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How Good Are Trickles Compared to Vills/ Upgrades?

Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition

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Trickle Cards give you a passive resource trickle, without any villagers/ Buildings working.  How good are they compared to Villagers/ Cards?
Steam Guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2363571080

Once you got the Card/ Technology you will get the trickle until the end of the game. There is no way of losing that income, compared to for example factories, which don’t give you anything once killed.

There are a few trickle cards: 
Most civilizations do have access to at least a trickle card, except Portuguese/ Aztec and Inca, which don’t have a trickle card. French, Sweden and Dutch have access to the food trickle card colbertism. British Russia, India and French have access to the wood trickle card mercantilism and German, Spain, otto and USA have access to capitalism.

Lakota and Asian civilizations do have some special Trickle cards.
The Lakota have the card earth bounty, which gives a trickle of wood and coin (also improves estate gather rates by 10 %)
Asian civilizations have access to sumptuary laws, which gives a trickle of all resources (including Export and Experience). By the way, when Indians send team sumptuary laws even Europeans get export, but it isn’t shown in the UI and you can’t do anything with it (Check resources after game).
Finally, Indians have access to the second wood trickle card, which is a better version of mercantilism.

Most Civilizations have only one trickle card.

With what civilization can you achieve the highest trickle and how many vills is it roughly worth it (no upgrades)?
I give you 3 seconds to guess ;)

How many villagers is a trickle card roughly worth?
To calculate this I used the gather rates of unupgraded villagers and assumed that xp = food and export = coin
0.84 food/sec
0.5 wood/sec
0.6 coin/sec
0.6 export/sec
0.84 xp/sec

to calculate the vill equivalent I used:
VillEquivalent = TrickleValue / GatherRate

If there are more Resources for a card i asummed the villequivalents for each resource:

VillEquivalent = TrickleValueFood / GatherRateFood + TrickleValueWood / GatherRateWood ...

How do trickle cards compare to Economic Upgrade Cards?
Now I want to see, how many villagers you need on a specific resource until it is better to use the upgrade card instead. I mainly want to see the late game effects, so I look at the wood/ Mill and estates improvements.

Assumed Gather Rate (70% walking factor on Mills/Estates):
Food = 0.469
Wood = 0.5
Coin = 0.35

The Question now becomes: How many Villagers do I need on Mills/Estates/Wood until the Economic improvement is better than the trickle card? There are a few scenarios where this question is relevant: Dutch (low overall vill count) Swedes (when going for mercenaries they tend to have very few vills on food). Or if you are unsure in Supremacy if you should use the wood improvement or mercantilism (as India for example). 
The Mill improvement cards give + 15% (age 1 + age 2) and +20% (Age 3)
The Estate improvement cards give + 20% (age 1 + age 2) and + 25% (Age 3)
The Wood improvement cards give + 15% (age 1 + more yield) and + 20% (Age 1)

Results: 
If you have 22 or less villagers on food (mills), colbertism is better than food silos/ sustainable agriculture
If you have 34 or less villagers on coin (estate), capitalism is better than rum distillery/ cigar roller
Sawmills / exotic hardwoods are better than mercantilism, when have more than 18/ 14 vills on wood.

So for Dutch and Sweden it can be a good decision to use colbertism (If you plan to go for coin heavy units/ composition - I.E Mercs or Ruyter + Canon).
It might be worth it to use Capitalism instead of the estate upgrades, if you are going for food heavy composition  (realistic maybe for spain/ USA. Otto and German are generally speaking to coin heavy and you usually have more than 34 vills on coin)

Summary:
Trickle cards generate resources worth 1-5 villagers (depending on what you assume). Wood/ coin trickle are more valuable than other resources trickle (sumptuary laws) or food trickle.
For Supremacy civs which don’t have access to the 3 villager card the trickle card are usually a decent choice (India/Russia). One more advantage I didn’t yet mention is, that when you are idled/ forced to stay in your tc trickle cards just still continue to work. So this is something to consider for Dutch for example.
China can get the most trickling, followed by India and French.
In late game the food trickle card is worth to consider for Dutch/ Swede, if you plan to go for coin heavy compositions (Ruyter/canon or mercs). Capitalism could be something for Spain/ USA, but it truly depends on the playstyle/ Unit composition.

Patch: April 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.

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Mightfo May 19, 2021 @ 9:23am

Great vid. And thanks for including a lot of the info in the description, I really appreciate it, it helps get the viewer up to speed quickly(since reading is faster than watching) which assists the video.

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