Did you know? ..... :O

[I_HaRRiiSoN_I]

I thought I would post this little info-bite here for other to see if interested. Useful for helping people evaluate their economy with factories. I'm not gonna overly talk about strategy here when to and when to not have factories on wood/coin/heavy cannons as it depends on so many things which are happening in game.

Did you know that 1 upgraded coin factory (7.15 coin per second, 300f 300w upgrade) has the same gather rate as approximately 20 villagers* on plantations with no plantation upgrades? This is considering 2 plantations with 10 villagers gathering on it. Plantations have a poor gather rate due to all the villagers having to walk around the plantation to a new cotton bud before continuing to gather coin. i used to think the 1 factory was around 12-14 vills on the plantations but I am grossly wrong.

*this was tested in game and 20 vills were found to have a gather rate of 7.1 c/s and 7.2 c/s on 2 different trials

1 factory on wood (no upgrades) has the same gather rate as 11 vills on wood. 1 upgraded factory on wood has the same gather rate as 11 vills on wood with the gang saw and log flume upgrades. Note GS/LF cost the same as the factory wood tech. If you have villagers with circular saw then these villagers are very efficient at gathering wood and factories are best set to coin, unless you need lots and lots of wood.

if you still have coin mines present then 1 upgraded factory on coin is about 11 villagers with placer mines gathering coin. Obviously there is a big difference between coin mining and plantations, and we havent considered the wood cost yet of plantations and upgrades.

theres the facts, I'll leave the decision of when to have actories on wood/coin to you as there is no 'one strat fits all' way of looking at it as each games is always different.

[I_HaRRiiSoN_I]

we were discussing this on GUA's twitch, i decided to write this up for future reference

[[Armag] diarouga]

Interesting.

[chris1089]

I tended to put facts on coin and vils on wood naturally while transitioning. Nice to see that this was justified.

[Kaiserklein]

Yeah I would only consider having the factory on wood for the transition for example in a team game, where your priority isn't necessarily to get units out, but rather to build and upgrade your plantations asap so that you're setup for late game. If you're trying to mass, it's superior toggled to coin

It's also why you often want to sneak in the industrial before running out of coin mines on the map. Indus means you can get these factories going for the infinite gold source, and it also means you can upgrade your plantations, cause non upped plantations are horrible.
That, or switch to bow/pike. Which in fact is often the wisest move when you're out of gold but have to fight for hunts.

[skandertayebi]

Yeah I would only consider having the factory on wood for the transition for example in a team game, where your priority isn't necessarily to get units out, but rather to build and upgrade your plantations asap so that you're setup for late game. If you're trying to mass, it's superior toggled to coin

It's also why you often want to sneak in the industrial before running out of coin mines on the map. Indus means you can get these factories going for the infinite gold source, and it also means you can upgrade your plantations, cause non upped plantations are horrible.
That, or switch to bow/pike. Which in fact is often the wisest move when you're out of gold but have to fight for hunts.

I agree with that, especially in team games you have to focus on not running out of coin in fortress. You don't want to switch to plantations in age 3.
In most of the cases it's good to save your 1k coin shipment for an industrial age up instead of sending it too early to get a mass out.
Then in age 4 it's situational, if you're ahead you mostly prefer primarly having factories on wood to get plantation switch in. If you're being pushed you rather have it on coin to get decent amount of units to hold.

[aaryngend]

If you think about it, your findings and analysis are crystal clear. But there is this mantra about "Wood is the slowest to gather resource, so never gather wood!!!" that is stuck in the heads of people.
So people don't think much about it and mostly put their Factories to gather wood or train their Heavy Cannons.
Wood in late game, once you got all your production buildings, enough houses, all your needed upgrades (which cost a lof of wood) you only ever need Food & Coin to train your units.
The ony lategame units which still need wood are the stronger bows (like Yumi or Longbows).
Ashigaru's, cuirassiers, any kind of skirmisher or goons, etc. always require coin instead of wood.
Also, wood is much easier to gather because it doesn't run out until the ultra lategame (50+ minutes).
In the end, you want to balance your needed resources anyway so you switch it up sometime for half a minute or so.

[dansil92]

Once you get the fortress age wood tech that slow wood mentality can go out the window. I definitely agree factories to coin and chopping wood is 100% better than factories to wood and vills on plantations, i mean depends on your civ but as brits you can spam out so many musks with factories as your only coin