Essay On Optimal Villager Distribution per Animal

[NekoBerk]

Essay On Optimal Villager Distribution per Animal by Nirket


In Age of Empires 3, experienced players know that it's important to move animals closer every 13 seconds. But there's a question that has never been addressed at least in the Spanish-speaking Age of Empires 3 community:

How many villagers should be assigned per animal?

The Age of Empires wiki states that in Age 3, there is a decay rate of 0.75 food per second, meaning food is lost from the animal's carcass—both for wild herds and livestock. From my own testing, I timed an animal decaying from 400 food to 354 food in one minute, which calculates to a decay rate of 0.76 per second. However, I assume there was a slight margin of error, so the actual rate is likely 0.75/s, making the wiki’s information valid.

Now, knowing that an animal decays at 0.75 food per second, how many villagers are needed to minimize food loss? A standard villager (without upgrades) gathers at a rate of 0.84 food per second, so placing at least one villager is enough to offset decay losses.

In a real match, you will assign multiple villagers to gather from the same animal. However, if too many are gathering from a single carcass, problems start to arise.

Why is it important to distribute villagers properly among animals?

When they're disorganized, some will finish an animal way too quickly and start shooting unexpectedly, increasing the chances of getting caught off guard by that.

When your villagers are properly distributed, they start hunting in a more synchronized and predictable manner. This allows you to accurately estimate when they will move, giving you time to focus on other tasks.

Additionally, excess villagers will be less efficient, as they won't be able to gather at full potential. Since the animal depletes too fast, they’ll waste time moving instead of maximizing their gathering.

Ideal Villager Distribution per Animal Type:
For bison (500 food) → 4 to 5 villagers
For deer (400 food) → 2 to 3 villagers
For elephants (1,000 food) → 6 to 8 villagers

All these calculations were done using ChatGPT.

How these recommendations change with food gathering upgrades? .

While I haven't crunched the numbers, my opinion is quite clear: reduce the max recommended villagers by one for each animal type after applying upgrades.

Video of me doing Herding and Optimal Villager Distribution per Animal:
Video's in Spanish so activate Youtube subtitles. I wrote them myself.



Were you guys already doing this intuitively?

[Garja]

Anything less than 4vills on a single animal feels a huge waste of food. Anything more than 7 feels too many and will probably means the whole hunt will be shoot too much and start moving away (plus more walking time but I guess that evens out in the long term?!). ChatGPT suggestions seem off by 1 or 2 villagers.

[NekoBerk]

Anything less than 4vills on a single animal feels a huge waste of food. Anything more than 7 feels too many and will probably means the whole hunt will be shoot too much and start moving away (plus more walking time but I guess that evens out in the long term?!). ChatGPT suggestions seem off by 1 or 2 villagers.

The number of vills you assign to gather food from an animal largely depends on how much food that animal provides. If you are hunting animals that only give 400f, assigning 2 or 3 villagers to each animal is a good balance between gathering quickly and wasting little food.

Placing a fourth villager doesn’t significantly reduce the amount of food lost. In a real game, the vill would walk from where you sent them and arrive just to stand up again and walk further. They would gather less than if you had placed him from the start on a new animal along with two other villagers, where he wouldn’t lose more time walking than working.

[RefluxSemantic]

Anything less than 4vills on a single animal feels a huge waste of food. Anything more than 7 feels too many and will probably means the whole hunt will be shoot too much and start moving away (plus more walking time but I guess that evens out in the long term?!). ChatGPT suggestions seem off by 1 or 2 villagers.

ChatGPT is nowhere near capable of answering these questions.

I'd argue it depends a little bit, I think its more important to be careful about the herding itself, than it is to optimize the number of villagers per animal.

[Garja]

Anything less than 4vills on a single animal feels a huge waste of food. Anything more than 7 feels too many and will probably means the whole hunt will be shoot too much and start moving away (plus more walking time but I guess that evens out in the long term?!). ChatGPT suggestions seem off by 1 or 2 villagers.

The number of vills you assign to gather food from an animal largely depends on how much food that animal provides. If you are hunting animals that only give 400f, assigning 2 or 3 villagers to each animal is a good balance between gathering quickly and wasting little food.

Placing a fourth villager doesn’t significantly reduce the amount of food lost. In a real game, the vill would walk from where you sent them and arrive just to stand up again and walk further. They would gather less than if you had placed him from the start on a new animal along with two other villagers, where he wouldn’t lose more time walking than working.

I just don't agree, it doesn't match my experience. Also depdning on the civ and MU, wasting no food is the absolute priority over a little more efficiency in waking time.
And btw, shouldn't walking time even out anyway in the long run between few vills spread over multiple animals and all vills on few animals? When all the animal in the herd are gathered you then have 20 vills idle at the same time and it will happen earlier than if you saturate each animal fully (due to the food deplete).

Example:
18v over 6 deers VS 18v over 3 deers.
In the first case vills gather uninterrupted till all animals are depleted, while each of the 3 groups of 6 vills have to walk to the next hunt once. However because of food depletion the vills spread evenly on all the animals will be idle earlier and will have to move to next hunt sooner.

Another example is with the first hunt to collect 800f to age up. On most maps you have exactly enough food just to do that so you can't afford to kill all the animals asap just to allocate all vills in groups of 2 or 3. Some civs like Germans, Italy or China will get idle vills before reaching 800f.

At the end of the day it's the same with herdables, you really don't want to delete all of them at the same time but rather use like 5-6 vills gathering from just one at time.

[Joshua667746]

Pretty good post! I usually put exactly what you wrote, 2-3 vils on tier 1 animals, 3-4 on tier 2 animals, and 5-6 on tier 3

[edeholland]

Can you show the calculations?

[NekoBerk]

@edeholland

@Garja 's comment made me realize that he's right. A fourth villager will work less than the other three at first. But, once they all start working simultaneously, each will gather the same amount of food, and less will be wasted.
ChatGPT maths are perfect, but my interpretations of the results are wrong, yes.

These are the formulas ChatGPT used:

A gathering rate of 0.84 with three villagers means collecting food at a rate of 2.52 per second. (0.84 × 3 villagers)

How do we calculate the time needed to gather 400 food? By using this calculation:
400 food / 2.52 gathering rate per second. The result tells us that the villagers would collect those 400 food in 159 seconds.

In those same 159 seconds, a total of 119.25 food would have been wasted. (0.75 × 159 = 119.25)

Comparison Table:
Villagers Time to Gather Food Lost to Decay
3 159 s 119.25 lost
4 119 s 89.25 lost
5 95.2 s 71.4 lost
6 79.4 s 59.55 lost

With this conclusion, my distribution might only be good at the very beginning when you have very few villagers and they are coming out of the TC. It might depend on the MU and the civ as Garja says.

[Garja]

Hmm, I'm admittedly bad at math but I ran some calculation yesterday after my last post.
I was considering the decay rate as an extra villager. So by my math, a deer with 3v takes 400/(2.52+0.75) = 122.32 seconds to expire. During that, a total of 91.74f is lost.
So if I'm not mistaken, it is slightly more optimistic than your math but with 3v it is still a huge waste of food (almost 25%). In fact, the decay is brutal regardless and even with 6 steel trap vills you still end up wasting about 41 food on a deer.

[shake2020aoe]

we are just profoundly autistic as a community

[alistairpeter]

Wow no wonder they nerfed Japan herding is so hard it requires two essays to even try to grasp it