This might will be a big post, Tl;Dr will be at bottom.
For a long time I have noticed a lot of confusion between how to determine the strengths of different units in late game, particularly whether cost or pop efficiency is best. For a long time I wasn't sure what the best method would be for determining units strengths, and it was something I was curious about, so looked into it. In this post I am going to explain the method I found which I think is best for determining actual unit efficiency at population cap – this is looking at the reinforcement rate of units. This mostly applies to TGs, but has some relevance to late game 1v1s also. Likewise this will apply well to melee units, but can be more complex for ranged units as I will show later.
To start off with the generally best method for determine unit efficiency is cost efficiency. E.g a knight of 135 cost is 2.25 times more expensive than a 60 cost pikeman, and thus expect players with similar eco strengths to be able to afford numbers equivalent to that ratio – e.g 12 knights to 27 pikes. There are ofc problems with this method: it doesn’t account for unit upgrade costs (pike is expensive upgrade), the value of each resource keeps changing, the differences in practical application of units (meaning speed + micro differences, though this is an issue for all such efficiencies), but the main issue it faces is dealing with the population cap at the end of the game. 60 paladin might cost the same as 135 halbs, but with 140 compared to 65 economy the paladin player should be able to afford much more army.
This leads to an argument of pure population efficiency, meaning that cost of units is mostly (or even entirely) ignored and only the population number counts. This would change the above 60 vs 135 paladin vs halbs into 60 paladin vs 60 halbs because each side would have 140 eco units behind it. Paladin win this fight by a large margin, so by viewing only population efficiency the dominant units are those which are more powerful regardless of cost. However, the pure population efficiency argument for has an obvious flaw: that more expensive units are more difficult to replace (or make in the first place) compared to cheaper units. Therefore the pop efficiency argument is not sufficient for determining unit strength/outcomes as it exaggerates the strength of more expensive powerful units.
This comes to the best method imo to work out unit strengths, and that is to work out the reinforcement/replace rate of units based on their economy. Reinforcement rate meaning the number of units which would be replaced with an ideal economy in a given time. To work this out just need to work out the ratio of villagers required for army to reinforce in a specific amount of time – for my purposes I am assuming that we want an economy which can remake full army in 4 minutes this is a slightly arbitrary number and it’s the ratio of villagers to army which really matters but it fits well with a typical paladin economy so I chose this to make things easier. It is also assumed that all the economy is working towards unit production (ofc this is impossible, but doesn’t really matter in determining the ratio of units). (There is perhaps some mathematical formula to work out the ratio of villagers to army, but I am no mathematician, so I just guess and checked to get the numbers) For example a typical late game set up for many civs is an economy of 120 villagers and an army of 80 paladin. Assuming a gather rate of 22 resources per minute, 120 vils make 2640 resources per minute which = 2640/135 = 19.5 paladins a minute. With such a set up it would take (roughly) 4 minutes to completely replace the army of paladin. Compare this to a halberdier player, they would need enough economy to be able to keep up unit production so that they can completely reinforce their army in 4 minutes in order to have a sustainable army against a paladin player. With 80 economy and 120 halbs they could afford 80 x 22 = 1760/60 = 29.3 halbs a minute, thus keeping up reinforcements to replace their army in 4 minutes. A likely battle between a halb and paladin player in a game would be at a ratio of 1.5 halbs to every 1 paladin, so 20 paladin against 30 halbs, or 40 paladin against 60 halbs. As would be little surprise to most, the paladin (just) win this match up. This means that in a population capped teamgame with full trade/gold pure paladins will (just) win against halbiders assuming both sides have full economy. The reinforcement rate therefore explains mathematically how population efficient armies are more powerful than cost efficiency would assume without unrealistically exaggerating their strength as population efficiency does.
Another example applying this method is war elephants against halberdier. If we look at cost efficencey it is 4.5 halbs for each elephants and even in larger numbers where the elephants trample damage comes into effect the halbs will win. However, applying reinforcement rate - If we look at war elephants, 150 vils x 22 = 3300 resources/275 (war elephant cost) = 12, 50/12 = 4.1 (closest we can get to 4), halbs we saw above have 120 army (for purpose of testing I halved numbers - its easier to test because 60 is max number allowed in a control group). So 25 elephants go against 60 halbs – and the result is heavily in favour of the elephants – about 18 elephants survived in my tests.
I mentioned halbs a lot in this post as losing to armies they are (in theory) meant to beat. This is not to dismiss halbs as a unit – they are a non-gold costing unit which is cheap and quick to replace so before pop cap they are good unit and are still decent afterwards. The reason I use in the examples is because they are a cheap melee unit which makes a great comparison to more pop efficient units. Also it shows clearly part of the reason why trash (non-gold costing units) generally aren’t as good in full trade Teamgames.
While I think the reinforcement rate method is the best for determining unit outcomes it does have its flaws. First ofc – it requires players to be pop capped, so does not apply so well if players are around 170 pop rather than 200 – in which case cost efficiency will have a greater impact. On the other hand it also does not account for the snowball effect. If there is a bit of time between fighting then a more population efficient army could either bank up more resources with its larger economy, or delete villagers for a larger army to give it an advantage. E.g a paladin player could delete 20 vils for 100 eco + 100 paladin army and a halb player could not realistically do they same, 100 paladins would win a battle vs halbs more decisively than 80, and then would snowball the reinforcements given that so many paladins remained after the first fight. - I think this snowball effect is the reason why its not common for halb players to run around with 120 army - because they need to have a decent number of villagers in order to maintain closer to equal footing when fights are not taking place - and thus a halb player might be further behind the paladin player than the reinforcement rate test indicates. Furthermore ranged units are a bit of an issue because they tend to not be killed as much in a typical TG composition so the correct measure is probably a bit closer to pure pop efficiency rather than reinforcement rate. Nevertheless in general I think reinforcement rates is the best method for determining the strength of units, particularly in relation to melee units in late game teamgames. It also has application in 1v1 games, but gold efficiency is more of a factor here (will save that for a future post).
I will post some videos in the near future which looks at the strength of units in a team game based on their reinforcement rates in more detail. They will also use melee + ranged combos in addition to reinforcement based numbers since they are more applicable to realistic team game battles.
Tl:DR: Neither cost or pop efficiency correctly account for the realistic amount of army which can be made by units with different cost. The best method for looking at how good ( in particular melee) units are in population capped late game team games is by looking at the ratio of villagers to military which can sustain an army – for my purposes assuming that the player wants an army fully replaced in 4 minutes. This is then compared to another unit, and together the numbers indicate the ratio of numbers that each army should have. E.g Assuming a gather rate of 22 resources per minute, 120 vils make 2640 resources per minute which = 2640/135 = 19.5 paladins a minute. With such a set up it would take 4 minutes to completely replace the army of paladin. The same method applied to halbs shows 80 eco with 120 army. This gives ratio of 1.5 halbs to every paladin – meaning 80 paladin vs 120 halbs. This same method can be applied to any/every melee unit to give a realistic indication of unit strengths.
For a long time I have noticed a lot of confusion between how to determine the strengths of different units in late game, particularly whether cost or pop efficiency is best. For a long time I wasn't sure what the best method would be for determining units strengths, and it was something I was curious about, so looked into it. In this post I am going to explain the method I found which I think is best for determining actual unit efficiency at population cap – this is looking at the reinforcement rate of units. This mostly applies to TGs, but has some relevance to late game 1v1s also. Likewise this will apply well to melee units, but can be more complex for ranged units as I will show later.
To start off with the generally best method for determine unit efficiency is cost efficiency. E.g a knight of 135 cost is 2.25 times more expensive than a 60 cost pikeman, and thus expect players with similar eco strengths to be able to afford numbers equivalent to that ratio – e.g 12 knights to 27 pikes. There are ofc problems with this method: it doesn’t account for unit upgrade costs (pike is expensive upgrade), the value of each resource keeps changing, the differences in practical application of units (meaning speed + micro differences, though this is an issue for all such efficiencies), but the main issue it faces is dealing with the population cap at the end of the game. 60 paladin might cost the same as 135 halbs, but with 140 compared to 65 economy the paladin player should be able to afford much more army.
This leads to an argument of pure population efficiency, meaning that cost of units is mostly (or even entirely) ignored and only the population number counts. This would change the above 60 vs 135 paladin vs halbs into 60 paladin vs 60 halbs because each side would have 140 eco units behind it. Paladin win this fight by a large margin, so by viewing only population efficiency the dominant units are those which are more powerful regardless of cost. However, the pure population efficiency argument for has an obvious flaw: that more expensive units are more difficult to replace (or make in the first place) compared to cheaper units. Therefore the pop efficiency argument is not sufficient for determining unit strength/outcomes as it exaggerates the strength of more expensive powerful units.
This comes to the best method imo to work out unit strengths, and that is to work out the reinforcement/replace rate of units based on their economy. Reinforcement rate meaning the number of units which would be replaced with an ideal economy in a given time. To work this out just need to work out the ratio of villagers required for army to reinforce in a specific amount of time – for my purposes I am assuming that we want an economy which can remake full army in 4 minutes this is a slightly arbitrary number and it’s the ratio of villagers to army which really matters but it fits well with a typical paladin economy so I chose this to make things easier. It is also assumed that all the economy is working towards unit production (ofc this is impossible, but doesn’t really matter in determining the ratio of units). (There is perhaps some mathematical formula to work out the ratio of villagers to army, but I am no mathematician, so I just guess and checked to get the numbers) For example a typical late game set up for many civs is an economy of 120 villagers and an army of 80 paladin. Assuming a gather rate of 22 resources per minute, 120 vils make 2640 resources per minute which = 2640/135 = 19.5 paladins a minute. With such a set up it would take (roughly) 4 minutes to completely replace the army of paladin. Compare this to a halberdier player, they would need enough economy to be able to keep up unit production so that they can completely reinforce their army in 4 minutes in order to have a sustainable army against a paladin player. With 80 economy and 120 halbs they could afford 80 x 22 = 1760/60 = 29.3 halbs a minute, thus keeping up reinforcements to replace their army in 4 minutes. A likely battle between a halb and paladin player in a game would be at a ratio of 1.5 halbs to every 1 paladin, so 20 paladin against 30 halbs, or 40 paladin against 60 halbs. As would be little surprise to most, the paladin (just) win this match up. This means that in a population capped teamgame with full trade/gold pure paladins will (just) win against halbiders assuming both sides have full economy. The reinforcement rate therefore explains mathematically how population efficient armies are more powerful than cost efficiency would assume without unrealistically exaggerating their strength as population efficiency does.
Another example applying this method is war elephants against halberdier. If we look at cost efficencey it is 4.5 halbs for each elephants and even in larger numbers where the elephants trample damage comes into effect the halbs will win. However, applying reinforcement rate - If we look at war elephants, 150 vils x 22 = 3300 resources/275 (war elephant cost) = 12, 50/12 = 4.1 (closest we can get to 4), halbs we saw above have 120 army (for purpose of testing I halved numbers - its easier to test because 60 is max number allowed in a control group). So 25 elephants go against 60 halbs – and the result is heavily in favour of the elephants – about 18 elephants survived in my tests.
I mentioned halbs a lot in this post as losing to armies they are (in theory) meant to beat. This is not to dismiss halbs as a unit – they are a non-gold costing unit which is cheap and quick to replace so before pop cap they are good unit and are still decent afterwards. The reason I use in the examples is because they are a cheap melee unit which makes a great comparison to more pop efficient units. Also it shows clearly part of the reason why trash (non-gold costing units) generally aren’t as good in full trade Teamgames.
While I think the reinforcement rate method is the best for determining unit outcomes it does have its flaws. First ofc – it requires players to be pop capped, so does not apply so well if players are around 170 pop rather than 200 – in which case cost efficiency will have a greater impact. On the other hand it also does not account for the snowball effect. If there is a bit of time between fighting then a more population efficient army could either bank up more resources with its larger economy, or delete villagers for a larger army to give it an advantage. E.g a paladin player could delete 20 vils for 100 eco + 100 paladin army and a halb player could not realistically do they same, 100 paladins would win a battle vs halbs more decisively than 80, and then would snowball the reinforcements given that so many paladins remained after the first fight. - I think this snowball effect is the reason why its not common for halb players to run around with 120 army - because they need to have a decent number of villagers in order to maintain closer to equal footing when fights are not taking place - and thus a halb player might be further behind the paladin player than the reinforcement rate test indicates. Furthermore ranged units are a bit of an issue because they tend to not be killed as much in a typical TG composition so the correct measure is probably a bit closer to pure pop efficiency rather than reinforcement rate. Nevertheless in general I think reinforcement rates is the best method for determining the strength of units, particularly in relation to melee units in late game teamgames. It also has application in 1v1 games, but gold efficiency is more of a factor here (will save that for a future post).
I will post some videos in the near future which looks at the strength of units in a team game based on their reinforcement rates in more detail. They will also use melee + ranged combos in addition to reinforcement based numbers since they are more applicable to realistic team game battles.
Tl:DR: Neither cost or pop efficiency correctly account for the realistic amount of army which can be made by units with different cost. The best method for looking at how good ( in particular melee) units are in population capped late game team games is by looking at the ratio of villagers to military which can sustain an army – for my purposes assuming that the player wants an army fully replaced in 4 minutes. This is then compared to another unit, and together the numbers indicate the ratio of numbers that each army should have. E.g Assuming a gather rate of 22 resources per minute, 120 vils make 2640 resources per minute which = 2640/135 = 19.5 paladins a minute. With such a set up it would take 4 minutes to completely replace the army of paladin. The same method applied to halbs shows 80 eco with 120 army. This gives ratio of 1.5 halbs to every paladin – meaning 80 paladin vs 120 halbs. This same method can be applied to any/every melee unit to give a realistic indication of unit strengths.