hey guys Spirit of the law here in this video we're going to take a look at the malians
who have gone from average or slightly above average last patch to seemingly instant top
tiered this month judging by the online win rates and performance while they recently
had three direct Buffs and are also winners from the long sword changes the thing that
gets the most attention is their gold bonus going from 30 longer lasting gold mines to
now 15 more gold dropped off it's a bit like fractional Reserve Banking and that every
time their gold miner deposits 100 gold the bank gets 115 added to circulation in this
video I'm going to take a good look at the new bonus and not just how it compares to
the previous one which we will do but also how it compares to other civilizations bonuses
with 1v1 games especially in mind I should note before we start however well the gold
bonus does hold up it's really just one of several things that are working for the malians
they have nice archery range options in the mid game on top of good camels decent nights
a useful unique unit and extra Pierce armor on their infantry claiming their recent success
is all due to their gold bonus seems a little reductionist it may be more fair to say it's
just but seem to have pushed them into the top level but again we'll see how good it
is to begin with a comparison to last patch previously having 30 longer lasting gold mines
was pretty straightforward basically they would just mine at their usual rate but the
gold taken from the mine would go down slower than usual meaning they could mine longer
and get more gold in total than you'd otherwise expect given a standard generation on most
Maps has 15 gold tiles around your town instead of 12 000 gold mullions could get an extra
3600 from their minds before needing any of the neutral gold piles on the map trade or
relics now just the generic 12 000 gold is actually a decent amount and gets you up to
Imperial age able to afford 85 archers 52 camels and 5 trebuchets along with all of
their relevant upgrades the effect of emollient bonus after that point was lets you make an
another 50 archers and 22 more camels assuming the game lasts long enough that extra gold
can be more significant than it sounds in the late game as often by that point you've
already paid for upgrades so it can all go directly into more units that all sounds pretty
good but keep in mind that the average online ab2 game is 40 minutes long going by the in-game
timer which is very often before you use up your main starting gold piles even in the
games that did reach 45 or 50 minutes if longer lasting gold mines encouraged emollient player
to stay in their base mining gold for longer and may have even led to their opponents moving
out to grab the neutral gold Pals first ironically meaning that both players in a 1v1 may have
ended up with more gold than usual in a very long game all of this together is why previously
this was considered a bit of a situational bonus now let's look at the new patch where
gold miners drop off 15 more which despite sounding like it went from 30 to 15 is in
fact a much stronger bonus the main thing working in its favor is it's now 3 three totally
different bonuses basically stacked on top of each other the first of its effects is
simply a direct gather rate boost however many resources a villager would be expected
to gather he's just going to drop off 15 percent more the second effect of this bonus is it's
also secretly a carry capacity boost normally collecting faster would mean you would have
to drop off more often but it turns out they carry 12 Gold without wheelbarrow where a
regular gold miner carries 10 to keep the frequency of their drop-offs at about the
same rate since villagers stick to whole numbers before wheelbarrow this means they're carrying
20 more gold so they drop off a tiny bit less often than usual but after wheelbarrow and
hand cart they drop off as frequently as other civilizations with equivalent upgrades the
third independent effect is they get more gold than usual in total reminiscent but not
quite the same thing as a longer lasting resource bonus each time they do the work of mining
one gold the mine loses one as it should but the Villager gains 1.15 from your starting
12 000 gold in your base that adds up to an extra 1800 that just appears out of thin air
and note that both of these gold piles shown here are going down by the same amount this
is actually different than how the Mayan longer lasting resource bonus and the previous mullion
bonus work where the villagers gathered at the usual rate but the gold mines go down
more slowly that can have a side effect of a generic civilization using up their minds
first which like I said before it means they might go off to secure other gold on the map
before the longer lasting resource player is even thinking about that with their new
bonus though Molly and mines run out at basically the same time as everyone else's they just
have an extra 1800 resources in the bank to show for it now all this got me wondering
about a side question of whether this is enough to make mining gold and buying other resources
from the market at least for a while faster than collecting them directly Malian certainly
wouldn't be the first example of a civ that can indirectly leverage a collection rate
boost and hack the market in feudal age to get a totally different resource faster than
they usually could generally this is saracens polls or Koreans finding Stone to sell at
the market to generate gold a bit faster but remember the Malian ruler Mansa Musa famously
inflated market prices everywhere he went thanks to his generosity and vast wealth from
Malian gold mines so might av2 be able to mirror history here if we grab some futile
gather rates assuming you have double bit ax we can reverse engineer the price you should
be willing to pay up to to buy a resource with gold for either a generic civilization
in white or Malians in yellow if during a game or we still have gold mines we notice
the price to buy a hundred of a resource is less than one of these numbers we're technically
faster at mining gold to buy it from the market then spending the same villager time Gathering
the resource directly there's no reason to have five villagers collect for a minute to
get a hundred stone for example if those same five villagers put on gold for 45 seconds
could let you buy that same Stone that's the idea here of course notice the malian's numbers
in yellow are higher than a generic civ because they gather gold faster so they should be
willing to pay a slightly higher price if we look at these starting market prices in
each game notice that all of them are a little higher than even mullions should be willing
to pay implying it's better to just collect resources like usual that is until we remember
you can pick up the gold mining Tech in feudal age if you have that Tech notice that food
is actually faster to mine gold and buy than to farm directly at least until you bid up
the price above 145.
I'd say it's general knowledge that if anything food prices tend to become elevated in Castle
H as Farms are costly to start at 60 wood each and players will also sometimes lean
on the market to get up to Castle age a bit faster and unlock stronger units emollients
in particular though this bonus makes it possible to move one or two villagers off farms and
onto gold and in some situations might not just be convenient but even the optimal play
if done in moderation if we go a step further and factor in the wood cost of farming 100
food you could even argue mullions are okay buying food up to a price of nearly 170.
wear it for other civilizations that stops making sense around 150.
at least in the short term you can make an argument for mullions buying food though long
term it also has some drawbacks on the other hand for stone or wood the numbers don't really
work and in the long run the ideal way to collect those is to just do it directly instead
of moving those villagers to gold at this point though we can probably agree the bonus
is looking pretty solid and to me the next obvious place to go to see how this compares
to other civilizations with gold bonuses and put them all into perspective to me the most
obvious comparison to start with is to the Turks who have 20 percent faster working gold
miners you'd be forgiven for thinking these are basically the same bonus or the Turks
might have the better version but it's not quite that simple first of all I found even
with a very well placed camp with walking time included Turks have more Lake and 18
Advantage compared to the malian's pretty reliable 15 percent the main difference is
malians end up with 15 more gold in total or again 1800 more from their starting map
generation we have to give a slight collection rate Edge to the Turks but it's very close
and I think the mullions bonus ends up arguably a little better overall next up another very
nice gold bonus is for the Bohemians who have free gold mining as well as Stone mining tacks
usually players don't grab gold tax the moment they're available which in the meantime means
the two civilizations are basically indistinguishable having about 15 faster gold miners than usual
in early feudal and Castle remember Bohemians also save a thousand resources in total cost
offsetting the malian's long-term extra gold for me this comparison comes down to whether
you prefer saving some food and wood in the mid game or having more gold in the very long
run but malians do end up with a higher collection rate after picking up the gold tax in each
age and also end with more gold in total so again in this comparison I think malians had
the edge another civ with less obvious symbol polarities is the Aztecs they have plus three
carry capacity matching the emollient gold miners though it goes without saying this
is nowhere remotely comparable to plus 15 percent switching our perspective though from
gather rates to the total gold available to you remember mullions end up with 1800 more
gold than usual Aztecs of course have their own long-term extra gold generator with 33
more gold from relics for some perspective in this case with five relics it would take
an Aztec player 36 minutes for their bonus to match the 1800 extra gold that we've been
crediting to malians that means while it's technically possible for the Aztecs team bonus
to be worth more than the mullions in the long run probably the exception to the rule
but while we're on the topic of long-term goal generation what about the other civilizations
with a gold trickle while Gathering namely the poles burgundians and Vietnamese to start
with the polls they generate a bit of extra gold while mining stone but assuming they
collect all of their nearby stone that still only just turns into 1050 gold compared to
malians's 1800 extract from their starting gold mines so obviously it's not on the same
level on the other hand burgundians in Vietnamese have unique texts giving farmers and Lumberjacks
a trickle of gold while working which is theoretically infinite to give a ballpark idea of how they
compare to the malian's total gold from mines it would take 30 Vietnamese Lumberjacks about
50 minutes to catch up with emollients in total similarly it would take 40 Burgundian
Farmers 44 minutes to catch up to the 1800 gold and this is ignoring the cost of both
tax clearly these are very slow trickles and emphasize again that the emollient bonus is
a lot more than just a speed boost in the early game another more indirect gold bonus
is the Portuguese unit discount taking away some cost for aging up and Technologies a
20 gold discount on units actually ends up being quite similar to the mullion bonus again
thinking about the very long term and being able to pump out more gold units than an opponent
even during the mid game though having a 15 collection boost and a 20 resource discount
probably have a very similar effect on your economy and practice if you're making a lot
of nights or crossbows again highlighting how similar I feel these bonuses are obviously
there are important differences between Portuguese and malians like the Portuguese lat camels
but finally that leaves us with just one civilization left which is of course the Spanish and their
brand new gold bonus Spanish now get 20 gold each time they complete researching a tech
which is a tricky bonus to estimate as it obviously depends on how many texts you pick
up trying to choose what I thought was a reasonable number for each age I came up with an estimate
of about 400 gold refunded by the end of Castle age and up to 800 in total that final total
is probably on the high end and long-term mullions almost certainly get more from their
minds though the 400 or so that Spanish can theoretically generate through text by late
Castle age seemed fairly strong and I wanted to at least attempt to compare that to what
you could expect from mullions over similar time periods to investigate I spectated a
1v1 game between a couple of high rated players with Italians and dravidians and then tracked
how many texts they'd researched and how much gold they collected at various points we can
then average them together and see how much extra the Malian bonus would have generated
versus the Spanish bonus throughout the game applying both bonuses to the data gives us
this graph representing how much each gold bonus would have been worth under these conditions
it admittedly it's not the most rigorous analysis and players might act differently with those
bonuses than just having it layered on top like this but I still think the general Trend
would hold my instincts say that Spanish get out to an early lead through Loom double bit
axe Etc and have an easier time getting the gold for Castle age faster than mullions but
the longer the game goes on the more I think malians are probably ahead but feel free to
disagree so that's the major gold bonuses that came to mind and how I feel they compare
to malians obviously ignoring trade bonuses which don't factor into 1v1 games and have
their own set of assumptions for the most part as expected Molly and stack up pretty
well giving you something similar to the top collection rate bonuses while having their
total extra gold only bested by the Mayans longer lasting resource bonus like I said
off the top this is just one part of what makes mullions so dangerous these days but
give them a try and tell me if you noticed the gold bonus either in the early game or
that you just seem to be making gold units for longer than you feel you normally would
as you probably are that'll do it for this one though thanks for watching guys and I'll
see you next time