[Anonymous Player]

Many people believe that crop rotation, the third farm upgrade, is not worth the cost until after 60 minutes.

This is based on a video discussing the topic of the Strategy of Time and Resources (SOTL).

The heavy plow farms need to be reseeded three times while crop rotation farms only need to be reseeded twice.

This means that when the heavy plow farms are the next to be seeded, you will be guaranteed to receive more resources.

Crop rotation costs 250 food and 250 wood, but if you give food a 1.2x premium, it would cost 550 wood.

There are two points to consider.

First, let’s assume you seed all your farms at the same time.

If you have 50 farms and your farms generate 24 food per minute, the heavy plow farms will run out after 17 minutes and the crop rotation farms will run out after 24 minutes.

This means you are gaining 3000 extra wood for the seven minutes in between.

This extra wood can be used to generate more resources, making the cost of crop rotation much less than the initial 550 wood.

The second point is that you don’t have to seed all your farms at the same time.

If you seed three farms per minute, at 17 minutes, three farms will expire under heavy plow, but none will expire under crop rotation.

At 18 minutes, three more will expire under heavy plow, and so on.

By the 24th minute, 21 farms worth of wood will have been saved due to crop rotation, which is more than twice the upgrade cost.

This means that crop rotation pays for itself after around 20 minutes, and pays double for itself after around 24 minutes, while continuing to add value throughout the game.

[depthofuniverse]

You still have to wait 20 minute before any pay back.

With a similar costing military tech like bracer or cavalier you can close out the game with your power spike immediately.

Just between eco techs, two-man saw which pays itself in 10 minutrs is also a better deal.

Point is, for crop rotation, if you happen to have the res and know the game will go on for a while, sure.

But there are so many other better ways to spend your res upon hitting imp.

[vvneagleone]

Yes, a lot of spirit of the law’s analyses are flawed in similar ways to this one.

It’s still a great channel and I enjoy watching it, but it does show that a lot of the “takeaways” from the channel are just wrong and the answer is almost always “it depends” instead.

That said, it’s almost impossible to make aoe content of that sort while actually taking every single variable and situation properly into account (you’d end up just getting so far into the weeds that things would barely make sense and your videos would become pretty boring), so he is somewhat forced to simplify some analyses in order to keep his content somewhat short and interesting.

For your specific case, crop rotation is not really overrated because in a real game you’re often better off spending the 550 res immediately on developing something else (army, TCs, siege, tech switch, whatever).

Crop rotation is only underrated for the situations in which you’re pop capped, making mostly food army, and floating some wood.

[notnorther]

The game is about creating win conditions for yourself, so yes in that degree, it’s really powerful.

However, it’s a pretty big investment to do, especially early to mid imperial age, and you could argue that there are heaps of different investments that could be made that would much more benefit your win condition, or eliminate losing conditions

[JeanneHemard]

How about for Burgundians, Sicilians, Poles?

Would you get it asap in castle age as Burgundians?

With Poles I think it pays for itself really fast.

Whereas as Sicilians, you’ll have farms that last forever.

[aureliusofrome_AoE]

Had a BF game the other day where I had a dock and some extra boars, my first farm that game (Burgundian) was a crop rotation farm.

It was beautiful.

[Koala_eiO]

I think it’s a good tech to research once you are done with everything else you wanted to buy, considering it’s really cheap (roughly 4 farms + 3 scouts).

[dymdymdymdym]

I think that despite the actual numbers, there’s a lot more to whether or not something is worth it than the hard payback time in a vacuum.

A slightly smoother eco 10 minutes from now might be worth the resources you’re floating, and these things are just hard to judge game to game.

[AntonDeMorgan]

I always research all the eco techs as soon they’re available

[Tarsal26]

Get it if pop capped and floating res, else leave it.

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