After 5 minutes of playing you’re already 1000 gold ahead! That’s 13 Paladins more! Bumping 1:18 with gold mining and only 1:08 if gold shaft mining is researched too! Imagine you can pay for your precious Paladin upgrade half a minute earlier than your opponent. So if 30 miners gather 1000 gold it takes them 1:30 without any goldmining upgrades. We assume that hand cart is researched, which is rather normal in a booming game. 30 miners are generally considered a good amount to have in imperial games for a normal imperial army. If we take the example to more extreme forms we take a look at a situation with 30 miners. Which equals the work of an extra villager! So technically you added an extra villager to your gold mine without even having to use your precious TC time for it. A minimal difference you say? Wrong, because in those 4 seconds, the player who has goldmining researched already dug up 15 gold extra. But if you pay for the goldmining upgrade, then it will only take the guys 24 seconds to gather 100 gold. If you have 10 gold miners then it takes about 28 seconds to gather 100 gold without any upgrades.

Let’s explain the numbers into more comprehensible language now. Only when you take bumping into account, the effect gets bigger. Seconds 1 villager needs to gather 10 gold TechsĪs you can see, the effect of the wheelbarrow and hand cart techs is rather minimal. We ignore the concept of “bumping” for now. This is the most realistic setup since only a very limited amount of villagers would be able to gather gold from a distance of 0 tiles. The villagers are 1 tile away from the mining camp. I came to the following figures with this setup: So let’s take a look at the gathering rates for goldmining. But the ones for mining upgrades seem to be more of a personal preference rather than a globally accepted truth. The basic upgrades for wood and food form no point of debate. If there is one thing even top players can argue about when it comes to booming it’s when to do certain economical upgrades. For an overview, you can check out the video at the end of the article. Note: the article goes into a lot of detail. Gold gives you access to your strongest units, so how to get the most out of those gold mines? And how important are relics really?

Age of empires 2 trade cart