How long does it take the first wood and farm upgrades to pay off?

Hey everyone,

Double-bit axe and Horse Collar are the first two commonly researched economy upgrades, for good reason. They don't use a unit production building to research and both interact with the wood and food economy that you use to expand your economic power, so if you already have the income to have your town center be active, you can sink more resources into a more productive future.

But which one is the better upgrade to do first? Well, paying for either costs villager time to do. I will be assuming no travel time for gathering, and assuming a herdable food gather rate. Given that both faster and slower food gathering methods exist, I think it works as a back of the envelop measurement. No travel Rates pulled from https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/6sfb6s/spirit_of_the_law_updated_villager_gather_rates/

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This is an interesting result, because it shows that Double-bit Axe actually costs more villager time, and it only gets worse with less fast food gathering methods.

However, double-bit axe pays for itself in "virtual villager time" much much faster. As soon as the research completes, your villager are 20% better, and you see this increase basically immediately, as soon as villagers have the option to complete harvesting trip benefiting from the research.

Horse collar. ... takes forever to pay off. You only actually get a benefit from horse collar after going past the 175 food that unupgraded farms give you. That is 565 (using a 0.310 food/sec gather rate including travel) seconds of constant farming. You then need 241 seconds to extract that extra 75 food. That extra up time gives your wood villagers the ability to supply more farms with wood. In the 804 seconds a single generic no upgrades villager could gather at most 272 wood compared to 190 wood which is 6 farms worth of wood vs 3 farms worth of wood.

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So that is close to a 100% bonus in productivity ... for wood villagers whose wood gets turned into farms, that takes real minutes to materialize into value with no ability to quickly expand operations to get more benefit.

In short, double-bit axe is a bit more villager time expensive than horse collar and less impactful for what it impacts, but because it applies instantly to all wood gathering villagers, rather than just the wood gathering villagers who feed farms after serious amounts of farming time has been sunk in.

The fact that double-bit axe makes the actual villager time cost of horse collar cheaper after completing it (faster wood gather rate) while farm upgrades improve the wood to food trade of farms instead of the villager time to food gathered times also probably helps determine why double-bit gets researched first.... and also why some dark age farming happens as well. Maintaining food income as natural food resources get consumed is much more important than conserving wood, and only being able to even think about noticing that wood conservation after 5 minutes of a farm being up with the upgrade.