Steam Community :: Video :: How Good is the Medicine Card in AOE 3?

Store Page

Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition

All Discussions Screenshots Artwork Broadcasts Videos News Guides Reviews

Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition > Videos > Andi's Videos

How Good is the Medicine Card in AOE 3?

Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition

View all videos

Award

Title

Description

In this video we want to find out, how the medicine card is in age of empires 3. We'll also take a quick look at related cards & medicine in different scenarios

So we want to talk about the medicine and related cards. What do i mean with that? All cards which do reduce the traintime of villagers and also affect the cost of villagers

Normal Medicine: 
(German, British, dutch, russia, sweden, spain, aztec, inca, haudeno, Lakota, porto (age 3))
-15% cost , -15% traintime

Team medicine: 
(india, aztec, inca, haudeno)
Team -15 % traintime, NO cost reduction

Variants of medicine for the civilisations:
Porto (Age 3)
Inca, Aztec, Haudeno: Normal + Team medicine 
Lakota: Medicine + adoption (age 3, -40 % traintime)

India: 100 wood to 100 food cost changed (The Raj) + Team medicine
Japanese: Zen diet (100 food to 60 wood changed)

Civs who dont have it:
CHINA
france
Otto

Lets take a look at medicine. First off 15 % reduction means your vills are getting trained in 21.25 seconds instead of 25 seconds and also only cost 85 food (according to my calculator ;)).
That means for a scenario with medicine and without with 1 TC. 
One TC can produce 60 villagers in 25 minutes and with medicine it can produce 70 villagers. Or with medicine you roughly get 2 extra villagers / 5 min/ TC.

Lets take a look at the Value of medicine: For the one TC Scenario and a Gatherrate assumption of 0.84 food/s, which is the base Gather rate from hunts and also no Idle/ walk time.
There are two ways medicine is giving you Value:
1) You save ressources, because your villagers are cheaper
2) You gather more ressources, because you have more villagers (or villagerseconds) compared to a scenario without medicine.

What of those Components has more impact?
In the next graph you can see the Value you get from cost reduction, from the extra villager seconds and the total Value of medicine.
A few words on the More food gathered Graph: Remember a Villager gets created in 25 seconds (without upgrades). With Medicine it gets created a little bit faster (see the jumps at the blue line), so you have 3 seconds, where you have a villager advantage (see grey graph). The next villager gets created at 43 seconds (compared to 50 second without medicine), so you have 7 seconds, where you have a villager advantage. After roughly 125 seconds, you do have 1 more villager with medicine and so the grey graph rises consistently.
At the start the cost reduction has more impact, but the longer the game goes on, the higher the impact of the traintime reduction on the overall return. 
In the next graph I will show the same only for 25 minutes, where it becomes even more obvious, that the longer the game goes, the higher the impact of the train time reduction.

Now that we have looked in detail at medicine with one TC, lets look at some other interesting use cases:
The 5 cases i could think of: 
1) Medicine with 3 TCs 
2) russia medicine (Base traintime and costs are different)
3) Team Medicine (-15 & traintime)
4) Adoption (-40% traintime)
5) Zen medicine (Change food to 60 wood to Equal a 25 food equivalent safe per vill)

In the next graph the net food value of the different card/cases are compared with each other.

In red are marked the expected Value of a slow economic Card
Age 2 Card = 700 food, Age 3 = 1000 food
Read it like this: After 400 seconds i am better of sending medicine than sending 700 food.

Some Keyfindings:
Medicine is worth it after roughly 4 minutes with one tc. With 3 TC it is worth it after roughly 2 min 30 seconds
Russia medicine better than Generic Medicine
Portoguese medicine better than Adoption of Lakota (since you have 3 TC with porto) 
zen medicine is the worst medicine type card.

Also: The Technology "Christian School" from the jesuits is the same as team medicine and costs roughly 250 food. So that means that one breaks even after roughly 300 seconds (1tc)

Summary:
With medicine, you have 2 vills more for every 5 minutes and every TC.
Cost reduction has better value at the start, while train time reduction of medicine gives you more value the longer the game goes.
 
Medicine with russia is better than generic medicine
With 3 TC's and sending medicine you are better off than sending a tempo card after roughly 4 minutes (so it is probably decent as porto).

Patch: February 2021

Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition© Microsoft Corporation. This Video was created under Microsoft's "Game Content Usage Rules" ( https://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/rules ) using assets from Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition, and it is not endorsed by or affiliated with Microsoft.

Save Cancel

277	Unique Visitors
0	Current Favorites