Gathering rate is not balanced!

[Dawn_]

Hello Esoc community,

before i start i want to tell something about me.
Probably nobody of you guys know me, i startet the game back in 2006 and grinded it till 2010 and peaked rank 34.
Now after years and years i totally forgot about age 3 and found my lovely game back in steam and bought it.
I did my HC's, watched a lot of replays and done a ton of games against bots, did my hotkeys and tried to get used to it and etc...

Now i wanted to perfectionize my age up and farming with my villagers to calculate the gathering rate and making some strategics.

I began with france and their coreur gathering rate.

After trying out different things i recognized the numbers are not the same everytime. Its kinda normal when numbers are more or less then 3-4 of gathering.
But i had something different. I aged up and found something out.
A gathering difference from 45 gold to 60 gold in a minute!
I was pretty confused and thought it was a bug. Tried everything out, sometimes i gathered on mills double as fast in age 2, sometimes in age 3, more often in age 4.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5me2Mm9XwZs)
(Timestamps in comments Gold & Mill)
Sometimes i gathered berrys with a double gather rate than normal in age 2.

(https://youtu.be/AOGWkSOaF0c)

I dont know , im sitting on these things now over 8 hours and its pretty crazy how different these gathering rates without any updates or shipments are.

Tried it in szenario and in a online game against a bot.

This Video is an 1 hour video of all the rates where i wrote down everything in Excel.

https://youtu.be/H-t8PpoQ1po
(if the video is not online its still uploading so just be patient)

In this game especially u gather more in Age 2 but not in others, im done for today and will do more tryouts the next days if other games get other ages where the gather rate is higher.

Maybe u guys are interested too in this and want to tryout too.

The Videos are pretty shitty and my mic too, never doin videos so be prepared

(Btw the gathering rate was also fucked up with normal villagers, just dont have them on record)

Thanks for you Attention guys

Dawn_

[Dawn_]

https://imgur.com/uvEHxgV

Excel data from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-t8Ppo ... e=youtu.be

[Mitoe]

How frequently did you get this bug when you were testing? Almost every game, or like 1 in 5, etc.?

I briefly tried to recreate your results on gold mines and berries (only tried once each), gathering for 100 seconds in each age with no upgrades or shipments and got the same number each time (83 for berries and 74 for gold mines)--which also matched with the CDB's gather rate in the proto file.

I haven't really watched your videos super closely (don't really have the time for that right now) so some more information would be appreciated.

Might try more on the weekend.


Edit: granted I was on EP and not RE, but I don't think that should change much.

[Interjection]

Dawn was telling me about this on Discord, it seems pretty weird so I asked him to post on the forums

[GiBthedurrty]

thanks

[Dawn_]

@Mitoe
hi and thanks for taking your time to read my thread!
i was over 4 hours in the scenario and tried it on every different age (sometimes in age 2, in age 3 or in age 4) there was some different gathering rate in one of the ressources (gold,wood, berry, mill, hunt)
after Saverorybeef told me to try it online against a bot. The Video is above where u can see in the excel and in the video that the rate in that game was in age 2 higher in every ressources! :)

[VooDoo_BoSs]

Fascinating if true...

[Mitoe]

Interesting if correct...

[Garja]

Scenario and single player have fucked up clock. It's not even consistent. You may start gathering as per standard values and then vills randomly gather more. Only multiplayer is reliable.
It would be interesting to test vsync vs non vsync gathering times.

[deleted_user]

Stimulating if authentic...

[Mitoe]

Damn it Garja you ruined the meme when it only barely began!

Forgot about the vsync nonsense. @Dawn_ do you have vsync enabled or disabled?

[Dawn_]

Hey guys,

just made another video, i have nothing to do actually on a wednesday evening / friday morning so i still trying things out.

I have Vsync enabled!

This time i stopped with the stoppwatch in my phone instead of the ingame time!

So in the next video mills gathering more this time in age 3 instead of age 4.

Normal gathering rate should be on 0.65 but goes up to 1,23.
Second try was 1,33 in 1 minute.

after first mill upgrade in age 3 the rate was 1,41.

after the second update... the rate fell down to 0,94.
second attempt of this was 1,05 still lower then before.

Goin in 4th Age and trying again its still on 1,06 gathering rate.


Whole test here in this Video.
https://youtu.be/6CifSs-WzSY

[dansil92]

You think this is bad, plop down a native farm or a rice patty and compare those too

[VooDoo_BoSs]

Hey guys,

just made another video, i have nothing to do actually on a wednesday evening / friday morning so i still trying things out.

I have Vsync enabled!

This time i stopped with the stoppwatch in my phone instead of the ingame time!

So in the next video mills gathering more this time in age 3 instead of age 4.

Normal gathering rate should be on 0.65 but goes up to 1,23.
Second try was 1,33 in 1 minute.

after first mill upgrade in age 3 the rate was 1,41.

after the second update... the rate fell down to 0,94.
second attempt of this was 1,05 still lower then before.

Goin in 4th Age and trying again its still on 1,06 gathering rate.


Whole test here in this Video.
https://youtu.be/6CifSs-WzSY

It could be natural variability within the sample size.

I think a good way to put this to rest would be:

1) Take the biggest variability scenario (seems to be berries age 1 vs age 2).
2) Try an online version with another person present and a single villager
3) Do it over 5 minutes
4) Use the in-game timer

[Dolan]

It's not abnormal. The villager has an array of animations that he cycles through. When you click to initiate gathering, the game selects an animation, but since he was close to an obstacle, his gathering animation was delayed. So he first walks around a bit and then settles on a gathering animation. And then it keeps cycling through these animations: "Walking around", "gathering a bit", "moving about", "gathering a bit more", etc. I think this sequence whereby he cycles through animations is not necessarily the same every time, it's likely that there is some degree of randomness involved, to make the movements more natural. So what you're seeing is, most likely, the effect of this randomisation of choice between different animations at different points in time.

The more villagers tasked on the mill, the more potential obstacles, so each animation cycling is likely to lead to more pathing issues and more time for each villager to adapt to these complex changes in surrounding animations. You have a number of villagers each changing their animations at different times in a "random" way, so the patterns of animation cycling and pathing adaptation are not necessarily ordered or consistent. Sometimes they might collide more, sometimes less, leading to different delayed timings in gathering and the overall differences in gathering rates that you're noticing.

[Mitoe]

It's not necessarily all that abnormal for the mill; for natural resources like berries, hunts, and mines, it is pretty unusual.

[Dolan]

Villagers have an array of different gathering animations for all types of resources, I think. Otherwise when they hit that pick hammer to gather coin, there would be a risk of them converging on a similar animation, which would make the whole movement very unnatural. The game makers have tried hard to make sure they avoid that unnatural synchronisation of movement between gatherers. So even when they gather a very straightforward resource like a mine, they should all hit their pick hammers in a slightly "out of phase" way.

This desynchronisation in animations can probably account for gathering differences even when there are no obstacles that would make vills collide and delay their gathering.

Yeah it's a little weird that the game developers didn't consider the potential implications this could have for competitive play, where everything needs to be quite precise. I suppose they thought that on a long enough period of time, these inconsistencies cancel each other out, (much like in a statistical effect of regression toward the mean, in which any measurement which is an outlier gets compensated by an outlier of an opposite size, eventually trending towards a general average).

[Mitoe]

That's not true, actually. You can have your villagers perfectly synced on a gold mine almost indefinitely, though it may appear that it is not synced because the female and male villagers have slightly different animations, and that pulls them out of sync. The mill walking is different, maybe--I have no clue how that one functions, but for natural resources the animations are not randomized at all.

[Dawn_]

Hey guys,

just made another video, i have nothing to do actually on a wednesday evening / friday morning so i still trying things out.

I have Vsync enabled!

This time i stopped with the stoppwatch in my phone instead of the ingame time!

So in the next video mills gathering more this time in age 3 instead of age 4.

Normal gathering rate should be on 0.65 but goes up to 1,23.
Second try was 1,33 in 1 minute.

after first mill upgrade in age 3 the rate was 1,41.

after the second update... the rate fell down to 0,94.
second attempt of this was 1,05 still lower then before.

Goin in 4th Age and trying again its still on 1,06 gathering rate.


Whole test here in this Video.
https://youtu.be/6CifSs-WzSY

It could be natural variability within the sample size.

I think a good way to put this to rest would be:

1) Take the biggest variability scenario (seems to be berries age 1 vs age 2).
2) Try an online version with another person present and a single villager
3) Do it over 5 minutes
4) Use the in-game timer

I'll will try it over 5min against a player instead of an AI, im done after more then 10 hours xD

Also showed my high gathering rate to @Mitoe , and before i even could calculate he instantly saw that my gathering rate on hunt was way to high than it should be.

[Dolan]

That's not true, actually. You can have your villagers perfectly synced on a gold mine almost indefinitely, though it may appear that it is not synced because the female and male villagers have slightly different animations, and that pulls them out of sync. The mill walking is different, maybe--I have no clue how that one functions, but for natural resources the animations are not randomized at all.

Yeah, you can synchronise the mining animations, but sometimes the animation is shorter, sometimes longer. So you synchronise different things. It's possible that when the animation is shorter they gather slightly less (-1 or -2 coin) than when the animation is longer or normal.

[Mitoe]

No, I'm pretty sure the length of the animation does not change the resources per second you receive (nor am I convinced that there are different durations for each animation), only when you receive it. Mills are different because walking isn't part of the animation that actually contributes to your gather time.

[Dolan]

When one single vill (standard Euro settler) gathers on one tree, things seem to play out like this:

On each hit, the vill adds 1 extra , but sometimes he hits twice before adding 1 . I haven't noticed any periodicity to this inconsistency. The wood gathering animation seems to have a duration of about 1 second, measured with a stopwatch (not with the in-game timer). If the official gathering rate is 0.5 / s, then the vill should only add 1 every 2 hits. But instead, he sometimes adds 1 per 1 hit.

So yeah, there is an inconsistency in gathered resources per each completed animation, even for resources for which animations are non-variable.

PS. One crazy explanation could be that, for wood, there are 2 animations: one which includes 2 chopping movements that look the same and another one which includes only one movement. And when the 2-hits animation gets played, the vill only adds 1 , while when the 1-hit animation gets played, the vill adds again 1 . However, this would not match the expected 0.5 / sec rate.

[Dolan]

Here's another possible explanation: it doesn't matter when the animation gets finished or if it reaches a certain sequence. Once you task the villager on a resource, he goes into "wood gathering mode activated" and a timer is assigned to this continuous activity. As long as the timer runs, a trickle of that resource keeps coming, until the gathering activity gets interrupted (by re-tasking or walking). Animations may or may not synchronise perfectly with the incoming trickle of that gathered resource.

Very rarely, if one vill gathers on a tree, that trickle of incoming wood seems to jump by 2 . And more often, the trickle freezes for more than 1 second. So while you keep one villager gathering on a tree, the trickle of incoming wood seems to sometimes slow down for 1 second and sometimes accelerate for 1 second. I wonder if there's a periodicity to this and if, on a long enough period of time, it evens out.

PS. It would be even weirder if this plays out differently on different machines, because the game engine commands might execute at different times, depending on a number of internal schedulers that keep track of every action on the map. So the game engine might handle these differently depending on how many computing resources it's being alloted by the system.

[Mitoe]

When one single vill (standard Euro settler) gathers on one tree, things seem to play out like this:

On each hit, the vill adds 1 extra , but sometimes he hits twice before adding 1 . I haven't noticed any periodicity to this inconsistency. The wood gathering animation seems to have a duration of about 1 second, measured with a stopwatch (not with the in-game timer). If the official gathering rate is 0.5 / s, then the vill should only add 1 every 2 hits. But instead, he sometimes adds 1 per 1 hit.

So yeah, there is an inconsistency in gathered resources per each completed animation, even for resources for which animations are non-variable.

PS. One crazy explanation could be that, for wood, there are 2 animations: one which includes 2 chopping movements that look the same and another one which includes only one movement. And when the 2-hits animation gets played, the vill only adds 1 , while when the 1-hit animation gets played, the vill adds again 1 . However, this would not match the expected 0.5 / sec rate.

I feel that you can't say for certain that there's inconsistency since you're only estimating on the length of the chopping animation.

[VooDoo_BoSs]

Here's another possible explanation: it doesn't matter when the animation gets finished or if it reaches a certain sequence. Once you task the villager on a resource, he goes into "wood gathering mode activated" and a timer is assigned to this continuous activity. As long as the timer runs, a trickle of that resource keeps coming, until the gathering activity gets interrupted (by re-tasking or walking). Animations may or may not synchronise perfectly with the incoming trickle of that gathered resource.

Very rarely, if one vill gathers on a tree, that trickle of incoming wood seems to jump by 2 . And more often, the trickle freezes for more than 1 second. So while you keep one villager gathering on a tree, the trickle of incoming wood seems to sometimes slow down for 1 second and sometimes accelerate for 1 second. I wonder if there's a periodicity to this and if, on a long enough period of time, it evens out.

PS. It would be even weirder if this plays out differently on different machines, because the game engine commands might execute at different times, depending on a number of internal schedulers that keep track of every action on the map. So the game engine might handle these differently depending on how many computing resources it's being alloted by the system.

Imagine if having a smoother PC increases your gather speed.