As any player of Age of Empires will know, the amount of town centres you utilise in your economy has a large bearing on how you play that particular game. More town centres pays off in the long term, but leaves you exposed in the short term. Correspondingly, less town centres allow you to be more aggressive in the short term, but if you don't make it count, you'll fall away in the long term. We know that the one town centre power play can be a lethal tool for winning games. Can it ever be justified to stop villager production completely for the sake of military?
To be clear, a town centre requires six to seven farms (depending on upgrades) to sustain villager production. An individual town centre requires an investment of 275 wood and 100 stone to build, as well as the cost of the farms to offset villager production. This represents a weakening of your immediate military power, as you divert resources away to invest in economy. Of course, the pay off is that the villagers you produce pay for themselves and then start paying for further military. In that sense, investing in villagers is a calculated risk, that has to be weighed against your ability to protect your economy and existing military long enough for that villager to start turning in surplus labour.
In a practical context, when players reach the castle age in Arabia, they have the choice to put up extra town centres. Beyond the purpose of protecting economic zones, a player who is confident of defending their territory can use these extra town centres to build their economy, and by consequence, their military capacity. The idea of the one town centre power play on the other hand is simple: as long as an opponent is producing from more than one town centre, they're investing resources into economy that they could be investing in military. Because economic investments don't yield immediate results, there's a window when your army is larger than theirs. A larger army allows you to kill more military units as well as enemy villagers and buildings, destroying the investment in the process.
The question is can we extend this logic to stopping villager production entirely? We know that in forward wars, the winner is often the player who can mass more trash. Although getting economic upgrades help you produce more trash during the feudal age, the immediate nature of the fighting means that an edge in skirmishers early in the forward can mean researching horse collar can lose you more than it gains compared to if you delayed it (more on this can be found here). If it's sometimes justified to make economic sacrifices to win an important fight, does it follow that it's sometimes justified to stop villager production entirely and go truly all in? I suspect the main factor against it is that although it costs 375 resources and building time to build a second town centre, your first town centre is free, so there's no reason not to use it. Still, I'm curious to know if there's any time it's appropriate to engage the zero TC power play.
To be clear, a town centre requires six to seven farms (depending on upgrades) to sustain villager production. An individual town centre requires an investment of 275 wood and 100 stone to build, as well as the cost of the farms to offset villager production. This represents a weakening of your immediate military power, as you divert resources away to invest in economy. Of course, the pay off is that the villagers you produce pay for themselves and then start paying for further military. In that sense, investing in villagers is a calculated risk, that has to be weighed against your ability to protect your economy and existing military long enough for that villager to start turning in surplus labour.
In a practical context, when players reach the castle age in Arabia, they have the choice to put up extra town centres. Beyond the purpose of protecting economic zones, a player who is confident of defending their territory can use these extra town centres to build their economy, and by consequence, their military capacity. The idea of the one town centre power play on the other hand is simple: as long as an opponent is producing from more than one town centre, they're investing resources into economy that they could be investing in military. Because economic investments don't yield immediate results, there's a window when your army is larger than theirs. A larger army allows you to kill more military units as well as enemy villagers and buildings, destroying the investment in the process.
The question is can we extend this logic to stopping villager production entirely? We know that in forward wars, the winner is often the player who can mass more trash. Although getting economic upgrades help you produce more trash during the feudal age, the immediate nature of the fighting means that an edge in skirmishers early in the forward can mean researching horse collar can lose you more than it gains compared to if you delayed it (more on this can be found here). If it's sometimes justified to make economic sacrifices to win an important fight, does it follow that it's sometimes justified to stop villager production entirely and go truly all in? I suspect the main factor against it is that although it costs 375 resources and building time to build a second town centre, your first town centre is free, so there's no reason not to use it. Still, I'm curious to know if there's any time it's appropriate to engage the zero TC power play.