Age of Empires II Medieval Monday: Ask Your Questions and Get Your Answers |
- Medieval Monday: Ask Your Questions and Get Your Answers
- How it feels chasing the shark like creatures around your TC
- Found my old hard drive - turns out I was a very efficient child
- How the hell do you defend?
- I hope Dave sees this.
- I hope "August" means August 1st
- The original AI was a little bit obsessed
- Now adapt
- How to use the Saracen Market
- Biggest fear in age of empires
- Any tips for terrible multi-taskers?
- I always find it funny that skirms counter archers
- Do you play random civ or do you pick a civ most of the time?
- AoE2 DE - Any news on full map screenshots?
- Is watching your recordings really that necessary?
- Wasn't the last patch supposed to fix the this? (No lumber and 12 less vills)
- Which civ has the tech or bonus that feels the most out of place?
- Game similar to AOE2
- For those having lag spikes
- 1v1 RM matchmaking: matching me with opponents 700-1000 lower?
- Online Play/Community?
- Real Life AOE
- Mid-Elo Cup Sign-ups close this week! (2v2 tournament)
- I struggle with army compositions
| Medieval Monday: Ask Your Questions and Get Your Answers Posted: 19 Jul 2021 04:00 AM PDT Time for another weekly round of questions. Talk about everything from build orders to advanced strategies. Whatever your questions, the community is here to answer them. So ask away! [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How it feels chasing the shark like creatures around your TC Posted: 19 Jul 2021 05:43 AM PDT
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| Found my old hard drive - turns out I was a very efficient child Posted: 18 Jul 2021 03:18 PM PDT
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| Posted: 19 Jul 2021 02:26 AM PDT Okay, I know that's a big question, I'll try to give some context. I'm at about 1.2k at the moment, so not bad by any means, but I've basically got there by being relentlessly aggressive. Every time I have to defend, I crumble. I've been through phases of trying to train myself to withstand pressure by practicing FC builds and it just results in my ELO tanking. I made a second mess-around account recently and almost lost in one of my placement games to someone like mid 900s because I thought, surely to god I can turtle for a bit against someone about 250 ELO lower, but it was a close run thing and I only won because I was raiding so much! I've had chats with other people on the game around my ELO and it feels like a common problem - once you lose a little bit of control, you lose all of it. From the moment those scouts get through your walls before they go up or those archers waltz into your base before you've got a tower up on your gold, you're basically finished. Even if you repel the aggression, you're way behind, they've got a forward Siege Workshop/Castle, you've lost map control. It's part of the reason I've learned to be so aggressive and it has got me this far - because at least if I'm attacking, I'm not defending. But sometimes you have to defend, and I just...can't. What are some things that I'm likely not doing, or small tips and tricks you have? I know most of the basics but there's probably something I'm missing, or I'm just lacking in execution. I wonder whether I just have too low APM to deal with aggression, everyone goes idle, I'm misclicking all over the shop, I wouldn't call it panic exactly because I don't feel panicked, but I do feel like I need to do a lot of things quickly, consistently garrisoning and ungarrisoning vils, trying to start production to defend as well. I know there are people at my ELO who are good at defending because every so often I come up against them and it is very annoying! I also suck at Arena so I don't think it's a walling thing either - if I can't win it with some crazy siege tower push then I usually lose. I just feel so trapped in my base when I'm under pressure! Thanks in advance for your help! [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 18 Jul 2021 09:53 AM PDT
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| I hope "August" means August 1st Posted: 19 Jul 2021 06:35 AM PDT | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The original AI was a little bit obsessed Posted: 18 Jul 2021 03:16 PM PDT
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| Posted: 19 Jul 2021 08:43 AM PDT
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| Posted: 18 Jul 2021 02:25 PM PDT This is a much demanded topic so I figured, "Why not post an explanation?" Fundamentally this is a theoretical question much more than an empirical one because it's very hard to tease out the causal effects of market use in a real game. So we use economics to solve this problem. If you want the TL;DR read the bold sections. Don't be afraid of the length of this post you can understand the main points in about 30 seconds by just reading the bold sections. Intuitively most people are aware that food is expensive mid-game and gold and wood are relatively cheap. So intuitively the Saracen market will probably have the highest return when buying food. Obviously the economic rule for something like the Saracen market is going to be buy food until marginal benefit = marginal cost. Marginal benefit is the villager time saved by not farming, marginal cost is the villager time spent mining gold. But when does that occur? This post investigates this question. To jump right in I will show the marginal food and gold costs. There is some math behind the scenes (explained at the end) but for now just assume the "real" rates below represents something that takes into account the fixed costs. Below is a table of the cost of generic farming assuming an interest rate r = 0.069 (6.9%) per minute. The real farming rate is what we will use for our marginal benefit as we avoid incurring this cost when buying food.
You won't achieve these wood cutting rates in game, but it was an easy metric by which to give an upper bound. Obviously the point is that farms are very expensive and by having to pay them for them up front it's a big drain on an economy. For our purposes (Saracen Market) we will compare to row 2, which has a real gather rate of 0.241. The reason we don't care about horse collar will be explained shortly. In castle age we will use row 5 with the value of 0.277. We repeat this analysis for gold we take into account the mining camp cost, because you will definitely need an extra one or two. Needing extra makes the fixed cost endogenous. The "Real" mining rate is the mining rate is part of our marginal cost. When multiplied by food/gold (1/buy_price) we obtain the marginal cost we incur to obtain the gold to buy food with.
Obviously you cannot have 3 miners per tile on one side. However this lifetime estimate is supposed to be for Saracen market use, which means there's a good chance we build up to saturating the gold. So we use 3 to see account for this roughly. As you can see it doesn't have a big effect one way or the other. Now that we have some marginal costs and marginal benefits, we set them equal. gold/s x food/gold = food/s. Solving for gold/food (the units of the market buy price) we see that this value is equal to (gold/s)/(food/s). So lets plug in Gold mining + DBA and compare to farms without horse collar + DBA because non-horse collar is the most likely alternative. In general in fuedal age 155g/100f is the cutoff when compared to farms. However because the wood rate I used is an upper bound, you might want to go as high as 165. This is 2000 food and is a good upper bound on the food price. We don't really care much about horse collar farms. Its almost certain that the number of farms required (to make the total benefit of more efficient farms exceed the total benefit of delaying horse collar) is too large when the market is also in play. It is almost always going to be more efficient to plant a few default farms to carry you through to heavy plow farms. Yes this price seems high but you have to remember you are spending 60 wood per farm and 15 seconds to build. Even with horse collar that is almost 20% the time it takes to exhaust the farm during which you get 0 value. Also this model is relatively conservative. The wood gather rate is inflated, and the gold mining efficiency somewhat reduced. If you use both starting golds to boost efficiency this model will probably understate the effects. A price cutoff anywhere between 140-160 is going to give decent value. I don't recommend mining stone to pull this market use off. By the time you sell 400 stone (without stone mining) you will be below the gold mining rate with gold mining, and stone mining (the tech) is a waste on standard resource maps. However I do recommend selling around 200-400 wood while you are getting the resources for gold mining and selling the 200 starting stone. Both of these save a little gold and is slightly faster than mining gold. If you age up to castle age before you hit the cutoff your new cutoff is the same at 155g/100f assuming researched heavy plow and horse collar and gold shaft mining upgrade. However a good build order will put you close to this cutoff to maximize gains so generally prioritize the farm upgrades. You will after all be shifting most of your gold miners to farming as you approach this cutoff. As you progress later in the game feel free to sell food to obtain the gold back. If and when you do sell your food later on you will get back ~90% of the gold you put into the market, assuming you don't get beat to that by the enemy. This is in contrast to a normal civ which would only get back like 55% or 65% with guilds. While the enemy might beat you to the punch, they will face a much worse trade off. It is guaranteed you will want to sell food earlier than the opponent to gain back the gold. E.g. With Hand cart + heavy plow and gold shaft mining the breakeven gold cost is 128, so you will want to sell food until that is the sell price for food. In general after this you will need to just be on top of food sales to capture the benefit, and the threat of the enemy "stealing" the gold you put into the market is a threat you do need to be aware of. But if they are stealing the gold (which at their worse prices is more expensive than mining it) you probably have map control, so IDK if this is a big deal. The size of this eco bonus is not trivial. E.g. at the model's optimal point of 155g compared to no horse-collar farms you save 20 villager minutes using the models marginal costs to estimate. This is a nominal estimate, unadjusted for when the benefit occurs, because that will depend on the rate at which you sell food. If you sell starting stone (and mine it back about 8 minutes later) that's worth another 4.5 minutes right off the bat, so 24.5 villager minutes. Delaying horse collar and moving gold mining up pretty much cancel out. Since again these wood gathering rates are overestimates you can probably get up to 2000 food and achieve similar sized bonuses. Someone else can make some build orders using this information. Castle age and both farm upgrades costs 1000f, 13 villagers is 650 food, double bit axe + gold mining is 200 and bow saw is 150. That's 2000. So you will still need a few farms to get through feudal age to the seed-farms-stage. Build them early to make sure you get enough food to get you to castle age. That's all this model really says about the Saracen Market. Try things out in game and test what works and doesn't work. If you're already used to using the Saracen market, comment on what does or doesn't seem correct here. I'm especially interested in the late game "market fights" and whether you can or can't recapture the spent gold under reasonable conditions. If you notice other errors leave a comment. Explanation of the "real" rates formula is below. ------------------------------------ Explanation of the derivation of real rates: A naive analysis for the Saracen market might look at the rate of gold collection in feudal with gold mining, which is about 24g/min, and compare this to the farming rate, which is about 20f/min. This would imply a price of 120g/100f is when marginal benefit = marginal cost. However there's a problem. Each farm can only support 1 farmer and each gold mine can only support around lets say 8 miners before issues start to occur. This raises a thorny issue: How do we estimate the "true" marginal cost, when we also have to decide whether to incur these fixed costs as well? This is most obvious when looking at the hypothetical example of if a farm cost 1000 wood. Clearly every civ would mine gold to buy food for quite a while if this were the case, yet marginal cost = marginal benefit would not indicate this. This makes the fixed costs endogenous fixed cost. That is, whether the cost is incurred depends on the model. This is in contrast to exogenous fixed costs (i.e. sunk costs) where whether the cost has already been incurred and the model doesn't change this. Ideally we still want a nice instantaneous gather rate for food and gold that somehow incorporates information of the endogenous fixed costs. Again a naive attempt would be to simply spread the up front costs out uniformly along the lifetime of the farm, i.e. cost/farm_farming_time. The cost is simply the (wood cost + build time) divided by the wood gathering rate and farm_farming_time is just the lifetime of the farm. However this makes when the cost was spent lost information. Clearly this matters so we need to try something else. To do this we first realize that resources in the game have an intertemporal opportunity cost, which is analogous to interest in the real world. In particular the primary opportunity cost in AoE2 is villagers/age-up time/TCs, which allow for a bigger eco and thus military in the future than not investing in those things. You have to defend this eco of course meaning military/defenses also generate a return and ideally you play such that eco and military have the same marginal return. I'm not sure what the marginal return is for feudal age but r = 6.9% per minute seems reasonable (100 resources now is equivalent to 200 resources 10 minutes later). Choose your own interest rate if you desire. Using r allows us to compare costs in the past via a discount function like e^(rt). E.g. 100 villager seconds now is equivalent to 100e^(0.069x10)=200 villager seconds 10 min in the future. So we now have a way to properly compare resources obtained at two different points in time. So how do we use this? We use the continuous discounting function e^(rt) and we leverage the naive model of cost/farm_farming_time by adjusting both terms for the point in time we are measuring at. Remember that 100 resources or 100 villager seconds incurred in the past is more valuable when measured in the present, and that 100 resources or villager seconds incurred in the future is worth less when measured in the present. This is just to make sure we compare apples to apples. So like I said we adjust the naive model of cost/farm_farming_time. Cost becomes cost*e^r(t-0), call this function C. This adjusts the cost so that when measured with other costs at time t it accurately reflects relative cost. The 0 term is when the farm was built, if the farm cost was only upon reseed this 0 would be the farm_farming_time. The denominator Farm_farming_time is also straightforward to adjust for time. We want to multiply each work-second t_n that occurred before now by e^(rt_d), where t_d is the difference between when that work-second occurred and now. We also want to multiply each work-second which will occur in the future t_n by e^(-rt_d). Put together over continuous time this is: Integral(1e^(r(t-t_n)), dt_n, 0, farm_farming_time). Call this function T (since it represents weighted time). Now when we divide C(t) by T(t) we are still spreading out the cost just like in the naive model. However we are making sure that both the fixed cost and work-time are measured properly at the same point in time. That's the only difference. This has the extremely useful and desired property that for all t C(t)/T(t) is a constant meaning we can drop the arguments and write C/T. In fact C/T is equivalent to the constant rate you would have to pay in order to pay off a loan for the cost of the farm, at interest rate i, by time farm_farming_time. Because of this you could also solve for it by solving for K in Integral(Ke^(-rt),dt,0,Farm_farming_time) = cost. I.e. K= C/T. I'll reference K from now on. The formula for K from this integral is cost*r/(1-e^(-rfarm_farming_time)). Put another way the present value of the farm's spread out cost is always equal to the present value of the naive up front cost. This is what we wanted: to maintain the naive cost accurately through all points in time. See this desmos graph to get a better intuition. This second form seems to have a few too many assumptions to jump right into in game without loans, which is why I went for the long derivation above by adjusting the naive model. Nevertheless it and the improved naive model are equivalent. As long as you agree with 1 of these approaches, this model should agree with you. So we finally have K, which is the extra instantaneous cost which needs to be added to the instantaneous work time. Since we also have to spend 1 villager second to farm per second, we need to add 1 to this to obtain the total cost paid each second to farm. So each second we pay K + 1 villager seconds. This is the "instantaneous" cost of farming. Taking the experimental farming rate per second and dividing by this number will give us the real farming rate per second. For a gold mine, we take n*rate and divide by n + K, where n is the number of miners per camp. K is obviously different for a gold mine because the camp has a different cost and lifespan. So for example if K = 0.36 and the observed rate is 0.33 we get a real rate of 0.33/(1.36) = 0.243 food per villager second. The advantage of this metric is that we don't care if we only delay farming. Since the real rate is constant we avoid 20s of gathering at the lower rate in favor of some higher rate. That being said it's still a model specific to endogenous fixed cost decisions. It's not relevant if you already have the farms or mining camps or lumber camps. It's only relevant if you need to account for new fixed costs in a way that makes the analysis continuous. If you're wondering how long this all took I'd say about 6 hours between the writeup and making sure the model was accurate, reflected reality, and testing different configurations. [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Biggest fear in age of empires Posted: 19 Jul 2021 01:37 AM PDT What is your biggest fear? For me it used to be making double mills… but I did that and actually won that game due to my opponent resigning super early. Now it's probably facing off against a strategy I don't know how to counter. I pride myself in making odd strategies but the Berber strategy has me for a loop… What is one strategy you don't know how to counter? [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Any tips for terrible multi-taskers? Posted: 19 Jul 2021 06:50 AM PDT I am just really bad at doing two things at once. I can hardly make one of my villagers build a house while controlling the scout to go find sheep. I immediately forget where I left off the previous task. Any tips for improving? [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I always find it funny that skirms counter archers Posted: 18 Jul 2021 07:34 PM PDT Anyone know why they did it this way? In RL, skirms would be outranged by archers, and were generally used as anti-infantry in antiquity. I always thought total war had it right with skirms being super good vs infantry, archers being a longer range less damage version of anti-infantry, and slingers countering both with superior range. I obvy don't want it changed in Age, it works well here and I love the 'rock paper scissors' they created. Just wondering what the original logic was. It's not like the Roman Pila was an anti-archer piece of equipment. [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Do you play random civ or do you pick a civ most of the time? Posted: 19 Jul 2021 06:58 AM PDT | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| AoE2 DE - Any news on full map screenshots? Posted: 19 Jul 2021 09:07 AM PDT While I am unaware there is currently no built-in way to take a full map screenshot in Definitive Edition, I come to ask if anyone has any updates on this particular subject. That is, has anyone released a 3rd party software that allows for this in any way? Have the devs published anything lately that may suggest the feature will be implemented? [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Is watching your recordings really that necessary? Posted: 19 Jul 2021 08:53 AM PDT I see a lot of advice here to watch your recordings. If someone is not improving, people blame it on not watching recordings. But do intermediate to high elo players really watch recordings that much? I feel like spending time playing is more beneficial. About 5 years ago, I personally reached 1800 elo on Voobly and have beaten a lot of 1900+ and 2000+ elo players just by playing many games a day every day. I didn't have time to watch my recordings, I just played a ton and climbed the ladder. What I did do was spectating better players play and see what things they did. I also looked at their mistakes (2000+ elo players still made a lot of small mistakes believe it or not). [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wasn't the last patch supposed to fix the this? (No lumber and 12 less vills) Posted: 19 Jul 2021 08:51 AM PDT
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| Which civ has the tech or bonus that feels the most out of place? Posted: 18 Jul 2021 08:48 PM PDT For example, it seems bizarre that Burmese get Parthian Tactics when they miss Thumb Ring and +2 armor. In what scenario (vs. Teutons???) would you ever go CA as Burmese? If you want you can make this about units (Celt Paladin, for instance) but I'm more interested in techs and bonuses relative to the rest of a tech tree. [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 19 Jul 2021 08:29 AM PDT I'm so glad that I re-found this game. I have it up and running great on Steam/Linux. I have this memory of a similar game but was slightly more fantasy driven. Like, you could play as human or elven or I think even the undead. Like AOE2, they all had different assets and liabilities in how they played, but as I recall, it was pretty similar? Does anybody know what i'm talking about? Also, did I mention? I freaking LOVE aoe2 :) [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 19 Jul 2021 07:29 AM PDT It can be Malwarebytes - so either disable it while playing or put Age II: DE's folder into the Allow List [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1v1 RM matchmaking: matching me with opponents 700-1000 lower? Posted: 18 Jul 2021 07:58 AM PDT
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| Posted: 19 Jul 2021 02:26 AM PDT Hey folks. Just recently downloaded AOE 2 DE and just wondered what the online community and play is like? Do you play directly through the game! I used to play originally on Zone.com a life time ago and then a little bit on Voobly half a life time back and would love to scratch that nostalgia itch with some old maps if they're even still in circulation? I'm talking everything from CBA to UDP & PTO. [link] [comments] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 18 Jul 2021 06:00 PM PDT
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| Mid-Elo Cup Sign-ups close this week! (2v2 tournament) Posted: 18 Jul 2021 11:19 AM PDT
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| I struggle with army compositions Posted: 18 Jul 2021 08:03 PM PDT Im 1280 elo. When i play archer civs i make almost exclusively archers. When i play cav civs i mass almost exclusively knights. I struggle to mass a second type of unit (ie: siege, pikes, light cav, skirms) as my eco cant handle it, and i also struggle with the control groups. Any tips? [link] [comments] |
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