Why is Feudal trading considered so bad? (AoE2) 

Reminder to Self: always make a single trade cart to send through Spirit of the Law's town, just to let him know I'll need to be carried all game.

Any excuse is valid to hear SotL talk about math

Spirit of the Law on his Wealth of Nations arc

"I am not looking to rock the boat or put the cart before the horse..." 2 puns in one sentense... SOTL stop, you're spoiling us.

You considered that Burgundians could get Caravan in Feudal to help with the trade boom, but forgot to mention they could also get Gillnets in feudal to amp up the Fish boom. SOTL might be a merchant sympathizer.

I seriously believe the sudden 2020 boom in AoE2 was largely because of the sheer amount of incredibly detailed guidance you provide to new and returning players. Thank for reviving this game

"In this video, we'll be Overanalysing ..." I lost it

~900 elo here and had ZERO idea trading early was bad…but all of this makes perfect sense. Adjusting gameplay from here on out

I think it's pretty self-explanatory why Feudal trading is so bad.... They're feuding.

at ~07:00 I think there is a second factor that inflates fish: you build a dock specifically for fishing, while you nearly always want a market anyway. (not that it really changes any outcome here)

1:25 Timestamp of Spirit passive agressive roast.

When I first played AOE2 about 20 years ago when I was a kid, I never would have guessed that 20 years later people are still playing this game and they are still releasing DLC expansions with new civs and they have these highly detailed videos that explain why trading in Feudal Age is not as beneficial. Thank you, Spirit of the Law for keeping the spirit of this game stronger than ever 20 years later. The community is stronger than it has ever been I think!

I miss the days when you gave a shoutout to “I lick toes at night.” Made me chuckle every time.

"You have made poor early game choices one too many times. Face my numbers heathen!" Love how much opportunity cost can be taken apart and analyzed, thank you for your endless stream of entertainingly packaged real research :)

2:04 When two dad jokes combine to transcend their own daditude.

Hi SotL, nice video, thank you! I think in your calculations you didn't take into account that the trade produces gold while the ships produce food. It's a bit difficult to convert with shifting prices, but we can still generalize. Selling food (if needed) returns lots of gold early in the game, while buying food from gold is rather expensive. This effect is reversed later in the game, which makes trade way more attractive than in the early game. Moreover, players need food rather in the early game and gold rather in the late game, which is already a factor for trade not being necessary so early. :)

Another thing against Trade for Burgundian Caravans Trade Cogs, you need both a Dock and a Market, since the latter is required to research Caravans.

This is actually really interesting. My family likes to play aoe4 a lot. In that game, we can build town centers in feudal and trade carts cost less resources (and sometimes don't have a gold cost if I remember right). I had told my family when we started playing that early trade wasn't worth it and that they should instead gather the stone to build more town centers, but maybe there are some civ cases where trade is actually more beneficial (especially considering several maps have neutral trade points that are a good distance away).

Ah yes, nothing like a Spirit video to start my day

I kinda want a map with neutral markets and little to no gold to force early trading (and protection of said trade). Perhaps with a Premium market in the centre that gives better value to fight over. Now that'd shake up Feudal Age

Thanks so much! I need to send this to my friend. Everytime we play, its 9min = boom, trade-cart. I tried to talk him out of it based on "I feel like..." but now I got exact mathematical argument 11

Hopefully this vid has an impact on the community. Getting a bit tired of telling teammates to stop trading in early Feudal age xD

There was actually one specific situation I have seen where feudal trade was the right choice.and it was very niche. It was an open map and 2v2, where my opponent had lamed my alternative gold and tower rushed my main gold and stone. It was a dire situation but my ally was going archers and was able to keep the towers from advancing. However the stone walls around my alt gold and three walled in towers around my main gold made me stuck in feudal. My ally was massing archers to defend himself too from the enemy spearman archer combo from the other opponent. Meanwhile I has scout rushing as Magyars and denying the rose man’s wood, and forcing towers at home. In this bizarre case, I chose to continue with scouts to help my ally win the archer war, because he had dedicated part of his army to stop the towers. I had no spare food and a surplus of wood. my ally got a market to buy his way to castle because he had too much wood. I decided to build a second stable and go hard on scouts while spending my last gold on trade carts. I could have bought gold but I had too little food to click up. I already had bloodlines so there was nothing else to spend gold on I was predicting that the game would drag on in feudal for a very very long time. It did because it was so extremely messy. I was putting on so much pressure on the archer guy with my 1/1 scouts that he was just stabilizing for 10 minutes.the tower guy was in shambles and had to wall himself in and crawl back into an economy. My ally took damage while helping me and was not relying on me to do something huge. By the time the dust settled I had 800/200 for castle and clicked up at an insane (late) time. I only made 3 trade carts the whole game which gave me enough gold to get the light cav upgrade and eventually +2 armour. That was it. I made nothing but 150 + light cavs and controlled the gamy for my ally. The trade carts ended up working out.

Hey Spirit of the Law! Could you please leave the outro music to play a little bit longer like you used to? It's really catchy for me, and i used to listen to the end of that sequence. Also your best videos are these ones, where you go into detail in the math behind the game, i really appreciate your hard work. Thanks, and keep on!

Fishing: Gives you about an extra villager worth of gathering (or more!) for a similar price right at the point you'd want the extra eco unit production the most. Trade: Basically only gives you half a villager worth of gathering for triple the price, and by the time it's set up you're already close to getting extra town centres. Fishing is about as good as farming and comes in when it's most valuable in dark age. Trading is usually far behind mining, and by then you're nearly able to make more miners anyway.

I love your videos and friendly voice, mate. You're greatly appreciated.

We can now be sure that if any dislike occurs on this video, those would be from the detractors of the fishing industry.

The opportunity cost point at about the 11:00 marker is hands down the most important point in this video. You're choosing to make trade units instead of military, which you can use to help defend your base from attacks. If you're that insistent on getting extra gold income, try to start gathering relics as soon as you hit castle, and send a few military units with your monks if needed. The gold you pay for that monk will be paid back on its own, then you can use those monks to heal your troops or defend against anyone going Knights or Elephants. That's my 2 cents at least.

That patreon announcement... Smooth man, so smooth XD

I played this back on mirc era, 23 years ago or so. Still to this day remember an Arabia game that went through almost 2h, 3x3, everything was mined, I had the persians pumping pikeman, elephants and scorpions, the back bone was 2 markets at the edge generating crazy amounts of gold while the map was mined out, people were trading food for wood and that was rich me with elephants. We were noobs, but very epic noobs. Crazy to think that at one point I had one last game and never returned, but your videos are great, love them.

For a game I haven't played in almost 20 years-- you're revolutionizing my understanding of the game.

Another argument against trade is about your opponent building military to stop trade/fishing: -Against fishing: They build warships, get water control and then their ships just stand there. You can get land control while they invest into water. -Against trade: They build archers/scouts, get land control and move on to your villagers after stopping trade.

Who would win? A Market and a Small-Tradey Boy VS A Stable and a Knighty-knight Man

It sure how else to reach out to you. Love your work! Keep it up! Have you made a video on Georgian fortified churches? My quick math on them is interesting to say the least. Would love expert analysis. Cheers

What about fishing on Black Forest?

Anything with a gold cost is premium in feudal age: archers and galleys and trade. You more or less pick one because putting too many vils on gold means youre putting less on wood and food which slows eco progression and your castle time. Thats pretty much it. Yes, the trade will pay off sooner but in feudal the long term value proposition is less important than stability and security to just stay alive at the moment.

The value of these resources change depending on the games state though In feudal and early Castle: food>gold Castle: food=gold Late castle and imp: gold>food

The Ally Relief fund is the most relatable thing I have ever heard in one of your videos

Would love to see the comparison of total resources by say 30 min with trade/fishing vs just standard 1 or 3 tc boom play.

Love hearing another vid from you (:

On hybrid maps, I do a Roman fc into rams and scorpions because I can count on my opponent to try fish booming. And it slaps hard when you’re laying down two forward siege workshops in their face at 13 minutes, and they’re still in early feudal because the fish boom set their uptime behind. I haven’t lost with that strategy yet in those circumstances.

I don't even know what this game is but you had me at "Over analyzing using more math and graphs then necessary." ❤

Hmm that is really interesting, I never played online and only play against moderate CPU so I never even heard anything bad about feudal trade. I will have to keep this in mind if I ever brave online play

On Michi, I run a trade cart boom (it's obviously best with burgundians but their post imp units aren't ideal for my post imp plans) On Michi, the tricks I use are. Build markets in both corners and have an ally market in each corner. The initial waypoint for a market is the ally market near in its own corner, thus eliminating a dead leg across the entire map. New trade carts in either corner's initial waypoint is the ally market in its corner. Furthermore, when a trade cart has completed its leg across the map, you select that trade cart and have it go to the ally market nearest to it in the its corner. Thus eliminating another dead leg. The feudal eco is basically just 6 on food and everyone else to wood. (Initially 5 on gold to kick off the trade). Add markets when I can afford it eventually getting to 10-12 markets. It's michi, so I don't have anything to worry about. Not going to add TCs, not going to place additional farms. I just bounce between the corner markets and find trade carts that are finishing a leg and micro them to the nearest market. Eventually I'll be floating a lot of gold. I might buy wood for more markets, or I might sling to an opponent in need. But eventually will get 100-125 trade carts and buy my way up to imp. Typically I do this with Japanese on Michi. And all this gold is turned into stone purchases and I spam 200+ yasama towers at points of interest The reason I type this is because these tricks to trade cart boom properly are not mentioned in this video. Nor is the ability to fish on Michi.

Hi SoTL. It comes very clear from the video that fishing > trading in feudal. But can you tell us more about the opportunity cost and the long term return of making carts in early? I understand it’s suboptimal in a water map, but why do you shiver when you see it in your matches? Why does it get good in imperial, or is it just the only way to get gold and ideally one should never trade? What’s the role of the techs? Should I get the carts fully upgraded before starting? So many questions :) thanks for your video! Such a great job and clear explanations

Hi Spirit, I am a big fan of your channel, you have helped me a lot in advancing my skill. However this video does not seem right to me. I think that there were two things spliced together. 1. Is fishing good? - The answer is obviously YES, I don't think that there is any doubt about that. 2. Is trading in Feudal Good? - this question was not answered as far as I noticed. You have focused on comparing fishing to trading, however fishing being really good does not mean that early trade is bad. I would love to see comparing feudal trading with non-trading. I think it would be interesting to see impact on early trade on timings of age advancing, etc. If my goal is to advance to Imperial and build for example 100 castle units, is it faster to trade in feudal or to rush castle and TC boom?

It would be nice to see a civ with a team bonus of trade carts costing half (and maybe free caravans in feudal) and see viable feudal trade. It would be a fresh twist to the meta and we would see raiding / protecting trade with feudal armies. Kinda like Cumans being able to build a 2nd TC in Feudal. The big problem is it gives no bonus in 1v1s though.

Nice video mate

I just watched a 12 minute video about a game i haven't played in 12 years, just for bro to not even show us what the results of the Trade Cogs in the super team test was. i was hoping it'd slam it in for at least the cogs. oh well. if i missed it i missed it. excellent work with the practical examples by the way.

What I'm taking out of the video is an idea to try making a couple of trade cogs on my way to castle age in games when my team looks to be winning water after feuda when I'm usually done with making fishing ships already.

Great video, checking out conventional visdom is, well, wise!

All I use AOE2 for is creating epic medieval worlds that never leave Castle Age. SotLs content has barely any value to me, and yet I'm totally hooked on him analyzing this 25 year old game.

This makes me appreciate how clever the AOE4 double half drop off actually is, as it might not do away with this scaling issue, it at least left shifts the trade slope by minutes. Of course, they rarely hit situations where they need trade, have enough gold trickle to ignore gold mining, or often just try to go it without gold rather then bothering with traders. But still, its a clever trick to tweaking the risk factors by a bit.

I never really considered it myself since those carts would be too slow to pay it back and they’d be easier targets to kill. The numbers are fun to watch anyway though. Thanks, SOTL!

I kinda wish they buffed early game trading. I feel like it should be viable as long as you keep your trade safe.

I hoped that you would have extended the graphs a bit longer. It would be interesting to see at what minute does trading overtake fishing with this setup.

I was ready to complain that you had forgotten to mention the cost, and you did right after. lol I still wouldn't put the cost all at once, only after the creation time of each unit (pro players modus operanti), but it's still correct.

I still remember one of my first ranked team games, it was a 4v4 and I made a couple trade carts in castle age. Once it reached the other side my teammate said something along the lines of "this teammate is making trade carts in castle age gg" and quit after which the other two quit since we were down a player. ngl if I said that didn't sour my opinion on ranked for a while.

I would love these kinds of videos for aoe4

One thing I am curious about is the reduction of space between the trade centers vs gold collected instead of maximizing gold by increasing space. I bring this up because I wonder if there is a sweet spot in the middle somewhere, where the loss of the max gold balances out due to the increased amount of runs able to be done per cart/cog. For example only, not actual numbers. Let's say at a in-game 10 mile span you get 30gold per car/cog normally, no bonuses. Of course the cogs are faster, but ignore that for now. Now let's say the minimum span of being right next to the trade center = 1 gold. At what point is the return of the cart/cog going to be fast enough to increase the gold per run enough to exceed the max gold per run instead. I don't think this is going to change the balance into trades favor in feudal, but I do think it might balance it out a bit.

Early trade is almost always a loss, but I have tried it with a single goal in mind: to hit the opposing team with heavy gold units asap in castle, in this case, elephants. While I did click up to castle after my teammate and both opponents, I was able to field 15 war elephants about 12 minutes into castle with full techs. My teammate went into crossbows and even a group of twenty or so was enough to ward off pikes so the elephants were devastating. It was an amusing strategy that wouldn’t work at higher elo or with more aggressive opponents, and gimped me for any longer game as I was severely behind with food, but I’m sure the other team was in a panic when they got hit by so many elephants.

4:20 The relation is definitely linear since, the variable gold income generated can be represented as a proportion of distance traveled.

Only thing i'm not to sure on is the bohemians. With cog's not carts. If you have 1-2 that could bump up your late possibly for a small cost when you are already mass wood on a water map or island map. would most likely delay your mid game a smidge though because of the 100-200 wood cost and the 50-100gold. But seen as you most likely aren't buying loom early on islands, the gold is semi negated with starting resources. it's not too hard to protect either if u both fish on the back side furthest away from enemy island and place a couple fire ships or so on either side to patrol the entry points (if possible map dependent n size ofc) it's usually a good idea to have 3-4 docks spread about before hitting castle IIRC (been a long time since i played and examined pro's etc, granted pro's never trade earlier then imperial i believe MAYBE late castle/upgrading too IMP) so I think there's a chance for bohemian's only on a water map (which IIRC they aren't the best water civ either sort of a not bad not good, could be wrong though so apologies if i'm mixing civ's or remembering incorrectly on anything.) to have a small trade early via cog's which would in the long term net value seen as after 12mins fishing ships are dropping rather hard off and the cog's were slightly under. In saying all that, I don't think it's that wise and the resources are just better off spent on other things but it could possibly be beneficial for bohemian's with cog's. Might have to test it.

YAAAAASSSS right during lunch!!!

New strat, build 1 cart and send it to the enemy so they think you have no idea what you're doing

There's also this dimension, which is an expansion on the resource angle. Specifically, let's focus on the part that matters: what resources are the units collecting? Fishing ships cost 75 wood but collect food, never wood; this is atop the 150 wood or so you need for the dock itself. So here, it makes sense if your aim is to grow the food supply--since food is needed by villagers. These can then collect the wood used and recoup it. In this, it's actually a very efficient way to collect food, compared to simply using a villager, who needs 50 food, and then several minutes seeding then harvesting a farm to recoup the food and turn in the desired food profit. Put another way: the cost is largely offloaded outside the fishing industry itself. So if you lose a fishing ship, then you can simply raise more, because (ideally) you should have the lumberjacks needed to keep collecting wood, precisely because the ships have raked in all that food. If you want to upgrade the ships, it will cost food, but it isn't required to turn a profit: only to increase it, for a more powerful boom. Meanwhile, a trade cart costs 100 wood and 50 gold atop the 175 wood for a market. And in my experience, carts rarely gathers more than 15-20 gold at a time on any given map. So just to recoup the loss of gold and begin to turn a profit, you need two or three runs, and after that, the margin isn't really all that high: the loss of a trade cart (or worse, a whole convoy) will set you back a LOT of gold. And this is to say nothing of the tech costs, which also include gold, and their inability to defend themselves, which necessitates defense of the trade route (while making it easier to cut off trade). Similar issues apply to cogs. So, as a means of getting gold, trade carts suck precisely because they cost a lot of gold, simply to collect gold from a market to a value that is typically well under the gold value of the cart itself. Meanwhile, mines only require food and wood to get gold (tech aside), and while monks cost even more gold than carts (100 gold a pop), they can gather relics and put them in monasteries, and these relics then generate infinite gold in turn ad infinitum. Further, if you're lucky, you only need one monk anyway to collect multiple relics, for faster gold generation. And this doesn't get into the fact that monks can convert enemy units (and buildings, depending on availble tech for a civ), and heal your own people. Thus, the utility value of a monk, who can heal, convert, or collect, is far greater than a cart that can only gather gold, thus making the higher gold costs of Monks and their relic collection more than justifiable.

It's surprising that on paper cogs are better than carts, but we pretty much never see them in competitive team games. The reasons why, I think, are that they get stuck on each other very easily, they're hard to defend (can't wall water), and most maps don't give you a good long sea trade route

Love yours videos c:

The other thing to mention about the payback times is that players shouldn't be spending that long in Feudal anyways. A ~5 minute payback time on Fishing Ships is fine for Dark Age-> Feudal Age and makes sense for preparing you to have a stronger mid-game economy, but trade taking that long to repay its investments in Feudal age means delaying aging up, and therefore delaying your Castle Age boom that pays itself off much faster. Its to the point where I could see the developers making trade carts and cogs only be able to be built in Castle Age just to discourage this, though that might disrupt a few campaign scenarios.

Depends on the map too, some times maps have little gold so making one or two trade cards to insure a trickle of gold is not always a bad idea as the market exchange rate becomes ever worse.

Very nice video.

Great video

Something tells me this video idea came up after someone went Feudal trade in one of his games!

great work! :-)

Hey guys, spirit of the law here

It's reassuring that I was subconsciously aware that trading early is bad, even though I never thought about why. I played AoE2 since my childhood, often back then and on and off since. But I was never and still am not particularly good. However, that you should start trading only in Imp was a fact I apparently picked up on as a child without ever analyzing the question.

Hear is a question, is a hybrid of the two 3 fishing ships and one cog worth it for heavy gold units in castle. Its been so long since I have played this game. But could that be the exception? also on a 1v1 map the lulling your enemy into thinking you don't know how to play or are throwing plus this random niche strat may win some games?

this makes me want to watch that vid where one team only used trade and the market to generate resources again.

1:20 I love how Law’s definition of being a dick is preparing a relief cache to aid an ally who’s made a strategic error. Like: “Sometimes my teammates make me so angry that I prepare a stash of resources to help them out when they run into trouble, all while being polite to them” He’s such a nice guy I stg. Such a rare find in the RTS nerd community

I've done Burgundians Feudal Gillnets before, but I've never thought about Feudal Caravan. I think on Michi, getting Caravan on the way up to Castle could be worth it, as you can start a trade boom in early Castle on that map.

lol, that player described building the trade units in Castle Age is my wife. I love her, and it's fun playing together, but she definitely drags down my team RM elo.

I mean the simplest answer lies in that food is far more important than gold in feudal age and even with market exchanging gold for food you're still depreciating the value which could bite you in the ass later if you're in a situation where you need a sudden injection of food and you're playing at a major trade deficit because you did early exchanges.

If I may, how come you did not put the Trade Cog on the graph for the super trading team?

Now this is the original SOTL vedio love you 🎉🎉 fan from india

i dont play this game but i love hearing you talk about it! maybe one day i will start playing and be one of those humanitarian resource users haha

"...we are going to be overanlysing a simple question in AoE2, using significantly more math and graphs than are strictly necessary. So a pretty typical video on this channel" At this point, I knew this was going to be good

However I saw that early trade was once a META in BF lord - when fully walled. So imagine something like amazon tunnel or the map where there is no way just cutting and maybe there starting trade earlier make your eco better just because you started earlier pumping out units that you would otherwise also do anyways. Sounds like Burgundians are good candidate for this actually. So I think there is this one more thing to analyse!

I was thinking of an interesting topic to cover for a video would be the cause and effect of AOE2 adding 1 minimum range to foot archers. Curious if that would shape up the meta and change the outcome of battles.

hmm, good to know, admittedly my games are mostly just casual compstomps with a friend or two. I'll try to keep it in mind, but it's hard not to start getting trade carts after building a market for the shared vision and stuff heh.

Well, I'd say it also depends on which nation you're playing I main Malians with 15% wood discount and 10% more gold, so imo it makes sense for me to queue carts adjusted to my resources in feudal, which usually end up with enough to spare on 3-5 carts comfortably

ngl, I used the same team when I play for fun against AIs and I noticed that the best performing AI is usually the one who don't even invest in market until all resources around its base were nearly depleted. I concluded that the safest possible way for anyone to use the trade cart gambit in feudal is to do so in maps where there are pre-existing fortifications like arena but not on maps with flimsy walls like hideout.

The idea of the trade cogs is on the maps that TC is busy and you have no other option in terms of production. I think you should consider it in maps like Arena.

I recommend sending at least 1 trade cart to the enemy market just to see the response. Sometimes they'll delete the market, other times they'll try to box it in or get scouts to chase it down, or you might just get "11" or "???". In any case, it's well worth the investment of 150 resources if you wanted the market anyhow

Never stop!

I dont know if it would make sense thematically but I would like the devs to add an increasing cost for trade units, so making few early was possible, e.g. first trade unit is 20W and 5G and each subsequent trade unit would be like +2 W/G in cost. IMHO it would make the game more interesting. Anyway I would love to hear some suggestions for devs to make trade units viable eraly on. If SOTL suggest something I am 100% sure that devs will at least consider that xD

I play mostly mega-random in turbo mode. Sometimes you only get 2-4 gold tiles to work with. Sometimes when gold runs out very early its worthwhile to start trade feudal. If in Turbo mode, the bottle neck is relatively slow villager and trade cart production time so starting trade early is more worthwhile because you are often swiming in resources. My point is don't take this analysis as gospel for all gameplay modes and all maps.

As a casual RTS fan who mostly plays campaign and not competitive, I guessed before watching the video that it was because the cost of trade carts wasn't offset by the amount of resources you'd get by making them at a point in the game where you couldn't get an upgrade for them. That was... one part of the answer, but not the full answer! I'm not ready for competitive, clearly. XD

It might be cool to test cheaper feudal trade/less cheap castle and full cost in Imperial. So you can mass before and save them from pressure but they can be viable. It can give the game another strategy

What about the potential value of _straddling_ trade across the Feudal/Castle transition? If you know Caravan tech will be available soon, then getting a small head start on having the trade units pay back their investment, even at a reduced rate, _may_ be worthwhile. Compare that to waiting on Caravans to be _fully_ researched before you even start on a Trade Cart. So, what I would try, is either time a Cart to finish right as Castle Age completes, and *then* start Caravans while the Cart is traveling. So not _necessarily_ "Feudal Age" Trade, _per se,_ but take advantage of the ability to build the Cart during Feudal, with the aim to *actually* capitalize on it as soon as possible in Castle.

Pushing that timeline out 25-30 mins in a bf or michi, some of the best free cut michi players used to trade boom in fed with fast fed mongol19 pop (span Allie) it was very effective. But clearly assumes safe trade and booming game