Hey guys, Spirit Of The Law here, if you've been feeling kind of lucky these days with conversions, you're definitely not alone
At first I thought it was because definitive edition is usually played at 1.7 speed and HD was 1.5 by default
But even after getting used to that it still feels like conversions are happening faster than I'm used to
I thought I'd investigate to see if it's just all in my mind or if something has actually changed
Now, conversions have an element of randomness to them so finding what could be a small difference in conversion time averages
Would require both a precise way to measure time, and the ability to test it on a large scale
Getting a lot of monks to convert at the same time is pretty easy
But then there's the big problem of how to measure fractions of a second in the game
You could use a stopwatch
But I've never had to do that in a video before and I didn't plan to start now
Now the solution to this is pretty ingenious, and the best I can tell it's been around since before 2008
It was used by someone named Neilkaz to look at the conversion mechanic
It involves queuing up a villager. Since a villager takes 25 seconds to create every percentage increase
Represents a quarter of a second. It's not a perfect timer but much more precise than the regular in-game one
I also added a trigger to remove Knights as they're converted, just so it's easier to see new ones that are changing color
I can then record the screen and watch it back frame by frame if I need to to see at what time they're being
Converted, and one thing that makes all of this a little easier is monks aren't constantly converting
It's more like they make an attempt at a conversion
Roughly every second. That means there's only certain times that a conversion can happen, making it easy to know when to look for them
After looking at a sample of 100 conversion times, this is the result
I found, you can see in definitive edition. The fastest conversions take about 4 and a half seconds
I found about a quarter of conversions happened at that time and you can consider the time before that to be the monk warming up
After that, you can see every second or slightly more than a second you get another round of
conversions, up to 11 seconds at which point any units that haven't been
Converted just give up and switch over. The average time I found was about seven seconds, now
I'm not really after the conversion mechanic here, though already this is revealing a few things about it instead
I wanted to know how these same test looks in HD or aoe2
2013, if you prefer the new name. Doing the same experiment in HD, I found noticeably slower conversion times
We get the same general pattern of what's called a geometric distribution
but with the right tail cut off, though this time the
Fastest conversions happened at 5 seconds with the longest taking about 12 and a half.
Overall the average time for conversion was about seven point nine
That means conversions in definitive edition seem to be just under one second shorter on average, or about 11%
Faster, with the maximum time for conversion being affected the most. Dropping by about one and a half
Seconds. To put that into perspective it takes a fully upgraded castle age knight about seven seconds to kill a monk from full health
That means even if you start converting at point-blank range
We have almost a 60 percent chance of making the conversion in definitive edition
Whereas in HD the chance of the monk surviving was more like 46 percent give or take. Any conversion can have a big impact
Since it means not only you're taking a unit away from your opponent
But now it's a unit they have to fight
Depending on how much damage you can deal with it, converting an enemy unit can end up costing your opponents several more
I also took a quick look at buildings and found a very similar thing
I used a pretty small sample size but on average I found it was about three seconds faster to convert a building in definitive edition
with the shortest and longest times being reduced
So if you were wondering whether you were getting more conversions and definitive addition because of a bit more luck or skill
It turns out it was neither, monks are just a little faster at it now
Conversions are obviously still very luck based and monks have limitations when it comes to micro
But this just makes them a bit better when defending against knights or when attacking in combination with siege
That's all for this one though. Thanks for watching guys, and I'll see you next time!