Hey guys, Spirit of the Law here.
I haven't done an 'answering comments' video in a long time and the last video had so many good comments
that I think we can have this one just focus on farm upgrades and a couple of questions about 256x mod.
Starting off, probably the most common question on the last video was
Why the pre- and post-Horse Plow farming rates were the same,
and shouldn't farm upgrades speed it up at least a little bit since your reseeding less often?
The answer is yes, there should be a slight difference there and it's something that the Inca team bonus really depends on.
I did include seeding time at the start of each test so it did have a chance to show up,
but something I glossed over is that farming itself has a lot of variation based on the path that villager takes from the farm
and how often they randomly decide to stop working.
When I found that pre-Horse Collar, they have a 20.5 average collection rate, it actually varied between 19.8 and 21.1
and there was a similar variation after Horse Collar as well.
In my case, they both averaged out to 20.5 food/min, but if I'd averaged across hundreds of farmers
I'm sure it would be in there as around a 0.2 food/min increase or something on that scale.
Next up, Mr. Bar ran some numbers and found that long-term Horse Collar is worth about one extra lumberjack for every 12 farmers
and in comparison, Double-Bit Axe is worth about twice that.
That means if you averaged over the long run if you have a roughly equal number of lumberjacks and farmers,
then Double-Bit Axe is about twice as good as Horse Collar.
Not only does that show Double-Bit Axe's long-term benefit,
but also think about how immediately that effect is felt.
A farm with or without Horse Collar has no difference for the first 8 minutes.
Whereas Double-Bit Axe is immediately going to start paying you back.
So from both a long-term and short-term view, Double-Bit Axe looks like the better tech in comparison.
The next question was about whether the calculation for the payoff time of Horse Collar is faster than I showed,
because players tend to make multiple farms.
I feel like I must have poorly communicated what that graph was looking at since people are asking that question.
To give an analogy, let's say I have a deal where I lent someone a dollar
and they're gonna pay me back five dollars exactly one week from today,
so we'd say there's a one week payoff time.
The question really comes down to "can I speed that up by making that same deal with more people at once?"
I think it's pretty obvious that no, it's not gonna work like that
and making the deal multiple times it's gonna give a great payout next week, but it won't speed things up.
Likewise, going back to the farm pay-off time, if we change the situation to 10 farms,
costing each player 600 wood at 12 minutes,
then at 20 and a half minutes the non-Horse Collar ones come up for renewal,
where of course we pay 600 wood to receive them again.
We can then skip ahead to 24 minutes and see the Horse Collar ones are also coming up to reseed.
At that point, both players will have spent 1200 (wood) in total.
We could have hundreds or thousands of farms and this is still going to be true.
It's also gonna be true at 37 minutes,
which is why I say the permanent advantage doesn't happen until after that point.
At that point, the Horse Collar player would always be at least one farm ahead.
So 60 wood times however many farms you have.
The point is if we're really nitpicking the argument that mill upgrades save you wood,
that's temporarily true at various points, but isn't permanent until much later
and the number of farms isn't a factor in that, as odd as that might sound.
The main thing I was trying to communicate, is those temporary wood boosts are the best argument for farm techs and not the total savings.
Moving on, a good point that was mentioned is that the farm techs tie back to the ideas in the inflation video.
The idea that resources now or more useful than resources later is very applicable to farming upgrades in two different ways:
Not only do you have the benefit of delaying your farms and temporarily freeing up that wood,
but simultaneously you have to balance that with dropping a 150 resources for Horse Collar to begin with.
Is delaying having to pay 900 wood at 21 minutes worth losing 150 resources at 12 minutes?
It feels like we're getting layers of time preference happening here
and just shows why answering when to get Horse Collar is such a complicated question.
Namely because it changes based on how you weigh those two things.
Moving on, 'Self-replicating whatnot' says that the multiplication of the farmers gather rate by one is totally expected
and probably just a leftover from the early design phase of the game.
Now, I did consider that but then I couldn't throw in a spicy Star Wars meme. So obviously my hands were tied.
Interestingly though, Crop Rotation doesn't have that multiplier and I think I know why.
After Handcart, villagers aren't the limiting factor of food income.
The farmer work rate is set at 0.53 food per second or 32 food/min.
At first, walking time is the limiting factor,
but the bottleneck you eventually hit is the farm itself, which only generates 24 food/min.
If you think about it, It's actually pretty realistic since no matter how quickly you can harvest the farm still needs time to grow.
Still, it's funny to think that even if you had a tech letting farmers gather a hundred times faster,
you'd be stuck at 24 food/min unless it affected farms as well.
The Slavs bonus for faster farmers actually gets around this by having their farms as well as their villagers work faster.
Next up 'GraveUypo' says I instinctively almost never get Crop Rotation funny how it works out. That was the right choice.
Personally, I also found one of the most surprising results in that video
was how long Crop Rotation takes to give a permanent advantage
and you also don't have that time-sensitivity factor as much in the late game.
I wouldn't say it's useless, but definitely the least important of the farm upgrades
and I can see why some civilizations don't have it at all.
Next up, 'planescaped' says that they keep scattering wood-chips on the ground, but nothing is sprouting. Please help.
I think I might know what's wrong here, and it's that you have to build a mill first.
That is unless you're from Cambodia in which case I have no idea why it's not working 'cause you shouldn't need prerequisite buildings.
Moving on, being asked if the video was inspired by the lack of food I had throughout the 256x Tech Mod video.
That was definitely an inspiration and I also got wheelbarrow way too many times in that game,
which led to the lovely outcome of grinding my food income to a halt.
Who would've guessed that a cheat code letting you research
techs more times than intended, would have unintended negative effects?
In a similar, 'Flavourius' has pointed out that the Malay fish traps with gill nets would also be good in that mod
I'll have to try that next time as well as the infinite food from Supplies trick
where you research Supplies a few times so your Militia-line costs negative food
and cue a few of them up, cancel, and repeat.
Next up, 'Nico' asked what the villager does with the horse collar considering there are no horses around.
It's a good question, especially for civilizations without stables.
'Morgan' on the 256x mod against 7 AI asked, "how can I gain access to this cheat code?"
So here's the thing...
the Going Above and Beyond cheat has a limited time to unlock in early-May
and I've been getting a lot of people asking on that video how they can do it now.
But the answer is if you didn't unlock it during that time period, then currently you're out of luck.
To me, if completing challenges unlocks them earlier, I think that's fine.
But everyone needs to get it at the end of the challenge or in the next patch at the latest.
I'm very confident that developers at Forgotten Empires are aware of the frustration people feel about this
and are gonna come up with a good solution soon.
And finally, 'Matej Hornansky' summarized the farm upgrade video saying, "get Heavy Plow before Horse Collar. Gonna try that next time."
Uhh... sure.
Glad I could help!
But, that'll do it for this one!
I appreciate all the comments and feel lucky to have such witty and insightful people adding to the discussions!
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time!