Hey guys, Spirit of the Law here.
This video is a second go around talking about the Feitoria.
Which has recently been rebalanced with the Rise of the Rajas expansion,
And is basically an attempt at answering
how good is it?
What have the recent changes done to that?
And how do we compare a building that generates infinite resources
to villagers?
It's a difficult comparison,
but I think there's a lot we can say that would be helpful to know and to keep in mind.
So let's check it out.
(Intro Music)
First of all, just a quick recap,
the Feitoria is a unique building for the Portuguese in the African Kingdom expansion,
It works basically like relics, in that it slowly generates resources over time.
Except instead of just generating gold,
it generates a bit of all resources and comes with the trade-off of taking up 20 population space.
So how fast does it generate those resources?
Well before the latest expansion, it was 42 food and wood, and 27 gold and stone per minute.
In the last Feitoria video I took a look at some post-imperial Portuguese villagers in an ideal economic setup
and if we compare, the Feitoria is generating about as much as five villagers.
I'll talk about the special importance of gold and stone a bit later,
and they're special because of how limited they are on the map.
But clearly, in terms of total resources gathered,
assuming you have an abundance on the map,
the Feitoria is about a quarter as effective with its population space as villagers.
As of the release of the new patch, along with the Rise of the Rajas expansion though,
those numbers have been adjusted a bit.
The food and wood have been bumped to 48 per minute, which is a 14% increase.
The gold has stayed the same,
and the stone has been heavily cut to just 15 per minute, about half of what it was.
The total number of resources per minute is still the same at 138,
but this should definitely be considered a big downgrade.
The main motivation for the change
was most likely to prevent people from spamming as many bombard towers.
Previously it generated the stone and gold for a new bombard tower every 4 minutes and 38 seconds for each Feitoria,
So with 5 of them it cost you 100 population space,
but was basically a free bombard tower every minute,
with a bit of food and wood on top of that.
If you're sitting in the corner during a free-for-all unharrassed,
you could certainly save up enough for a lot of those.
And with access to extra strong and cheap bombard cannons,
the towers were also difficult to take out with trebuchets.
As an extra nerf to that strategy,
Feitorias were also changed from 250 wood and gold,
to 250 gold and stone to build.
It now takes over 16 and a half minutes just to pay that original stone back and get to where you started.
If you want a simple way to look at its new stone rate,
considering it produces about 5 villagers worth of the normal collection,
it's basically setting aside an 15 unusable population space in order to get 7 bombard towers every hour,
or one every eight minutes.
In a 300 or 500 population game, that might seem worth it to you,
and on an extreme scale of replacing your entire 500 population economy in the late-game,
even after the nerfs, every minute of gameplay, you'd save enough for 3 bombard towers.
The way to counter someone doing that strategy
is obviously by putting the pressure on the Portuguese player early.
So that's the depth I went into in the last video,
but now let's take a look at stone generation in a bit more depth.
Let's say someone else, like a Turk player, wanted to go for a bombard tower strategy as well,
but using the market to convert food and wood to gold
and then buy the stone.
Clearly, the determining factor of how well the Turks market strategy will work
depends on the price of stone.
As it goes up, buying stone will become slower,
so at some point a Feitoria will produce faster,
the question is, how long?
With a pretty generic setup of 40 farms, I found Turks for instance collect about 23 food per minute,
and about 31 wood per minute.
Though for other civilizations that's going to depend on whether or not you have two-man saw
and if you forget to rebuild your lumber camps.
We'll say it's an optimistic but reasonable number.
If we do 10 farmers and 10 lumberjacks, we can expect around 233 food and 309 wood per minute.
If we also factor in the wood cost of reseeding those farms, it's about 224 wood per hour for each farmer.
That's not the most sustainable use of resources though,
since food sells for the same as wood once you get the price bottomed out
and you can convert 60 wood into several hundred food.
So converting all that wood to food makes your forests last longer.
One lumberjack, according to those numbers, can sustain 8.3 farmers,
That changes to roughly 12 to 1 with crop rotation.
Those would be the best ratios to conserve resources on the map and get the most out of them.
On the other hand, sending all 20 of those villagers to be lumberjacks
would be the fastest way to generate gold at the market,
Since it collects more quickly than food from farms.
The downside is that you burn through your forests more quickly,
but environmental protection groups won't be founded for several hundred years
so really, who's going to stop you?
To get a general sense of how quickly you can buy stone by selling wood and food,
I set up what I think is a reasonable late-game economy
of 40 farmers and 40 lumberjacks with post-imperial Turks.
I let it run for 30 in-game minutes, selling off excess wood and food for gold,
and then buying stone.
I included farm reseed and replacing some lumber camps,
so there's a bit of placed out effect in these numbers.
Starting at the generic base rate of 150 gold for 100 stone,
I found by 30 minutes I had 4400 stone,
enough for 35 bombard towers over that period and the price was at 301.
Here's the amount of stone I had at each minute,
and even though the economy took a few minutes to get rolling,
you can see the rate trending downward as the price goes up
as it takes longer to save up the gold for the next stone purchase.
Now how does the result compare to using Feitorias?
Well I redid the same 30 minute test, but with 4 Feitorias
who use the same population space as those 40 farmers and lumberjacks that I tested previously.
I sold extra food and wood and used all the gold to buy stone.
If we compare it to the farmers and lumberjacks, we can see how it fits in.
They actually both ended at 30 minutes with a nearly identical amount of stone,
and had been pretty much neck and neck after 20 minutes,
though the Feitoria was consistently behind early in the test when the price was low.
Just eyeballing it, it seems like it started to have its comeback around 11 minutes.
Another way we can look at all this is more theoretically,
and calculate for any market price,
what it means with and without guilds,
and with different combinations of eco-techs and villager distributions.
If we do some spreadsheet math, and plot a graph with the price of stone at the market on the x-axis,
and the rate that we can buy stone using that particular setup on y,
we can judge the relationships at a glance.
We can also plot the Feitoria here as well.
Now for the non-Feitoria player, it depends how you're using your wood and food to generate the gold,
and if you're relying on a mix of farmers and lumberjacks or going for the sustainable route.
But the Feitoria is certainly in the mix, and better than most methods if the price is passing 175.
Though using 20 lumberjacks with guilds is still better up until a market price of 400, go lumberjacks!
In the practical example I tried, the Feitoria started catching up when the price was only 218,
about 60 earlier than we would've predicted.
That's because the Feitoria player also buys less to get the same stone to build with,
and was only at 184 after 11 minutes.
Any direct comparison of their rates on the graph undersells the Feitoria,
since it won't be moving up the chart as quickly.
To be fair, it looks pretty balanced to me in terms of stone generation.
Market prices of 200 and slightly above are certainly realistic,
and there will be times the Feitoria is holding its own against villagers.
And there are certainly other advantages to it that I'll mention a bit later.
Before the update, I can see the argument for it being a bit broken in terms of stone.
By a market price of 180 or so, it was already getting
past the point that you could use farmers and lumberjacks with guilds to keep up.
And after the market price went past 240, the Feitorias were really off to the races,
and got stone at rates no one else could match.
But enough about stone, what about gold?
We all know relics are good, so doesn't that make Feitorias good for gold?
Well, again we have to think about population space, and what else you could be doing with it.
First of all, if trade is an option, it will always be better than Feitorias.
Even one trade cart can make more gold than a Feitoria on a route of a good length,
and even when you factor in congestion, suboptimal routes, and potential raiding,
I just think you're better off taking the stone you'd spend on the Feitoria
and build a wall around your trade if that's what you're worried about.
2 or 3 trade carts will definitely offset the Feitorias gold production
and you can use the extra population for more units and go on the offensive.
The more interesting implication is for maps with no trade, like a 1 verse 1.
This one's a little bit different than selling stone, and just about any way you look at it,
you're making more gold by selling wood and food created by your 20 villagers
than you are from a Feitoria over time.
The only exception would be if stone is selling at an absurdly high price,
in which case the 15 stone per minute does generate significant gold.
The main theme that keeps coming up in all of this is,
from a strictly numerical economic view on gold or stone,
Feitorias are just never the best option.
But what about some non-numerical factors that aren't being captured in all of these calculations?
We can certainly mention a few of those.
For example, it's been brought up in comments about what if wood runs out on the map?
Obviously in a case where you can't find resources for your villagers to work on,
then yes, Feitorias will be producing more than zero.
That's a pretty extreme situation, though in that case there's obviously a big advantage for the Portuguese.
Another point that gets brought up is resistance to raiding.
The Feitoria itself is quite strong, and has comparable HP to a castle.
They're pretty space efficient as well, so you could hide them in the back and wall them up,
or tuck them in corners around the map.
Just make sure you don't lower the cost of spies too much, since they won't count toward the cost of that.
There's certainly an argument to be made about an economy that won't get harrassed as easily,
though I think you can achieve a similar effect with a few bombard towers,
or all the extra units you'd be making with your more efficient economy of villagers.
Just remember that aggressive playing is often better than giving up a ton of map control for free,
and trying not to lose is not the same thing as trying to win,
and trying to win is often much more effective.
I think this goes hand in hand with the idea that it's also a lot less micro-intensive
to make buildings rather than villagers.
Again, there's a big production cost to that to keep in mind,
but if you think your attention elsewhere can make up for that by using your units better,
or making the game more enjoyable for yourself then that's not necessarily an invalid feeling.
The big advantage I like though and want to mention, is the potential to boom or rebuild quickly.
When we're talking about population efficiency and trade-offs,
it carries with it an assumption that we're at our population max,
and making decisions about trade-offs from that point of view.
But quite often you're not at your limit, and population space is something you have a lot of.
I'm especially thinking if your town is being destroyed and you're relocating.
Of course you put down town centers, but there's a cap on how quickly you can make villagers,
and you're not deciding between them or Feitorias,
it's just an extra building that you can make that helps you just in and get your economy going again,
so that you can get back into the game.
The stone cost does make it harder than it was previously,
but any that you can make, even if they're only producing as much as 5 villagers, definitely help.
The last thing to mention is that, yes you can convert them,
if someone converts your Feitoria it takes up the same 20 population space,
and generates resources for them.
Unfortunately, the Indian sultans tech doesn't apply to it,
though that isn't completely unexpected if you've seen my series on conversions,
and converted buildings usually aren't affected by civ bonuses, but it was worth checking anyway.
Like any building, you can destroy them if you're worried about them falling into the wrong hands.
But that's my look at the Feitoria,
I posted a version of this video a couple of days ago, and concluded Feitorias were basically terrible,
but an error that I made was pointed out to me about their stone gather rate
and now I'm sold that they're actually a decent option if you're going heavily into stone,
but like the convenience and raiding resistance that they provide.
That being said, it also seems they've had their one special role taken away,
and they were already arguably situational as a stone generator in games without trade,
and now they don't really have that anymore.
It never hurts to have the option,
but I think you shouldn't feel like you have to use them in every game as Portuguese.
I think the intention was to get it to a point that it's a tough decision,
but I hope now you at least know some of the factors that you're weighing when you make that decision.
Thanks for watching guys, and I'll see you next time.