) which avoid the inefficiency of slower gathering resources. At scale, you could, consider 21 villagers working for 37.5s, with 20 chopping trees and 1 gathering a 300c crate, versus 20 villagers, with 20 mining and 1 gathering a 300w crate. The former gives you 375w and 300c, while the latter gives you 300w and 450c.

Another example is every second a villager spends building a building is a second the villager spends not gathering resources. So you can add 'hidden costs' to your buildings in term of the vs it takes your villager to walk to the location, build the building, and walk back to the resource they were gathering.

-

Having looked at a couple of examples of this concept and how it can affect short-term efficiency, I will explain some less intuitive examples. Purely in terms of maximising your economy, shipments of Villagers, as well as cards that hasten ramp-up like Medicine, Land Grab, or Agrarian Ways, can have substantial long-lasting effects.

Consider the Fortress Age 8 Villagers shipment. Worth 800f that you don't have to spend on them, right? But also worth all the time those 8 Villagers work (the vs they generate) until you would have trained 8 Villagers. Except your ability to train Villagers is limited by where you can train them from (which is usually 1 to 3 Town Centres) and how fast (1 per 25s), and you're still going to be training Villagers even if you ship them, ideally until you reach the limit of 99. Ignoring the benefit of other cards, and supposing you have 3 Town Centres and you have, say, 40 Villagers when the shipment arrives, the value of this card can be calculated along the following lines (what we are actually doing is finding the difference of integrals of step-wise functions based on arithmetic series):

All existing Villagers generate 25vs of productivity in the time it take to train 3 more Villagers. An increasing number of Villagers will be doing this until you hit 99 Villagers.
Starting with 40, in the first step they generate 1000vs. Then you have 43, and they generate 1075vs, for 2075vs total. And so on for 500s since you started.
Starting with 48, in the first step they generate 1200vs, then you have 51 who generate 1275vs, and so on. You will hit 99 Villagers at 425s, but for comparison we should count until 500s.
After 500s starting with 40, your total productivity will be 34250vs, while with the 8 Villager shipment, it will be 38025vs.
So the shipment is worth not just 800f, but also 3775vs of productivity.
The earlier you send such cards, the greater the magnitude of their total benefit.
Extra Town Centres or extra ways to train Villages (such as KInship Ties), faster-training Villagers (Medicine and TEAM Medicine) have similar advantages.

We can compare this to, and examine how it compounds with, the benefit of cards that improve gather rate, taking Great Chinampa for this example. It provides 20% of the base gather rate for agriculture. So if you have no other upgrades, it converts every 1vs on a Mill or Plantation into 1.2vs. Using the Villager numbers above, over the 500s period, it provides 6850vs without the 8 Villager shipment, and 7605vs with it. So it provides more productivity in itself than, does compound with, the 8 Villager shipment. Depending on time-scale, since it is only an additive bonus and does not compound with tech improvements, if you account for this, 8 Villagers can out-perform it (as tech gather rate benefits compound with greater Villager numbers).

-

Basically the idea is that by thinking in this way, you can determine what is efficient/good timing and order for sending cards, including cards that appear to have one-time or short-term benefits, in a way that provides a lasting 'lead' ahead of where you would have been without them. Gather rates provide an infinitely growing lead but the greater the scale of your economy when they kick in, the faster they will deliver their full benefits.

Similar thinking can be applied to free or cheaper buildings and upgrades (especially if they enable or improve gathering). Land Grab, for instance, can be worth upwards of 2000w and several minutes of saved building time/extra gathering time if you are committing to agriculture at scale (though it is still best to stay on natural resources for as long as it is safe).

This could explain why your opponents are getting ahead - they could in principle have 99 Villagers around 17 minutes pretty easily, which could mean they have mean they have anywhere from 10,000vs to 40,000vs more than you by the time you max you Villager count.

Obviously there's a balancing act, especially in supremacy and 1v1, and it's up to you to optimise your economy based on what you want to achieve, but unless you're playing 60+ min Treaty games, there will almost always be cards with lasting pay-offs that should be sent in preference to and much earlier than gather rate cards that provide a greater total long-term value on isolation.

[Jebe]

Originally posted by pope henry viii:

Not sure how 'new' you are to RTS in general so pardon me if I explain things that you already know. If you tell us what you're doing, what you're prioritising, when you're sending things/aging up/researching things, in what order, etc., we can probably identify inefficiencies more easily than by speculation.

You can consider universal villager productivity using the unit 'villager seconds' ('vs'). Essentially, this is the amount of work that 1 villager does in 1 second. This concept allows comparison between otherwise distinct quantities, as well as quantifying opportunity costs (or the value of not having to take such costs).

You can use this to compare the value of unit, crate or other shipments, you can plan around the time it takes different cards and technologies to pay off compared to just gathering or shipping resources, and you can use this to allocate your limited number of villagers (and hence their productive time as vs) efficiently.

-

So, for example, gather rates are different for different resources and for different sources of resources. Without upgrades, chopping trees produces 0.5w/s, so 1w is worth 2vs, while mining produces 0.6c/s, so 1c is worth 1.67vs. So if you need both wood and coin, suppose you can ship 300w or 300c. If you ship the wood, you will after 37.5s (as crates gather at 8r/s) have 300w worth 600vs, so the wood crate shipment is worth 562.5vs, while if you ship the coin, you will only derive 462.5vs of value. Knowing this, you can plan to allocate your villagers to resources that gather faster, and fill gaps with shipments (especially of wood) which avoid the inefficiency of slower gathering resources. At scale, you could, consider 21 villagers working for 37.5s, with 20 chopping trees and 1 gathering a 300c crate, versus 20 villagers, with 20 mining and 1 gathering a 300w crate. The former gives you 375w and 300c, while the latter gives you 300w and 450c.

Another example is every second a villager spends building a building is a second the villager spends not gathering resources. So you can add 'hidden costs' to your buildings in term of the vs it takes your villager to walk to the location, build the building, and walk back to the resource they were gathering.

-

Having looked at a couple of examples of this concept and how it can affect short-term efficiency, I will explain some less intuitive examples. Purely in terms of maximising your economy, shipments of Villagers, as well as cards that hasten ramp-up like Medicine, Land Grab, or Agrarian Ways, can have substantial long-lasting effects.

Consider the Fortress Age 8 Villagers shipment. Worth 800f that you don't have to spend on them, right? But also worth all the time those 8 Villagers work (the vs they generate) until you would have trained 8 Villagers. Except your ability to train Villagers is limited by where you can train them from (which is usually 1 to 3 Town Centres) and how fast (1 per 25s), and you're still going to be training Villagers even if you ship them, ideally until you reach the limit of 99. Ignoring the benefit of other cards, and supposing you have 3 Town Centres and you have, say, 40 Villagers when the shipment arrives, the value of this card can be calculated along the following lines (what we are actually doing is finding the difference of integrals of step-wise functions based on arithmetic series):

All existing Villagers generate 25vs of productivity in the time it take to train 3 more Villagers. An increasing number of Villagers will be doing this until you hit 99 Villagers.
Starting with 40, in the first step they generate 1000vs. Then you have 43, and they generate 1075vs, for 2075vs total. And so on for 500s since you started.
Starting with 48, in the first step they generate 1200vs, then you have 51 who generate 1275vs, and so on. You will hit 99 Villagers at 425s, but for comparison we should count until 500s.
After 500s starting with 40, your total productivity will be 34250vs, while with the 8 Villager shipment, it will be 38025vs.
So the shipment is worth not just 800f, but also 3775vs of productivity.
The earlier you send such cards, the greater the magnitude of their total benefit.
Extra Town Centres or extra ways to train Villages (such as KInship Ties), faster-training Villagers (Medicine and TEAM Medicine) have similar advantages.

We can compare this to, and examine how it compounds with, the benefit of cards that improve gather rate, taking Great Chinampa for this example. It provides 20% of the base gather rate for agriculture. So if you have no other upgrades, it converts every 1vs on a Mill or Plantation into 1.2vs. Using the Villager numbers above, over the 500s period, it provides 6850vs without the 8 Villager shipment, and 7605vs with it. So it provides more productivity in itself than, does compound with, the 8 Villager shipment. Depending on time-scale, since it is only an additive bonus and does not compound with tech improvements, if you account for this, 8 Villagers can out-perform it (as tech gather rate benefits compound with greater Villager numbers).

-

Basically the idea is that by thinking in this way, you can determine what is efficient/good timing and order for sending cards, including cards that appear to have one-time or short-term benefits, in a way that provides a lasting 'lead' ahead of where you would have been without them. Gather rates provide an infinitely growing lead but the greater the scale of your economy when they kick in, the faster they will deliver their full benefits.

Similar thinking can be applied to free or cheaper buildings and upgrades (especially if they enable or improve gathering). Land Grab, for instance, can be worth upwards of 2000w and several minutes of saved building time/extra gathering time if you are committing to agriculture at scale (though it is still best to stay on natural resources for as long as it is safe).

This could explain why your opponents are getting ahead - they could in principle have 99 Villagers around 17 minutes pretty easily, which could mean they have mean they have anywhere from 10,000vs to 40,000vs more than you by the time you max you Villager count.

Obviously there's a balancing act, especially in supremacy and 1v1, and it's up to you to optimise your economy based on what you want to achieve, but unless you're playing 60+ min Treaty games, there will almost always be cards with lasting pay-offs that should be sent in preference to and much earlier than gather rate cards that provide a greater total long-term value on isolation.

wow i bet that took you some time to write all of this down, i appreciate it very much.

i get that there are other civilisations that will outperform aztecs n economy no matter what, but it's really nice to see some of these numbers.

And i must say there is one card that makes a really big difference now for me: "Calendar Ceremony" it allows me to age up so much faster while still being under pressure, it's a really good card

[canboztepe03]

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