Talk:Farming villages

Why is this page locked? I have useful info to contribute. Very annoying!

There was no useless copy of the main page, I updated copied it to the talk and did an added some usefull info and deleted some wrong info. - Zorrotwee

Mood info : Mood seems to increase roughly 1% every 30 minutes. Will need more testing to confirm
Slimline 18:07, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Mood

When looting an NPC (farming village) with 100% strength (and therefore 6005 resources on hand) the mood seems to go down by a fixed amount (48%) regardless of the size or mix of army sent to do the looting. Najevi 05:34, 20 October 2010 (CEST)

Resource looting

An NPC village at 50% strength will yield 2275 resources. Therefore, in the very early stages of game play, you need not strengthen a farming village before looting it. Only once your loot carrying capacity has increased beyond 2275 do you need to become concerned with first strengthening an NPC village before looting it.

The mood of an NPC village reduces in proportion to the amount of loot your army carries away regardless of which type of unit (or mix of units) does the carrying. However, this proportional relationship is not a simple linear proportion. Najevi 19:57, 21 October 2010 (CEST)

Efficient farming procedure

Various opinions are voiced as to the virtue of researching Booty and Diplomacy to help with efficient farming. Rather than debating that point, this section aims to simply describe an efficient procedure for farming a non-player city (NPC) with and without Booty and Diplomacy. Each reader can then decide for them self which is best for their chosen style of game play.

The starting condition for the target NPC is 50% strength and 100% mood since that is where all NPC's drift toward if you leave them alone for long enough. Of course strength could be at any level depending on which other players are farming your targeted NPC. Notice that this procedure includes trade activity because that is just as important to increasing your supply of resources as looting.

The mood threshold mentioned below refers to that lowest mood level at which the village people are still smiling at you. (i.e. 75% without Diplomacy and 60% with Diplomacy) In either case the visual cue described in the section titled Mood is always your indicator.

Note that although the game expresses mood and strength in percentage points they are simply treated as points in this table - to avoid confusion.

General procedure		Without Diplomacy				With Diplomacy
Step	Action	Strengthen	Loot	NPC Mood	NPC Strength	Strengthen	Loot	NPC Mood	NPC Strength
0	Initial condition			100	50			100	50
1	Increase strength toward 100	75 pop.		100	65	75 pop.		100	65
2	Increase strength toward 100	75 pop.		100	80	75 pop.		100	80
3	Increase strength toward 100	75 pop.		100	95	75 pop.		100	95
4	Top up strength to 100	25 pop.		100	100	25 pop.		100	100
5	Loot such that Mood drops to threshold		3008 booty capacity	75	91		4680 booty capacity	60	88
6	Top up strength to 100	45 pop.		75	100	60 pop.		60	100
7	Loot maximum booty		6005 booty capacity	27	84		6005 booty capacity	12	84
8	Wait for mood to return to 80			80	??			80	??
9	Trade as needed to balance resources			80	??			80	??
10	Wait for mood to return to 100			100	??			100	??
11	Repeat the entire cycle			100	??			100	??

The following example unit choices correspond to the figures used in the Strengthen column of the above table. The formula is not complicated so you could do the math in your head if you can remember your multiplication tables.

#pop = strength_increase * 5

#units = #pop / pop_per_unit

Strengthen	Catapult	Chariot	Horseman	Hoplite	Archer	Slinger	Swordsman
5 pop. +1 strength	0.333	1.250	1.666	5.000	5.000	5.000	5.000
25 pop. +5 strength	2	7	9	25	25	25	25
45 pop. +9 strength	3	12	15	45	45	45	45
75 pop. +15 strength	5	19	25	75	75	75	75

The following example unit choices correspond to the figures used in the Loot column of the above table.

• Reduction in mood will be greater than indicated if NPC strength is less than 100% at the time of the looting attack. So keep it predictable and always loot after first topping up NPC strength to 100%.
• The pairs of unit counts correspond to without : with Booty researched.

Loot	Catapult	Chariot	Horseman	Hoplite	Archer	Slinger	Swordsman
3088 booty mood 100..75	7 : 5	48 : 37	42 : 32	386 : 296	128 : 98	386 : 296	193 : 148
4680 booty mood 100..60	11 : 9	73 : 56	65 : 50	585 : 450	195 : 150	585 : 450	292 : 225
6005 booty maximum booty	16 : 12	94 : 73	84 : 65	751 : 578	251 : 193	751 : 578	376 : 289

Once again the formula is not complicated but dividing by 1.3 is going to be easier with the aid of a calculator.

• without Booty researched

#units = #resources / carrying_capacity_per_unit

• with Booty researched

#units = #resources / carrying_capacity_per_unit / 1.3

• round down for safety margin at step 5
• round  up  for safety margin at step 7

Diplomacy

In one cycle the player that has researched diplomacy will loot ~10% more resources than the player who has not but the player who has not researched diplomacy only has to wait for NPC mood to recover from 24..100 whereas the player who has waits for a recovery from 12..100. Therefore the choice of whether or not to research diplomacy is going to depend on your style of game play and especially on whether or not you are willing and able to repeat these cycles with no extra delay than that required fo rthe mood to recover to 100 points.

Opinion

The game seems designed to tempt players (while your city is still young) to spend resources (and free population) on units that become redundant (or less useful) after (i) your city grows in size, (ii) increases resource production/looting capacity or (iii) researches more advanced technologies. This is true for (i) resources consumed to build units used in looting armies, (ii) research points used to research various technologies in the Academy, (iii) population consumed to build each type of unit and increase the level of various buildings. So plan for the long term and accept compromise for the short term. e.g. Horsemen help you farm rapidly but since they cannot be built as early on as archers, make the research/building of horsemen a high priority and make do with a smaller number of archers in the early days. (Once you have horsemen you'll wonder why you wasted resources on swordsmen.)

Eventually, an army of archers built for looting is also a valuable city defense force whenever they are not deployed farming. Similarly, an army of slingers is useful for looting nearby player cities. Steps 6 & 7 in the table above can just as easily be achieved with slingers (step 6) and archers (step 7) while steps 1..5 are achieved with horsemen. All 7 steps can be queued at the same time and might take you a minute or two to queue then you can go away from keyboard while your troops complete their tasks.

Najevi 06:46, 1 November 2010 (CET)