Could schoonerless boat be better than plantation transition?

No Flag a passing slimey
Crossbow
Posts: 27
Joined: May 27, 2016

Could schoonerless boat be better than plantation transition?

Post by a passing slimey »

Ive been wondering if boats would be a better transition than plantation due to the whooping cost of 800 wood each plantation has. Both whales and plantation villagers gather at a 0.5 gold per sec rate. However, villagers walk around when gathering on plantations instead of just being stilll constantly gathering. Because of that, the gathering rate varies a lot. At any rate, whales will always yield more gold than plantations as long as any cards are involved.

A test of 10 villagers gathering coin on a plantation for five minutes offline yielded 1210. Let's just bring it down to 1200 for convenience's sake. Have in mind that these resulted DO worsen with lag, and can also be improved by putting 7 vills on each plantation instead of the whole ten since it causes the vills to bump into each other less. In any case, the gather rate is approximatedly 0.4 per sec.

On the other hand, 10 unupgraded whale boats gather 1500 gold in the same amount of time. While you have to spend money on the docks, you will have villagers free to do whatever. Assuming you have those 10 villagers on wood without any upgrades ( which you probably would at this point), you would also get an extra 1500 wood minus the 200 from the docks, another 200 from the two extra fishing boats. A surplus of 1100 wood. With all upgrades it would be 2000 wood. Thats a really big difference.


Of course, there is also the training time, but lets just ignore it. Calculating all that is a pain in the ass, and the main issue to it is getting the gold you need fast anyway. This problem can be solved by just making boats earlier on. You would already have villagers on wood because you dont have enough gold mines to fit them, so thats not really a problem as long as you play smart.

There is still one more issue to tackle: the upgrades.

Actually, there is nothing to worry about for non-card upgrades. With all plantation upgrades (60% extra gather rate), you get 0.64 per sec, while with all fishing boat upgrades (45% extra gather rate) you get 0.725 per sec. Besides, you can only get the first plantation upgrade on fortress age (just 10%) while you can get all the fishing upgrades on the go. Not only that, the plantation upgrades are crazy expensive. The fishing boat upgrades cost in total 290 gold and 290 wood, while the plantation ones cost 1300 food and 1300 wood. There is nothing to worry about when you get to imperial either aince the gold upgrade also affects boats. The only problem is the gather rate cards.

It is possible to delay until all mill, unit uogrades, factories and eco theory are sent before sending plantation cards. If you dont have enough space in your deck, you might as well put just mill cards rather than plantation, or even fishing upgrade cards. The real problem is in case you can actually fit in all upgrade cards. In a team game on a water map, you can just leave all the fish to the water civ, but if there is nobody to take water, would leaving it alone be a waste?

Well, idk avout that, but somewhat of a rule of thumb is that whales are as good as a plantation that is ahead one gather rate card. As for the exact numbers, go find them out yourself. Im too lazy -.-
User avatar
Australia wardyb1
Retired Contributor
Donator 01
Posts: 1507
Joined: Sep 20, 2016
ESO: wardyb1
Location: Australia

Re: Could schoonerless boat be better than plantation transition?

Post by wardyb1 »

I like the idea, but I think you've missed a few things. 1. By the time you are going to plantations, your vills have already paid for themselves. So to transition to plantation is only a cost of 800 wood each for every 10 vills. To transition to boats, it's 200 wood for the dock plus 1000 wood for the 10 boats. So you are already 400w worse off going to boats. Now yes you do have free vills left over and they will most likely cover this cost.

2. Boats are usually a lot harder to defend than plantations, and offer require more investment into water to do so.

3. Now not always, but sometimes if the game is transitioning to plantations, then population caps start to become a thing. If you are forced to invest another 20/30? pop into boats, yes you'll have a crazy eco but you could find yourself with a significantly smaller army and could lose you the match if you can't rebuild fast enough.

4. The time investment is quite large as well. Building plantations is quick and easy. Transitioning to boats will leave you exposed and without coin for a while if you haven't planned early enough ahead.

5. And finally, if you are going to do this, why not just play water from the start, and abuse the upgrades more? Or at least play it transitioning from early pressure or a rush.

I'd like to see if it's possible but it seems not very beneficial when taken out of the vacuum of theory.
“To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.”
User avatar
China fei123456
Jaeger
Posts: 3283
Joined: Apr 23, 2015
ESO: fei123456
Location: Alderaan

Re: Could schoonerless boat be better than plantation transition?

Post by fei123456 »

its better to go 5 rax xbow pike, instead of plantation.
fish boom is better than plantation too. (fishing boat is vill, plantation isnt.)
No Flag a passing slimey
Crossbow
Posts: 27
Joined: May 27, 2016

Re: Could schoonerless boat be better than plantation transition?

Post by a passing slimey »

@wardyb1

1.I dont get what you mean :c. Yes the vills are going to gather the wood you had to spend extra.

2.Yeah, thats actually something i forgot to say. Even so, it also depends. For instance, if you were france and won the water against port. Now you have complete control of the water and no use to it. Wouldnt it be good to add boats then? Im not sure about matches both civs cant go water. The other guy probably wouldnt get ship upgrade cards, and if you did, you would have a massive advantage over the water, but it is a bit difficult to see whether that is worth it or not without knowing in practice how exactly more effective boat transition is... After all, you could just get a plantation upgrade rather than the ship one. Going without upgrades in such case should also be viable, but also riskier since the boats are indeed vulnerable.

3.Not really, because whale boats gather gold faster than plantations, unless you get all plantation upgrades (alsodepends on the civs. Iro and oto plantations suck, and whales will always gather faster to them for instance.) Its the rule of thumb i said before: A plantation is as good as whales when one card ahead, and better when two or more cards ahead.

4.It shouldnt be the case as long as you invest on it early on before the gold mines are completely exhausted. Even making three docks is viable actually, since the cost is going to get paid up anyway.

5.Thats about schoonerless boats tho :c. You have a point if it is a land civ contesting water against a water civ however.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 9 guests

Which top 10 players do you wish to see listed?

All-time

Active last two weeks

Active last month

Supremacy

Treaty

Official

ESOC Patch

Treaty Patch

1v1 Elo

2v2 Elo

3v3 Elo

Power Rating

Which streams do you wish to see listed?

Twitch

Age of Empires III

Age of Empires IV