New Farming Meta?
Vložit
- čas přidán 30. 06. 2024
- How does the "Magic Square" farming layout compare to the more conventional pinwheel and doubled up farms? We'll look at it both experimentally and from a mathematical perspective.
Inspired by: • Low ELO Legends #7 OCD...
Patreon: / spiritofthelaw
Full intro song: • Spirit of the Law Chan...
Background music from Epidemic Sound: www.epidemicsound.com
Game: Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, with Forgotten Empires, African Kingdoms, Rise the Rajas, and Last Khans expansions - Hry
Khmer: "They look the same to me"
"They are the same picture"
T90: "Thank you khmer-san
Bill safety tho
FARMS ARE FARMS!!!!
(Insert incredible 2 meme
Hoàng Nguyên you can also use the farms as gathering points when you hunt deer
Kill the deer
Put it in your hand
Create a farm
Free real estate
Lies: the true farming meta is to leave 5 villagers on idle, and then start cursing furiously because you forgot to switch on Reseed Farms.
idle villagers should be force marched to the enemy base. that will teach them.
@@MojoBonzo Ok Stallin
me_irl
Kids nowadays! Back in my day, you had to remember to do this by clicking!
@@d3athblad3 I used to win matches just by remembering to press Ctrl+I and shift+F (many times)
*sees the farm layout*
He's too dangerous to be left alive.
I NEED HIM
@@ikilly9713 Entendí la referencia.
Very underrated lol nice
İ am the senate
"Is it possible to learn that power?"
Rumours say that if you say the phrase "farm placement" 3 times in succession, t90 appears and bonks you on the head
Jerrin can confirm, my head hurts now
Doink!
Farm placement
Farm placement
worth it
Honestly, the "Perfect Square" just looks so satisfying, it reminds me of Spirit Of The Laws voice. Thank you so much for making these videos.
It reminds me of the way I used to play the good old Caesar II. Fountains had range of 9x9 squares, so that's what I did for my housing areas. Good times.
Who are Spirit Of The Laws Voice and Thank You So Much For Making These Videos?
Seems like someone is a little jealous that I got more than 200 likes compared to your 3.
Someone having a bad day @antonio, -onis, m
Also: Given how panicky one usually drops the first two houses, there's never enough room for perfectly planned farm layouts. So: Shift-clicking and randomly spraying them around the TC it is!
Early game & panic don’t usually go together.
I usually aim for the edge of the fog closest to the villagers' spawn. So that i can have the easiest 2+1 building house possible.
@@Jaxck77 actually they can come together, especially when you are housed or having a bad boar lurring
Just play Khmer only, like a true chad
hey farms, barrow of the wheel here
But according to my brain Magic Square leads to a 20% increase in my happiness
Even though it says 20% it is actually 25%.
So it has that going for it
AAaaah, i see what you did there
I see you too are a true spirit-fan of culture
but losing evey game because your farming is slow in feudal age will lead to a 33% decrease in happiness (it says 25% but its actually 33%)
2:14 Ben Finegold threw me for a loop there. Wasn't expecting a chess reference in an AoE video!
Yeah i was so surprised! SOTL is a Ben Finegold fan? Nice!
Very suspicious
Me neither. He confused the audience
Everytime I see ugly farm placements, I cry like a grandmaster.
Incorrect!
Magic square can be still improved by moving 4 farms (for example 2 from north-west and 2 from south-east) next to town center. It will not be that esthetic but little bit more effecient.
A little bit? The farmers will have an average distance to the TC of 2.2 tiles if you do that!
That was the first thing i though of aswell, use the space and move 4 farms closer (ideally the ones that are likely to be harassed and get an economy boon aswell)
I had the same idea! I wonder how this could improve the farming rate vs the perfect 12 square...
Juraj Šebej you can only move 3 closer in, but yes
@@inordirection_ no? 4 on one side, 4 on the opposite, the 2 on each shorter side can be moved 1 tile closer to TC
2:18 sneaky finegold, made me laugh
It's kinda sad that so few people will get that reference.
Tripled farms are 3 times as good!
Teutonic knife f5
Spirit of the law playing chess confirmed?
finegold memes everybody
replace the text "random" with "t90" this video would have absolute perfection
I love how you have exactly 90 likes. For some reason, I am sure, I am not the only one, who doesn't want that to change
So glad that the intro back on the regular
I'm getting a new computer tomorrow. I'll finally be able to play definitive edition for the first time. Can't wait!
gg
well uhh how was the year? turn pro?
GL
I use a variation of the "magic square". You can place 2 adjacent non-corner farms touching the town center, and do the same with the opposite side. It forms something like an H pattern arround the TC
You forgot something : With the "perfect square" you can towers IN AND OUT of the farms. More portection.
More things for villagers to path around
nobody does that
Now I want Spirit to add an adendum to this video where he redoes the numbers with towers involved, and see if it actually protects the villagers better that way. Basically if the perfect square could be numbr one in SOMETHING!!!
@@datboi7893scrub players have to...
I hardly think that I play AOE2 enough a year to justify watching a youtuber solely based on it, but for some reason I love this channel and it all has to due with the jokes that always land and the great editing style that you employ. Thank you for making such an excellent youtube channel Spirit.
It's truly amazing how very deep you can look into the mechanics of this "ancient" game.
1:36 Villager in the far left does the moonwalk.
3:29 - the "T90 cluster" as one might call it
*sees thumbnail*
It's beautiful.
I've looked at this for five hours now.
He just posted this 10 mins ago........
@@Athari_Muslim well done
@@Athari_Muslimthats me. fastest clicker in the west
This guy created a wormhole to a planet orbiting a quasar or black hole, just so he could watch this for hours before we could. Respect.
What if you position them so that the farms on the left are right up against the TC? Shouldn't this even out the walking distance for the villagers, since they always work on the left side of the farm?
That's a really fucking good question.
Your father was an average fighter Kakarot, but he was a brilliant scientist !
Khmer Farmers be like:
"Drop off? What is that?"
I onca saw a game, the guy had hidden his farms at the other end of the map basically
@@pierre-mariecaulliez6285 that is interesting idea.
@@pierre-mariecaulliez6285 I did that the other day playing against an AI. Put farmers in the edges of the map and walled them off, building houses in the walls to act as gates.
Pathetic
@Hoàng Nguyên you already said that.
*The magic square farm layout warms my heart after so many years of imperfect farm placement*
I "discovered" it eons ago becauce my OCD would go berserk if the farms lined up imporperly. Efficency had nothing to do with my reasoning.
Same. Thankfully I got it under control once I decided to focus more on actually playing the game. You just forget to worry about your OCD when trying to get something vaguely resembling a decent uptime.
and yet neither the Town Center nor Mill can have perfectly spaced farms on all sides of them. Some programmer was being cruel with that.
Yes! The Spirit of the Law theme is back! Hearing that music at the start makes everything better. I don't know when it came back, I'm back to these vids after a while, but I'm glad it is.
I like using the "magic square" because it allows me to build towers that guard my farms and each other. My style of play is definitely slower than some though and I lean towards defense early and then big offense from late game econ.
"Random"? That's a weird way to spell T90
T90 has synonims, it can mean blindness and 3 archery ranges on a neutral island. I see why he went with that you don't want the people to be confused
@@shigekisun3922 Well, it is a whole style. When you say «T90 farms», you know what it means, same as when you say T90 ranges or T90 babes.
You could build the 2 farms on the right and the 2 on the left directly touching the TC, and it wouldn't affect the distance of the otter farms to the TC. You don't need to leave a gap for those farms. You would improve the early game collection rate
Yes. Or even shift the whole square of farms one step to the right to counteract the bias from the position of the actual square farmers move over. Then Shift some farms closer to the TC, perhaps leaving the rightmost corner farm out. This will be an 11 farm layout, which is OK too. Funny, even. 11
Keep in mind that villagers go towards the center of the building (TC in this case) not the closest point.
This is probably for the better as going to the closet point is likely to cause stampedes near corners.
I've been staring at these villagers for how many years now and I've never realized that they stay in that part of the farm.
Love the intro being back!
One thing that might be worth considering (especially if you're tight on space) is that pinwheel and doubling up are compatible with each other, and if for any reason you want to place more than 12 Farms near your TC, the magic square breaks down completely with a longer walking distance, while the former two allow 15 decent Farms (considering that the villagers move around in the western corner of the Farm, so building to the east and north-south is alright) and up to 20 okay-ish Farms (if you're willing to build to the western side as well). Building placement might get you in the way at that distance, but unless you're enclosing yourself very closely, you can probably squeeze in at least 2-3 Farms over 12.
The 8-farm pattern you show at 1:00 on the TC, stacks perfectly with the 8-farm "pinwheel" design for mills. Combining these two in an alternating "checkerboard" style you can attain infinite farm coverage with no gaps anywhere and a maximum of 1 tile between farms and their gathering buidings. Granted, this only allows for 8 farms per Mill/TC, and an equal number of each... but it looks quite nice to have no gaps.
Spirit Of The Law: *Uploads video with T90 farms in it*
Also Spirit Of The Law: Why do I hear boss music?
Been wanting a video about farm shapes and efficiency for a while now. Thanks!
I do the magic square with houses around the corners, then towers at each corner as well as four around the town center. Sometimes I will place a wall around the houses too. It’s a lot of fun
That intro is fire. Updated game plays, but still satisfying flattening, plus fire camels.
The true beauty of the Magic Square is that you can wall up the space around TC. This way your TC (and villagers) are safer from militia line raids. Gates optional. For added safety, add walls around the farms too. Show your enemies how you have ascended beyond any other turtle into godhood.
waiting for a new civ with the "Gated Community" building/tech
What's up! Its this guy again. Remember me from the other 50 times I've asked about your intro song. Lol you're not going to escape us. Trust us man, we all really want to hear your full recording for it. It's a mind blowing tune that goes hand in hand with AEO2 now. WE GOTTA HEAR IT!! Help a man out, and obviously thx for all the videos. You're the best thing about the AEO2 community and we really appreciate it.
I always use the inner 8 layout. That leaves 3x1 gops on the corners which I'll use to my advantage: If I'm playing with a civ that will require lots of food, my way to expand is placing a new TC into one of those holes and building another inner 8 layout around it. You could expand this patern indefinitely without wasting a single tile and having every farm in perfect proximity from a TC.
I'll normally settle with four TCs, which gives you a total of 24 farms in inner 8 layout, 8 of which are "shared" by two TCs (that's why they're 24 and not 32).
You could have one TC in the middle surrounded by farms in inner 8, build one more TC in each corner gap and surround those with farms in inner 8. I've never tried it, but it would give you 32 farms surrounding 5 TCs.
0:08 the lonely mill on the side: Am I a joke to you?
Thanks to your videos, I always put my first farm to the exact right of the TC.
Full intro! Awesome!
Good stuff...keep em coming brother
Omg i placed farms like this in my childhood, ty spirit forthe memories
You should have compared it to T90 farms, I think that's the main thing to compare against 11
They aren't covered under the "random layout"?
@@SpiritOfTheLaw Nah, the gaps aren't large enough
@@SpiritOfTheLaw if you can see them all at the same time then they aren't t90 enough.
@@SpiritOfTheLaw Na that's normal person layout, T90 farms sit whole farms apart
@@SpiritOfTheLaw man sorry but i tried to find ur Rome vs Barbarians map on aokheaven, is it only available on Steam?
At least four farms of the magic square can be one tile closer to the town center.
Based on the average shown un the video, that gives us an average distance of 2.2 tiles. Which is better than the double up and the pinwheel.
3:16 Wow you got T90 to do your farms for this video, you really go the extra mile for quality content
Thank the lord that the whole song is now being used in the intro!
@spirit of the law i saw fairly easy way to make it slightly more efficient. You can move two pair of middle farms closer by one square toward town center. This would make "magic square" more efficient.
I live that you went back to the old intro music, uncut
Makes me wonder what the efficiency of chained, pinwheeled farms attached to mills (rather than tc’s) would be. There’s a massive up-front cost of wood for all the mills, but all the times I’ve tried it the food output reaches a hefty critical mass.
imho the pinwheel is more visually appealing. the gap in the "magic square" just triggers me.
Try adding gates to sides of tc and towers on corner. You can even lock gates and just use towers to diagonally hop into tc or tc into towers, unless that has been patched out
I like them both better than everything else
5:02 That's why I often like the idea of doubling up where your base is likely the safest, economy in the back, bulk and firepower in the front, assuming you're not vulnerable to flanks.
Could still move two sides of the magic square inwards. I should make a spreadsheet, but I'm listening to your amazing channel late at night on bed, so it's not an option :D
In regicide, you can magic square and wall the TV. Put the king in Tc as back up if the castle goes down
The farming magazin at 3:10 has 10 hacks to be idle more often on page 4. Hope my vills are not subscribed!
On the magic square, you can slightly, but easily, modify it so it has 4 adjacent farms to the tc. Doing this should lower the travel distance by 1 square for 4 farms, which would seem that it would place the magic square above (Probably still insignificantly) the pinwheel/double in the late game, and closer to tied in the early game. If I have time later, Ill try to figure out the exact average tile change, my assumption would have been ~4/12 improvement, but the more exact result is important here to see where it falls compared to the doubled/pinwheel methods
EDIT: So I did the math and got that a magic square is 2.8568 and the improved magic square is 2.5235. The first number is inconsistent with your magic square, but it is a 4/12 tile improvement (which, in hindsight, duh).
gyazo.com/8c10321ff36d6f6f3bdc0c627ca7ed22 showing the math I did on excel. Would love to know what I did wrong on tile distance, but I do think this slight improvement which would yield 2.2007 is enough to say modified magic square should be the new "meta" farming
Me accidentally clicking on "CZcams Home" is faster than youtube's recommendation features.
Now I need a video on the most cost effective way to watch a Sotl video
haha you're so quirky haha and beautiful too haha im joking haha....unless you feel the same...
T90 wants to know your location
One thing I wish they changed in HD or DE was farm proportionality. In Age of Mythology (the one they made next, Back in the Day), the farms are 2x2, the mills are 2x2, and the town centers are 4x4. Thus, you can intuitively surround a mill with 8 and a center with 12.
I also miss how trade works in AoM: they go from from market to town center, as opposed market-to-market, so you do not necessarily need a partner to use them.
But now add some Folwarks around that bad boi and now we have pure perfection.
Whoa, SOTL got a sick new pfp!
It got me confused for a second, i was so used to the old one!
No he doesn't?
Also, clockwise pinwheel and anticlockwise pinwheel are equivalent by horizontal symmetry so it doesn't matter, as long as you complete the half on the right first.
You'll probably always go anticlockwise because farm are easier to align going toward the top due to the perspective.
Now that is high quality content. Took into account all possible scenarios and analyzed them from different angles, in different contexts. However it made me think of a followup - what about Mill farms? Is pinwheel the way to do?
You could put 4 of the side farms in the square 1 tile closer to the TC.
Ive been using this layout since age of kings. Awesme to see a video on it!
The perfect farms look so good when you expand them tho. There is a way to perfectly fit the Mills so they are a part of the "patern" and perfectly cover every square with farmland.
How to place farms around the mill? Two tiles empty on one side, 7 farms in total? A total of 8 farms in the form of Pinwheel with no empty tiles? or a total of 8 farms in the form of Magic Square?
@@orkunyucel3095 It's 2 layers of 4 farms. You can fit 4 farms perfectly around a mill by making a pinwheel. It's hard to explain.
Yes, pinwheel for mill consists of 4 farms. If 4 more farms are added to the 4 corners of this pinwheel, it will have 8 farms. With 4 farms for mill, pinwheel is of course the most effective. But 1 mill per 4 farms would not be very economical. So I wanted to ask 8 farm pinwheel per mill directly.
@@orkunyucel3095 I don't understand what's your question lol
this is 8 farm pinwheel for mill. m.czcams.com/video/DJ_W9siWsUY/video.html 4 farm are inner perfect and 4 farm are in the corners.
this is 8 farm Magic Square for mill. m.czcams.com/video/-b9kmlhf2v4/video.html
this is 7 farm for mill. (2 tiles are empty on one side) encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcQNXFFP6H8VRjEFCEH0AwfUiuNGhy-M2frfeUigsYfoNO2q-OgD&usqp=CAU
Ignore TC in this picture.
Which one is the best?
Thank you for answering my question. I know I wasn’t the only one to ask but still awesome to see
For the most of time i was placing farms ONLY around mills, in some distance from TC . Because its Town Center, not farm center.
Hey Spirit of The Law
If you push in 4 farms of the magic square, you loose a bit of neatness but you will remove 1 tile travelling distance from each of those four farms. This should shorten the average walking distance by about 0.3 which should make it better in the end than the other two designs.
This video cracks me up. The game has been around for almost 30 years now and people think we’ve never tried the magic square?
"Now that's how farms look like in the real world"...so true. I am usually getting attacked by Feudal, I plot the farms fast and get back to defenses ASAP. I usually strive for pinwheel on water maps where land rushes are rare.
Was not expecting the Ben Finegold reference at 2:14. Truly a pleasant surprise.
2:17 Master Ben Finegold
Ben Fingold appears when you least expects it. And this, and that, et cetera, mainly et cetera...
It's frankly ridiculous
So just before I finish watching this, thanks for making a farming vid on this, quality content 10/10
for that magic square you can place 4 farms closer (2 on one side and 2 on the oppsite side) and therefore close the gaps a bit.
I was literally thinking to myself yesterday:
"Gee, I wonder what optimal placement of farms around a TC is? I hope SotL covers the topic someday."
I always built my base as an OCD person would, perfect square, houses lined up in a grid, all that jazz. When I wanted to improve my efficiency I discovered the inner-8 and pinwheel and started using that instead. Great video, I'm glad I'm not the only person to find the new meta!
Could upgrade the magic square a touch by moving one of the middle sets in one square.
Juraj below mentioned an improvement to move 4 opposing farms next to tc. Based on average f/min rate based on your calcs of 1.695 for pinwheel for the 4 farms and 1.5583 for magic square for the remaining 8 farms, the new rate would be 19.2467. And this is actually unfair to the tc adjacent farms b/c the pinwheel rate includes non-adjacent farms. U should redo the calc with this configuration and the new center farmer placement. I love stats and probability, so loving your vids.
ben finegold reference in a SOTL vid... you make me happy man, good work hahaha
I played aoe2 as a kid and always build these farms like that because it looked pretty. xD didn't know there's so much stuff behind that, I'm impressed.
I think I said it once before, when the question of the impact of "+Carry Capacity"/"+walking speed" Bonuses came up.
CC/WS helps if you got suboptimal walking distances. Higher CC means more working between walking, less walking overall. Higher WS means less time spent on the walk. So with both you do overall more work per dropoff-walk.
With "Inner 8 Perfect", mining camp placement and the moving woodcamp, you *already optimized* for walking distance. So CC&WS can have no effect. And CC can even be slightly detrimental, causing you to have longer delays between dropoffs.
The Magic Square is - by definition - something not optimized for walking distance. Accordingly the impact Carry Capacity and Walking Speed bonuses have would be higher.
A FINEGOLD REFERENCE??? My dream is complete
Dang, that magic square farm placement is so AESTHETHICC. Fuck efficiency, imma start using it on my games.
Dude, i know how hard must ve to make the awesome vids that you post. But we need MOREEEEEEE. PS: Fan of the pinweel. Geometry wise, it is the most beatiful one.
The 8-farm TC pinwheel is clearly the superior choice, as it leaves no gaps and as shown in the video, it gives the best food/min rate. Also, it fits perfectly with 8-farm Mill pinwheels, providing both beauty and efficiency ( imgur.com/a/EF32CVm ). Every other design is suboptimal.
I'm really digging the intro ngl
So basically the _noob square_ from the early 2000's is now called the 'magic square'.
Interesting.
the random grandmaster ben finegold picture got me
Unspoken advantage: you can build guard towers in the inner square and keep it nice and tidy.
I wish they could resize mills to fit the size of Monasteries, that way we also get Mills Magic Squares.
Real talk though, I, after seeing the T90 vid a few weeks ago, wanted to test this out and ended up with different results, but that's probably because I didn't know about the perfect inner eight, as I usually am able to squeeze in nine unevenly. Not to mention the difference in food I saw came from villager numbers, and total food counts with dark age farms being constantly reseeded over fifteen minutes. But one other thing I had bumping around in my head is the idea that this perfect square is the original game designed way to farm around a TC.
In AoE classic, farms were un-walkable and the main way for proper farm placement is a tile away for villagers to stand. So I think that during development of AoE II, they operated similarly before the ability to walk over was added. It's like how boar luring wasn't an intended mechanic, but a side effect of how the game works. The intended way to farm is the twelve square, but in practice, it's not as good as those developed by playing the game.
I've been doing this since I 1st started aoe2. Put up a wall and gates around the town and farms, using the corners for towers, and ur town center is basically untouchable unless they have siege, and as a result, ur farms, as well. No backdoor cheese, no raiding issues.
I actually remember seeing that farm layout in a early/mid 2000's gaming magazine tutorial for an AOE2 Kings 'unbeatable early imp cavalier Huns strategy' where it's main claim to fame was "maximum real-estate efficiency" 11 ahh, when thing's were more simple...
That Ben Finegold meme at 2:18 hahaha
This is the first Spirit of the Law video where I feel I am totally in the right with disregarding everything he said because this farm layout is just too cool