Complete results of Farming Rates (and other experiments) for AoE2:DE - v.34793

Hi. I decided to take up Farming testing again after the wake of the new Khmer farm bonus. I'm not really in the best of mood right now, so I won't go into too much. All of this testing took roughly just over a week of dedicated testing and like my previous testing that I have submitted here on Reddit, I've attempted to be as thorough as possible and present this to hopefully be the definitive results for farming gather rates as in the current state of the game.

Test 1 - Regular Farming Results

Test 1 is basically the standard testing. The testing for the first 3 tests (No Upgrades, Wheelbarrow, Hand Cart & Heavy Plow) is done with a standard optimized 8 Farms around the Town Center, running for 10 Minutes, 12 times per Civ / Upgrade, omitting the best and worst result due the nature of RNG (Testing sometimes produces abnormal gather rates, so this minimizes this and gives a more ideal average.) The "2nd Layer", or Double Layer testing is done with 12 Villagers and Farms one "layer" away from the Town Center. Same deal, 10 Minutes, 12 Times omitting the best and worst result. All testing is done at 1.7x Speed, which is the most common competitive speed and in case there is significant differences in game speed.

Percentages:

If there is one general take in this for every civilization (except the Khmer), is that you should not Double Layer farms until you have Hand Cart. There is just so much efficiency being lost. Also Heavy Plow does have a slight effect due to the +1 carry capacity, which is why it's included in the testing with Hand Cart.

Khmer's new farming bonus, obviously it's biggest strength is the fact they can basically build them anywhere. In general, it's still a great passive bonus compared to standard civilizations who have farms right beside drop off sites.

Slavs is more or less farming on par to 10% and outside of Aztecs pre-wheelbarrow, are the best farmers in the game in terms of pure optimized gather rates.

Aztecs have a great farming rate due to carry capacity having an indirect effect on the villager gathering mechanics. Because of this, the Aztecs are actually the best farmers in the game in the Dark Age / Pre-Wheelbarrow. However, this drops off rather quickly due to the Aztecs being affected by the 24 FpM cap. Even though they do not have a difference in gather rates compared to most civilizations after Hand Cart (The tests resulted in a slightly slower gather rate, but that is likely due to bad RNG), the extra carry capacity gives the Aztecs the best Double Layer farming in the game actually.

The Berbers I'm actually rather surprised. While the extra movement is just a nice, minor passive bonus as it always has been, I was thinking that the extra speed would make the Berbers great as doing double layer farms. This isn't the case. The Berbers are not that much efficient in doing double layer farms than most other civilizations.

Mayans have a slower gather rate on purpose since the resource bonuses that they have also increases the workrate of villagers, so their tech tree has a negative workrate multiplier to the villagers to compensate. This is as close as they can get to generic civilizations without having a faster workrate. However, an interesting side effect for the Mayans in Definitive Edition is that Resource 190, the effect that grants Mayans extra food on food resources, now affects the workrate of Farms just like the Slavs. Because of this, the Mayans are no longer affected by the 24 Food per Minute cap that Farms have (Except for the Slavs) and can now farm slightly faster than average after Hand Cart. This is clearly a bug and should be fixed soon. With it fixed, the Mayans with Hand Cart would farm at just above 24 Food per Minute just like mostly everyone else. That being said, the one thing you should never do with the Mayans is double layer farms, it's very inefficient for them due to the naturally lower workrates.

Test 2: Game Speed Differences

I decided to also test gamespeeds in Definitive Edition since that hasn't really been tested yet. The test is the same as the previous result\While gamespeed before had somewhat of a noticeable effect in HD and even the original 1.0c release, the Farming rates between gamespeeds in Definitive Edition are, at best, very minor. Even though it still follows the usual trend of slower gamespeeds = higher gather rates, due to the randomness of Farming in general, there could actually be no difference and the progressive rate could just be a coincidence. I also do not think 1.5x speed is the "fastest", I just think they had better RNG luck and at best, it's the same as 1.0x speed, if there is a gatherrate difference.

Test 3: True Khmer Farming Rate Testing

The testing method in this test is simply a single villager and a farm in the Dark Age getting 10 food as fast as they can in multiple games each. The Khmer uses the new "trickle" mechanic while the Generic Civilization uses a custom Dataset that sets the villager drop off to the Farm. This is different from the Khmer since this method, the villager automatically drops off the food when at 10 food and does not trickle in. The point of this test is to make sure that the new bonus isn't directly contributing to a faster gathering rate besides the lack of drop off sites. As in, the Khmer are not actually farming faster than regular civilizations

Generic Civ: (Average = 27 seconds) 29, 29, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 27, 26, 26, 26, 25, 25, 25, 25

Khmer: (Average = 28.667 seconds) 33, 32, 32, 31, 30, 29, 29, 29, 29, 28, 28, 27, 27, 27, 26, 26, 25

Result: Khmer farm roughly 6.17% slower than generic civilizations in terms of gathering food, but the lack of drop off sites more than makes up for it.

Off topic and probably unnecessary, but as of this, I'm taking a break from Age of Empires. I just have way too much going on and internal issues with the community is not helping with things.