From tournament games and streams it looks like China players haven't really made up their minds about when to build the imperial official. Some thoughts after having messed with Chinese dark age builds in single player:
- Imperial officials cost 150 food and have the same train time as villagers
- Imperial offcials can supervise drop-off points to get +20% of the resources dropped there
- Drop-off point buildings generate 1 tax gold for every 10 resources dropped there
- Imperial officials can gather tax gold from these buildings and drop it off at the TC. They can carry 20 gold max (until a feudal age upgrade)
Since we start with 6 vills, if we immediately build a drop-off building (a mill at the berries in this case) and put all 6 vills on sheep, going imperial official first means our initial villagers all get +20% gather rate. This is a bigger increase to our economy than building a vill first (a vill only grows our economy by 17%). Notably, since the official will be able to start supervising the mill before the first resources are dropped, the +20% gather rate immediately takes effect at the start of the game.
The downsides of this are: We have to build a mill immediately, and we spend an extra 100 food on the official as opposed to the villager. BUT both downsides are compensated for if we change our build to not mine gold in dark age. We can do this because the official can gather a total of 100 tax gold (80 from the mill, 20 from a lumber camp if we build it at the right time) in time to age up. This makes us age later than usual, but if we task 2 or 3 vills to the landmark, due to our +100% build rate civ bonus we will still be up before 5:00. And we'll be up already having made the official that we want in early feudal anyway, which means we will age up with more of a bank than otherwise. Also, in early feudal age we would typically rather have a mill on our berries than a mining camp on our gold, which is another advantage.
Benchmark: We can be up to feudal and have the resources for a 2nd TC around 4:50. This is around the same time we can have the 2nd TC res if we simplify our dark age and make only vills and no official, but in that case we have a mining camp instead of a mill, and lacking the official is not great considering the bonuses it can give to gather rate and potentially unit production.
We can obviously macro for military production as well, the point is we age up on time with a better setup for feudal age. It's not a huge difference but early official feels strictly better on land maps.
It doesn't work on maps where we want to dock early because we don't want to spend 50w on the mill so early, and due to the 150 food cost of the official we are forced to leave more vills on food to keep up vill production, slowing down our dock boom.
Maybe this is already common knowledge but I figured I'd post since this section needs more threads
TLDR: Yay
Early imperial official: Yay or nay
Re: Early imperial official: Yay or nay
Oh yeah the imperial official is totally worth, imo. I think you explained it perfectly.
The 20% yield is highly strong too. I would never not make an imperial official and just micro the coin.
It's funny because I was messing around with it just this morning myself. A few notes:
Carry capacity for tax is 20 at first, can be boosted to 40 if you build the appropriate landmark
You can gather gold from buildings exactly every 30 seconds
The 20% yield is highly strong too. I would never not make an imperial official and just micro the coin.
It's funny because I was messing around with it just this morning myself. A few notes:
Carry capacity for tax is 20 at first, can be boosted to 40 if you build the appropriate landmark
You can gather gold from buildings exactly every 30 seconds
Re: Early imperial official: Yay or nay
I also dont think it's common knowledge at all btw
You prefer 2nd TC over a Dynasty with 35% faster vill training btw?
You prefer 2nd TC over a Dynasty with 35% faster vill training btw?
Re: Early imperial official: Yay or nay
Depends on how greedy you can afford to be which idk. Also on how important it is to have access to zhuge nu. For booming the 2nd TC is much better but you might end up with not enough stuff.
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