Food Bonuses and Infantry Civs.

This is yet another post where I inundate the subreddit with too much information related to off-meta concepts that few people care about. Today I'll be talking about infantry civs and their food eco. This is all just food for thought, not meant to be definitive advice. That being said all the numbers/relations expressed should be correct to within a useful degree of accuracy.

Here's a brain teaser to start off. What is the relationship that exists between:

• bad build orders
• meta build orders
• known build orders

Given that, what claims must be true to infer things about unknown build orders?

Anyway onto the post. Everyone knows food post-dark-age is pretty time consuming to obtain. It's relatively slow to farm and on top of that you also have to build a farm. At 60 wood each that's pretty pricey to only get 175/250 food back. So naturally there's a hesitancy toward using food heavy units like militia.

Lucky for us the developers gave basically every infantry related civ a bonus which reduces the cost to obtain food, saves food, or improves the cost efficiency of infantry. So this post should serve as a repository for looking at infantry civs buffs as they relate to food.

The game has 11 civs which are considered "Infantry" civs. These are: Aztecs, Bulgarians, Celts, Goths, Incas, Japanese, Malians, Sicilians, Slavs, Teutons, Vikings. There's also a few other civs with infantry UUs who have bad cavalry or bad archers: Ethiopians, Franks, and Malay. There's also Burmese who get an infantry bonus. Malay elephants are good but also food heavy so this still applies to them.

Quite literally all 15 of these civs have tools to increase their food in the early or mid game. Some more than others (looking at you Incas.....). All of these civs have supplies or are Goths. Many also have direct infantry buffs early in the game improving cost effectiveness.

• Aztecs: Around 10% faster farming rate thanks to the carry bonus up until wheelbarrow and hand cart show up.
• Bulgarians: Save 100s of food by mid game at the blacksmith and from free militia upgrades.
• Burmese: Save 250f and 150w on lumber upgrades by early castle. Their infantry buff is very strong.
• Celts: More wood = more farms. Real farm productivity is about 3% higher due to higher wood gather rate, farms effectively costs about 12% less.
• Ethiopians: Pikes are a necessary complement to infantry vs cav civs, saves on that upgrade. Extra food and gold pretty self explanatory (e.g. could be used to make supplies effectively cost 50f).
• Franks: Faster berries, free farm upgrades. Saved resources can be more farms. Horse collar is around a 6.6% increase in real farm productivity, though you won't notice until late feudal.
• Goths: Effectively better version of free supplies and an extra discount in castle age. Extra villager from instant loom. Deer faster than default farming at up to 21 tiles away. Free/better arson.
• Incas: Free llama, but has to be gathered. The farm bonus increases farming by 1.4% in the early game down to around 1% late game. Its a joke. Just give the incas more than 1 llama already. Could at least buff the team bonus to farms build instantly (1-2 seconds) to bump the effect to ~3% in the early game.
• Japanese: Faster working fishing ships, save a sizeable amount of wood in the early game that can be used for "free" farms. Their infantry buff is very strong.
• Malay: Extra villagers, fish trap bonus. Malay fish traps are better than building town centers and farms iirc.
• Malians: Cheaper buildings = more wood = more farms. Plus free gold mining. Their infantry buff is very strong.
• Sicilians: A sicilian horse collar farm is about 10% more productive than default farms in real terms. Like normal horse collar you won't notice this until the midgame though. Also allows seeding more farms/saving wood in midgame when other civs would have to reseed farms. It's actually sometimes worthwhile delaying double bit axe to get sicilian horse collar ASAP if you have to choose between them.
• Slavs: 10% faster farming and free supplies. Free supplies is potentially huge for build orders. Cheaper siege and saving on houses helps with that mid game food boom as well.
• Teutons: Easily a top 2 direct food bonus. Default teuton farms are just as productive as heavy plow farms (except for the +1 carry cap) in real terms at 11% more than generic default farms. It also alters the budget constraint such that you can afford more farms at any point in time. Thus you can hit a desired food income faster than basically any other civ.
• Vikings: The other top 2 food bonus. Free wheelbarrow and handcart. It's like 10% then 20% better farming. Once these become 0% due to another civ researching these techs, it's a massive resource savings w.r.t. villagers and raw resources.

So assuming the incas get extra llamas or something similar that's 15/15 civs with a decent sized food relatable bonus and/or infantry buff and it covers a wide range from small to large.

So what's the point of this post? The point is that I personally think it is almost impossible for "infantry cost too much food" to be universally true. I think it's unlikely to even be generally true for infantry civs, at least it's certainly not true to a high degree of confidence. There are just some incredibly strong food bonuses in the game, especially teutons and vikings.

I also think buried in here somewhere is some type of competitive build order for something -> longswords + support. The biggest reason for this is that to my knowledge no one has a build order that reflects the best longswords or infantry UU can do. It would be one thing for a commonly known build order to exist and everyone knows "yeah this build order is the best you can do and it still sucks". It's an entirely different thing to assume every infantry build order will have that outcome. E.g. siege, towers, and pikes all complement infantry in different ways offensively and defensively. Stone walls hinder enemy mobility severely for only twice the cost of palisades. Given all of these complements available, I for one am not prepared to say that good players are so uncreative that they couldn't make longswords meta under current circumstances. The fact that the competive meta doesn't include them currently could be due to any number of reasons, only some of which allow the conclusion that they aren't meta because they are bad.

Which brings me back to the brain teaser at the beginning of the post. But this post is long enough so that's enough food for thought assuming you (the reader) made it this far.