Market Trading Vs Selling: An Analysis

[nimanoe]

Then you have to include the opportunity cost of having used that pop for wood chopping which isn't negligible.

No you don't, unless you deleted vills since you were pop-limit.
Anyway, this argument that a lot of games end before the game is over is pretty bad. If someone adds additional villagers just before the enemy resigns, that investment didn't pay off, but that doesn't mean that it was a wrong decision to add those additional villagers. The same goes for adding trade carts, although the time before it pays off is a bit longer than with villagers, but the point is still the same: If the enemy had resigned a few minutes later, the investment would've been worth it.

 

[HyunaOP]

Man, all I did was post a video of Spirit of the Law showing us that trade generates more gold than selling and I thought that would be the end.

And RicoJay is a big SOTL fan, so I'm shook how this is still going. If this doesn't make it into YouTu... I mean aoezone rewind then idk what will.

 

[robdyrob]

Man, all I did was post a video of Spirit of the Law showing us that trade generates more gold than selling and I thought that would be the end.

And RicoJay is a big SOTL fan, so I'm shook how this is still going. If this doesn't make it into YouTu... I mean aoezone rewind then idk what will.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all the events and personalities of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. (Marx, 18. Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

Marx forgot to add that the question about "Market trading vs. selling" was already a farce at the first time.

 

[theHand]

Man, all I did was post a video of Spirit of the Law showing us that trade generates more gold than selling and I thought that would be the end.

And RicoJay is a big SOTL fan, so I'm shook how this is still going. If this doesn't make it into YouTu... I mean aoezone rewind then idk what will.

No, no, no, you're not getting off that easily. I warned you the first time you necro-posted this zombie awake that nothing good would come of it. That SotL video was simply entertainment. His 'rigorous analysis' isn't much better than the OP's here. It should have been blindingly obvious that Mathman would have a field day picking holes. You're now just as culpable as him for this ****-show... 11

 

[HyunaOP]

No, no, no, you're not getting off that easily. I warned you the first time you necro-posted this zombie awake that nothing good would come of it. That SotL video was simply entertainment. His 'rigorous analysis' isn't much better than the OP's here. It should have been blindingly obvious that Mathman would have a field day picking holes. You're now just as culpable as him for this ****-show... 11

I'm not letting you off either, you lost a game man. Smh.

 

[theHand]

I'm not letting you off either, you lost a game man. Smh.

Touché! I even struggle to make a ninth trade cart every time I play voobly arabia TGs. Imagine thinking that this negated everyone else's arguments and lent credence to your own... omegalulz 11

 

[flightlessbird]

I am loathed to give this topic any more attention, but given that it seems to be revived regardless I wanted to comment on a few things.


The whole ‘I get 3000 extra res or 40 extra mangudai’ argument is disingenuous. Even ignoring the issue of production time etc it is a pathetically small amount of army for a full economy over 14 minutes. In 14 minutes an economy can produce roughly 45500 resources or (using your numbers) 626 mangudai. This means that the person doing an all in push gets an impressive 6% extra army. Or to put it in other words, in exchange for 1 out of 14 minutes military production a person can establish full trade. Even if you take the first 6 minutes (where the majority of the cost is) it is only 15% of economy dedicated to trade during that time. The reality is, if the map is BF the resources must go to siege to push. The extra 3000 res you get from not building trade isn’t even enough to afford the SO, and even with onager cut you lose most of your advantage.

Furthermore, you neglect (or at least downplay) the set up costs for selling, which requires extra lumber camps and guilds. Assuming 4 extra lumber camps (you will likely need more) a ‘seller’ will be ‘in debt’ for 9 minutes and still -500 in debt when the ‘trader’ is at highest point of debt, meaning that the ‘traders’ peak resource deficit is closer to 2500 than 3000. Not to mention that if you want a somewhat sustainable economy then you will need many more villagers, which adds additional cost and reduces army pop space.

You seem to try and use as evidence for your argument that sometimes higher level players will not build trade, and fail to realise that most of the time they are DELAYING trade, they will start it later if the game goes on. Reasons to delay trade may be because the team doesn’t control a good trade route, the opposing team has greatly superior late game civs, or perhaps the opposing team has a forward which needs cleared first. Some maps like arena can also be more difficult to set up trade. Nevertheless setting up trade is the standard for a reason, and is usually superior to delay. It is often easy to tell at lower levels who the better players are based on how quickly they start trade.

Furthermore, you seem to claim that if a player hasn’t reached x amount of trade profit it wasn’t worth it, which is an incorrect approach because A – they may not have invested as much as you assume and B – it is a far more secure way of winning a game by establishing a sustainable economy, even if it does not pay off before the opponent resigns.

Most importantly point – the maths simply isn’t important to players. While it is of underlying importance most players do not have a bunch of calculations in their head about each situation, and rather learn the best application through putting it into practise over a large number of games. Trade is an example of this. Players try trading, delaying trade, and not trading in various scenarios and (99.9% anyway) come to the conclusion that trade is usually the best course of action.

 

[RicoJay13]

No you don't, unless you deleted vills since you were pop-limit.
Anyway, this argument that a lot of games end before the game is over is pretty bad. If someone adds additional villagers just before the enemy resigns, that investment didn't pay off, but that doesn't mean that it was a wrong decision to add those additional villagers. The same goes for adding trade carts, although the time before it pays off is a bit longer than with villagers, but the point is still the same: If the enemy had resigned a few minutes later, the investment would've been worth it.

My point is that the data is out there, and in most yt games and in most games I've played in trade doesn't pay off by the end of the game. If the decisive moment in most games happens inside of that 14 minute ROI window, I stand by the assertion that would make ramping into trade bad as the meta.

Using your analogy, it might be the case that the last villager made in most games doesn't pay off. I would argue that you therefore could make the case that the last villager is a leak in people's games and they should stop making that last villager. I honestly don't know this is just an analogy.

In my experience, I kept wishing I had resources while I was busy trying to set up trade and created the spreadsheet to see if there was more to this seemingly obvious meta thing to ramp into trade.

 

[RicoJay13]

I am loathed to give this topic any more attention, but given that it seems to be revived regardless I wanted to comment on a few things.


The whole ‘I get 3000 extra res or 40 extra mangudai’ argument is disingenuous. Even ignoring the issue of production time etc it is a pathetically small amount of army for a full economy over 14 minutes. In 14 minutes an economy can produce roughly 45500 resources or (using your numbers) 626 mangudai. This means that the person doing an all in push gets an impressive 6% extra army. Or to put it in other words, in exchange for 1 out of 14 minutes military production a person can establish full trade. Even if you take the first 6 minutes (where the majority of the cost is) it is only 15% of economy dedicated to trade during that time. The reality is, if the map is BF the resources must go to siege to push. The extra 3000 res you get from not building trade isn’t even enough to afford the SO, and even with onager cut you lose most of your advantage.

Furthermore, you neglect (or at least downplay) the set up costs for selling, which requires extra lumber camps and guilds. Assuming 4 extra lumber camps (you will likely need more) a ‘seller’ will be ‘in debt’ for 9 minutes and still -500 in debt when the ‘trader’ is at highest point of debt, meaning that the ‘traders’ peak resource deficit is closer to 2500 than 3000. Not to mention that if you want a somewhat sustainable economy then you will need many more villagers, which adds additional cost and reduces army pop space.

You seem to try and use as evidence for your argument that sometimes higher level players will not build trade, and fail to realise that most of the time they are DELAYING trade, they will start it later if the game goes on. Reasons to delay trade may be because the team doesn’t control a good trade route, the opposing team has greatly superior late game civs, or perhaps the opposing team has a forward which needs cleared first. Some maps like arena can also be more difficult to set up trade. Nevertheless setting up trade is the standard for a reason, and is usually superior to delay. It is often easy to tell at lower levels who the better players are based on how quickly they start trade.

Furthermore, you seem to claim that if a player hasn’t reached x amount of trade profit it wasn’t worth it, which is an incorrect approach because A – they may not have invested as much as you assume and B – it is a far more secure way of winning a game by establishing a sustainable economy, even if it does not pay off before the opponent resigns.

Most importantly point – the maths simply isn’t important to players. While it is of underlying importance most players do not have a bunch of calculations in their head about each situation, and rather learn the best application through putting it into practise over a large number of games. Trade is an example of this. Players try trading, delaying trade, and not trading in various scenarios and (99.9% anyway) come to the conclusion that trade is usually the best course of action.

You're completely right, I forgot about the cost for Guilds. I'll add a box in my spreadsheet to select whether to pay for Guilds (some civs get and some don't) or not. In 2017. Do you want me to tell you which cell it is? Honestly is there a way to require some basic reading and opening the spreadsheet before any basic dude just types a long but moronic post? Open the spreadsheet. Try to understand it. Watch the video. You might learn something.

All my wood collection includes the cost of the camps at periodic times. I mean obviously. I did it in the editor with all 3 types of civs: non final upgrade, final upgrade and Celts. I got 26.7, 30.2, and 31.1 respectively. I am pretty sure I typed this exact sentence 23 times. It's been read by you zero times.

The "total resources" boils wood and food down at market bottom prices, so most assuredly you can afford the siege onager upgrade with the extra resources from NOT ramping into trade. Rock bottom prices depend on whether your civ gets Guilds or not, which I'm just finding out about since you mentioned it above just kidding. This thread has been going on so long that this specific conversation was already had! In fact I pointed out that if all you get for your extra resources is an upgrade like SO, you can see in the editor very easily how game-changing that is because SO flatten regular Onagers with ease.

If most of the time trade doesn't pay off, then yes beyond a shadow of a doubt I win the argument and everyone who thinks trade is profitable loses. That's what we're arguing about. This argument that "you don't know how long the game will go so the safe play is to ramp into trade" is silly. That's like saying "you don't know whether you will have a car accident so you better get car insurance to be safe". The obvious retort is "yeah and it's a bad investment to do so which is why insurance companies have their names on stadiums and jerseys." Aoe2 isn't like life where you want to move the risk from you to a larger entity so that you avoid bankruptcy. Do you buy the archer defense upgrades just in case you go into archers every single game? No, because that would be bad ROI most of the time.

 

[nimanoe]

My point is that the data is out there, and in most yt games and in most games I've played in trade doesn't pay off by the end of the game. If the decisive moment in most games happens inside of that 14 minute ROI window, I stand by the assertion that would make ramping into trade bad as the meta.

We've been over this already: Most games take longer than that

Using your analogy, it might be the case that the last villager made in most games doesn't pay off. I would argue that you therefore could make the case that the last villager is a leak in people's games and they should stop making that last villager. I honestly don't know this is just an analogy.

In my experience, I kept wishing I had resources while I was busy trying to set up trade and created the spreadsheet to see if there was more to this seemingly obvious meta thing to ramp into trade.

But you don't know whether the last vill you make will be the last one before the enemy resigns, therefore you should make them until you're fully boomed. If you stop making them before that, you'll open yourself up to a comeback if the enemy manages to deal with your army. Going for extra economy is just the safe choice, if the enemy resigns in a few minutes, it's wasted resources, but if he doesn't you should have the superior economy for the remaining of the game.

 

[flightlessbird]

I am going to refrain from commeting beyond this reply here, since seems 90% chance you are trolling, or 10% chance being stubborn - which would be a shame since I actually agree with some of your other comments I have seen on other matters.

You're completely right, I forgot about the cost for Guilds. I'll add a box in my spreadsheet to select whether to pay for Guilds (some civs get and some don't) or not. In 2017. Do you want me to tell you which cell it is? Honestly is there a way to require some basic reading and opening the spreadsheet before any basic dude just types a long but moronic post? Open the spreadsheet. Try to understand it. Watch the video. You might learn something.

All my wood collection includes the cost of the camps at periodic times. I mean obviously. I did it in the editor with all 3 types of civs: non final upgrade, final upgrade and Celts. I got 26.7, 30.2, and 31.1 respectively. I am pretty sure I typed this exact sentence 23 times. It's been read by you zero times.

Your spreadsheet is poorly organised and confusing. In some places guilds and caravan are given full cost, and in others are given reduced food/wood cost. However, no where have I see mention of -900 res to start for seller, or 9 minute pay back for seller - which means either you left them out, applied a lower cost to starting lumbercamps in contrast to starting markets, or conveniently failed to mention them - hence my commet. (perhaps they are hiding away in some forum commet, I have read large parts of it but not all 57 pages...)

If most of the time trade doesn't pay off, then yes beyond a shadow of a doubt I win the argument and everyone who thinks trade is profitable loses. That's what we're arguing about. This argument that "you don't know how long the game will go so the safe play is to ramp into trade" is silly. That's like saying "you don't know whether you will have a car accident so you better get car insurance to be safe". The obvious retort is "yeah and it's a bad investment to do so which is why insurance companies have their names on stadiums and jerseys." Aoe2 isn't like life where you want to move the risk from you to a larger entity so that you avoid bankruptcy. Do you buy the archer defense upgrades just in case you go into archers every single game? No, because that would be bad ROI most of the time.

Its basic rts knowledge that it is better to have a safe win if possible than a risky all in. For instance in this game: https://youtu.be/QlS0et8Exzk - (which I remember you claiming as prove of no trade being good) making trade is ofc correct desision, since even if opponets come back they have no chance of winning if no trade vs established trade. Also notice how trade was a bit later than usual since there was early game warfare, and the one team didn't build trade because they didn't have a trade route (all good reasons for delaying trade). Even from watching other rts games can see that a safe win is better than a risky one. Your insurance analogy isn't bad. Also see Nimanoe's commets on which he is 100% correct.

most assuredly you can afford the siege onager upgrade with the extra resources from NOT ramping into trade

Even with your assumptions the cost for SO alone is 80% of your advantage already. An advantage which is already minimal - only 6% over 14 mins.

I guess I should thank you, I never realized how low the cost of setting up trade was before looking at your numbers. I fail to see any other intepretation from your data. In effect with full economy military production can be stopped for 1 out of 14 minutes to pay for cost of establishing full trade. It is very easy to stall for this length of time, espeically on a closed map like BF. Not to mention the value of the defenders advantage. And with full trade you have 4-5x advantage over opponets as game goes on in gold production a massive amount.

 

[MaSmOrRa]

This argument that "you don't know how long the game will go so the safe play is to ramp into trade" is silly. That's like saying "you don't know whether you will have a car accident so you better get car insurance to be safe". The obvious retort is "yeah and it's a bad investment to do so which is why insurance companies have their names on stadiums and jerseys."

Ha!
I’m starting to think this might just be a cultural difference in our ways of thinking lol.

Your insurance analogy is perfect, actually.
And yes, even if I never happen to be in a car accident, I would still consider my car insurance a good investment.
It’s good to know I won’t go bankrupt if something bad happens to my brand new car.
Similarly, it’s good to know my BF game won’t be over if my first push fails to defeat my opponent.

Anyway, I stand by my point that those 40 mangudai aren’t nearly enough to defeat an equally skilled opponent, fully boomed, with trade, in a map like blackforest. And so far I haven’t seen 1 good argument coming from you that proves the contrary. Your gameplay experience at a rather low skill level (absolutely no offense intended here) is obviously totally irrelevant.

By the way, I bet any BF game you find on yt will most likely be a troll-ish game, especially if Viper is in it.

But hey, the good news is you have hundreds of BF games being played on Voobly every day, with excellent and very experienced players. And you know what, you can spectate them for free! No time for spectating? Not a problem, Voobly stores every single rated game played on its platform and you can download the rec whenever you have the time. For free, of course.

You would think that would be the perfect opportunity to empirically prove your theory?

Don’t tell me you’re just as lazy as all the people you have accused of being lazy by not reading your spreadsheet?

 

[12Tirador]

Instead of car insurance think of trading as putting your seatbelt on... If you didn't do it and you happen to need it you are dead.

Alll those seconds you could have saved throghout your whole life by not putting your seatbelt on are 40 mangudais.

I believe buckling up is the better option here.

 

[RicoJay13]

I am going to refrain from commeting beyond this reply here, since seems 90% chance you are trolling, or 10% chance being stubborn - which would be a shame since I actually agree with some of your other comments I have seen on other matters.



Your spreadsheet is poorly organised and confusing. In some places guilds and caravan are given full cost, and in others are given reduced food/wood cost. However, no where have I see mention of -900 res to start for seller, or 9 minute pay back for seller - which means either you left them out, applied a lower cost to starting lumbercamps in contrast to starting markets, or conveniently failed to mention them - hence my commet. (perhaps they are hiding away in some forum commet, I have read large parts of it but not all 57 pages...)



Its basic rts knowledge that it is better to have a safe win if possible than a risky all in. For instance in this game: https://youtu.be/QlS0et8Exzk - (which I remember you claiming as prove of no trade being good) making trade is ofc correct desision, since even if opponets come back they have no chance of winning if no trade vs established trade. Also notice how trade was a bit later than usual since there was early game warfare, and the one team didn't build trade because they didn't have a trade route (all good reasons for delaying trade). Even from watching other rts games can see that a safe win is better than a risky one. Your insurance analogy isn't bad. Also see Nimanoe's commets on which he is 100% correct.



Even with your assumptions the cost for SO alone is 80% of your advantage already. An advantage which is already minimal - only 6% over 14 mins.

I guess I should thank you, I never realized how low the cost of setting up trade was before looking at your numbers. I fail to see any other intepretation from your data. In effect with full economy military production can be stopped for 1 out of 14 minutes to pay for cost of establishing full trade. It is very easy to stall for this length of time, espeically on a closed map like BF. Not to mention the value of the defenders advantage. And with full trade you have 4-5x advantage over opponets as game goes on in gold production a massive amount.

The wood collection rate includes the -100 to build the lumber camp. Ie, Teutons collect wood higher than the 30.2 w/m collection rate, but baking in the 100w lumber camp cost every 20 minutes puts them at the 30.2 figure. I'm not sure what your 9 minute ROI comes from. 6 vils building a lumber camp (Teutons for the easy math) collect 30.2w/m per vil so that's 180 wood in a minute. Sure it takes ~15s to build the lumber camp but the ROI is < 1 minute by any measure.

It's been discussed that the majority of games I've seen on yt and played in, players ramp into trade long before the market cost of wood/food have crashed. Yet I've used the rock bottom price of wood for the 100w cost for trade carts. In reality it's actually an even worse investment from an ROI perspective in games where you're spending 100w per cart and the market price of wood is still around say 80. Because my poorly organized spreadsheet that nobody looks at until they say something completely incorrect about it is calculating the ROI as though the wood cost for trade carts is almost negligible (14 or 17 at rock bottom). As a compromise, my spreadsheet uses the full cost (not rock bottom) of building the markets and Caravan as those things logically happen first and almost never occur with the wood price crashed.

I also pay for car insurance. But I understand it's a bad ROI only justified by the peace of mind. That does NOT translate to aoe2. There's no risk of ruin in a game of aoe2. There's only decisions which either improve or reduce your chances of winning the game. In the same way buying car insurance reduces your long term wealth overall, ramping into trade reduces your long term chances of winning the aoe2 games you play in.

Citing voobly players who exclusively play 4v4 BF and show the average game length until all players on one team resigns to be ~50 minutes makes me want to wager thousands of dollars that trade pays off well less than 50% of the time. Let me show you how I come to that conclusion:

4v4 Black Forest | Mongols

Twitch ► https://www.twitch.tv/tyrant_theviper TheViper Merch ► http://theviper.themonetizr.com Twitter ► https://twitter.com/TheViperAOC Facebook ► https://...

youtu.be

In that game, he actually checks his # carts right where I've linked it. 25 and keeps making them which you can see every 50s in game time where his markets highlight and new yellow units come out of them. At the finish screen, he has ~4k in trade revenue. If you look in my spreadsheet (linked again below) and use column E to go down to running gold capture of around that 4k figure, you can see that is still inside the window where trade has NOT paid off.

The gg is called at 58:30 in game time. That is significantly longer than the average game cited previously of around 50 minutes for voobly BF 4v4 exclusive players.

This video also includes him deleting vils even though several people continue to believe and argue that isn't what always happens when people ramp into trade.

As a fun fact Viper has the most trade revenue in this game. So logically it's very unlikely any other player made trade profit in this game.

Fun fact #2 is that this game ended as soon as Mangudai got into the enemy trade route and slaughtered all those units that cost about as much as War Wagons and were bad investments.

Age Trading Analysis

Master Sheet Equation for gold based on distance,Enter carts#,32,Halved y = 0.0024x2 + 0.0823x + 0.9875,<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/2ua4mq/trade_cart_value/">https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/2ua4mq/trade_cart_value/</a>,<--- yellow boxes you can change, theyre variables...

docs.google.com

 

[RicoJay13]

Ha!
I’m starting to think this might just be a cultural difference in our ways of thinking lol.

Your insurance analogy is perfect, actually.
And yes, even if I never happen to be in a car accident, I would still consider my car insurance a good investment.
It’s good to know I won’t go bankrupt if something bad happens to my brand new car.
Similarly, it’s good to know my BF game won’t be over if my first push fails to defeat my opponent.

Anyway, I stand by my point that those 40 mangudai aren’t nearly enough to defeat an equally skilled opponent, fully boomed, with trade, in a map like blackforest. And so far I haven’t seen 1 good argument coming from you that proves the contrary. Your gameplay experience at a rather low skill level (absolutely no offense intended here) is obviously totally irrelevant.

By the way, I bet any BF game you find on yt will most likely be a troll-ish game, especially if Viper is in it.

But hey, the good news is you have hundreds of BF games being played on Voobly every day, with excellent and very experienced players. And you know what, you can spectate them for free! No time for spectating? Not a problem, Voobly stores every single rated game played on its platform and you can download the rec whenever you have the time. For free, of course.

You would think that would be the perfect opportunity to empirically prove your theory?

Don’t tell me you’re just as lazy as all the people you have accused of being lazy by not reading your spreadsheet?

Lazy? I'm the one posting videos of pro BF games that prove my point. See above. You're the one who is making long posts that don't actually make any progress towards this discussion.

I've said it 100x, but the skill Viper shows even if you think it's trolling is a skill level far beyond what I or the 99.9% majority of aoe2 players will ever achieve. Even at that skill level, they don't earn trade profit relative to chopping.

 

[RicoJay13]

I'm not letting you off either, you lost a game man. Smh.

The guy manned up and played me. We agreed we are at similar skill level. He lost fair and square and didn't earn a trade profit. This should be data, not a source of insult. Unfortunately nobody seems to want to see it that way.

 

[MaSmOrRa]

Lazy? I'm the one posting videos of pro BF games that prove my point. See above. You're the one who is making long posts that don't actually make any progress towards this discussion.

I've said it 100x, but the skill Viper shows even if you think it's trolling is a skill level far beyond what I or the 99.9% majority of aoe2 players will ever achieve. Even at that skill level, they don't earn trade profit relative to chopping.

Fair enough, I tend to make long posts. That's my bad.

I my defense though, I do read everyone else's long posts. Yours included, of course.

Did you read mine? And the part where I suggest you look for recs on Voobly where you have a huge ammount of data that could prove (or disprove) your theory?

 

[HarshtJ]

Even if games end before the time the trade kicks in, there is one more argument. If I am on the backfoot and I know enemy has started trade, I'll resign. If I am on the backfoot and enemy has no trade, I still have some hope left of comeback. If I can somehow deal with this last wave of enemy attack, I can comeback to win the game since the enemy has to start trade or sell resources in bottomed out market or move to trash.

 

[nimanoe]

In that game, he actually checks his # carts right where I've linked it. 25 and keeps making them which you can see every 50s in game time where his markets highlight and new yellow units come out of them. At the finish screen, he has ~4k in trade revenue. If you look in my spreadsheet (linked again below) and use column E to go down to running gold capture of around that 4k figure, you can see that is still inside the window where trade has NOT paid off.

Again, you're using the same problem as before, just because the enemy calls the gg before the trade can pay off doesn't mean it's not a good investment. If Viper wasn't able to get in the enemy trade and the game would've gone on for a few more minutes, the trade would've paid off.

The gg is called at 58:30 in game time. That is significantly longer than the average game cited previously of around 50 minutes for voobly BF 4v4 exclusive players.

Viper also starts trade way later than the average game, he makes his markets around 40 min in the game, but doesn't make tradecarts until around 8 minutes later. In the average game the trade will start around 30 min, so 18 min before Viper actually started the trade. Following that logic, trade will pay off in most games.
So saying that in this game the trade hasn't paid off as an argument that in most games the trade won't paid off is disingenuous.

This video also includes him deleting vils even though several people continue to believe and argue that isn't what always happens when people ramp into trade.

Yes, he starts deleting 15 villagers by my count at 51 min in the game. Then 3 more at around 55 min in. Those vills have been collecting resources for longer than you accounted for in your document and are way less than the 40 you accounted for. I honestly don't know how you think that this shows you're right, when it shows the exact opposite.

 

[RicoJay13]

Even if games end before the time the trade kicks in, there is one more argument. If I am on the backfoot and I know enemy has started trade, I'll resign. If I am on the backfoot and enemy has no trade, I still have some hope left of comeback. If I can somehow deal with this last wave of enemy attack, I can comeback to win the game since the enemy has to start trade or sell resources in bottomed out market or move to trash.

By then it's too late. I mean that from a math perspective, not a gameplay one. Ie, an extra 40 Mangudai of resources is enough to swing what would have been a game where you end up on your backfoot, to a game where you push into your opponents base and end the game or raid his trade etc.

It's also a purely conjectural argument. If most games end before trade pays off, this is a leak in people's games and it's easy to fix.

 

[RicoJay13]

Again, you're using the same problem as before, just because the enemy calls the gg before the trade can pay off doesn't mean it's not a good investment. If Viper wasn't able to get in the enemy trade and the game would've gone on for a few more minutes, the trade would've paid off.

This is a gloriously ridiculous argument. You're right: if games would all just go on an additional 4 hours, then definitely trade would pay off. This is what your side of the argument has come to?

 

[nimanoe]

This is a gloriously ridiculous argument. You're right: if games would all just go on an additional 4 hours, then definitely trade would pay off. This is what your side of the argument has come to?

But as the attacker you can't know when the opponent resigns, so saying that you shouldn't invest if you're winning is like saying you shouldn't make any villagers once you have an advantage.
Also not gonna respond to the rest of my post?

 

[RicoJay13]

Yes, he starts deleting 15 villagers by my count at 51 min in the game. Then 3 more at around 55 min in. Those vills have been collecting resources for longer than you accounted for in your document and are way less than the 40 you accounted for. I honestly don't know how you think that this shows you're right, when it shows the exact opposite.

My entire premise is that the pop he (or anyone) uses for trade carts could instead be used for vils you either create or DON'T murder. Had he done that, he'd have more resources than if he did what he did which was ramp into trade. I respect that his (and I assume yours) opinion at that point in game is that he'd rather ramp into trade in the preparation for the possibility that the game goes on long enough for it to pay off. I completely understand that that is the idea behind trading. But in this instance, it absolutely DID NOT pay off. Easy math. End of discussion on this one data point. And none of the other players likely had their trade pay off. I think a few had 0 trade revenue so it's not all 8/8, but I think it was 6/8 or so. If the average pro game is ~50 total minutes, I view that as almost an ironclad case that trading isn't paying off in most games. Especially because constant production from 3-5 markets is not a given even for elite players. It's a lot of wood and gold and micro, even moreso if your route requires onagering, protection etc. In that Viper video he spends a lot of time flaring and asking his teammates to clean up an area in the middle of their trade route as an example.

 

[RicoJay13]

But as the attacker you can't know when the opponent resigns, so saying that you shouldn't invest if you're winning is like saying you shouldn't make any villagers once you have an advantage.
Also not gonna respond to the rest of my post?

What you say is both true but belies the point. Which is that if most of the time trade is NOT paying off, then you should NOT be doing it. Obviously some games will go on so long that it does pay off. I lose plenty of games I play in where they go so long that trading puts my opponents at a major advantage. Obviously that doesn't appear to be the case most of the time based on my experience, games I've posted that pros play in, my assumption if the average 4v4 BF voobly match only lasts ~50 mins, the challenge matches vs TheHand, etc.

 

[RicoJay13]

Viper also starts trade way later than the average game, he makes his markets around 40 min in the game, but doesn't make tradecarts until around 8 minutes later. In the average game the trade will start around 30 min, so 18 min before Viper actually started the trade. Following that logic, trade will pay off in most games.
So saying that in this game the trade hasn't paid off as an argument that in most games the trade won't paid off is disingenuous.

Does he though? Or am I supposed to just assume what you say with no backing data must be correct?

Also I'll take this moment to point out that Viper starting ramping into trade at 40 minutes and then still not having had it ROI 18:30 minutes later when the game ends is just another example of how it's hard to perfectly get a good trade route, have constant market production, and have it pay off in the perfectly efficient spreadsheet version which has it pay off in 14 minutes.

Oh, did you or anyone notice what the market price of wood and food were when viper started trade at 40 minutes? Hint: it's not rock bottom. Hint #2: while it isn't part of my spreadsheet and we haven't really talked about it, food is also a resource in aoe2. Pop space can be used to build farms, which collect food, which can be sold for gold sometimes at a very high price.