Overview
Have you ever wondered if this one interesting card is worth to pick up? And how good is it really? My in-depth look into some random cards i stumbled upon. This Guide is a Work in Progress and I will add more analysis if time goes on. If you want to know about a specific card, then just post them in the comments.
Underlying Assumptions for all Calculations
Food Equivalent
Ressources are gathered at a different rate and also some ressources are more scarce than others (wood hard to get in lategame, food very easy). Because i want to compare gold, food and wood with one and another i usually calculate the foodequivalent. So i basically say, wood is more valuable than coin and food:
wood > coin > food
My rates are as follows:
100 food = 100 food
100 Wood = 125 food
100 Gold = 115 food
This is reasonably accurate and makes many things much easier. I ll use those rates when calculating the food equivalent cost
Grazing (India)
This card lets all your Camels gather food and all your elefants gather wood.
So in what Situations is Grazing actually worth it?
Grazing:
camels gather 0.05 food/s
Elefants gather 0.1 wood/s
Includes explorer, even when they are dead (however that works). Wow, Working while uncouncsious –> Those monks are The real Employees of the month!
How many Camels are one villager?
17 Camels = Vill
How many Camels do you need, until grazing is better than mercantilism / Foreign logging (Allready includes the rate of the explorers)?
mercantilism: 27
foreign logging: 54
And how many elefants?
11 for mercantilism
22 for foreign logging
Payback Times:
What are the payback times with grazing (e.g. how long does a unit stay alive until he grazed back his cost). Example Scenario: You are in a treaty game and think about Boosting your economy by building camels/ Elefantos
How much do Produce a army consisting of x pop? And how many villagers would that be?
Villager Equivalent of a 20, 100 and 200 pop army of a single unit.
Long Story short:
Grazing is in most situations not worth it. It should never be a high priority card… You’ll need around 50 camels for the card to be worth it or 22 elefants (Compared to foreign logging). With an army of 100 zamburaks you’ll only get a villager euqivalent of 6. That is the maximum practical value you’ll get from this card.
Video with more details and talking about assumptions and methodics:
[link]
Tupac Rebellion (Inca “Revolution”)
Overview
What does it do? Transforms all your units into european units.
Villager and spearman = Revolutionary (Veteran musketeer)
Chimu = Hussar
Jungle Bowman and huaraca = Skirmisher
Bolas = Grenadiers
Clubman = Light canons
Assumption:
Age 4 Shipment is worth 1600 food equivalent
How much does Tupac Revolution cost?
2000 gold, food and wood and a age 4 shipment. Which means the card costs around 8400 food equivalent. If you would assume, that you save 2 age 4 guard upgrades, then it costs around 7000. Why 2 Age 4 guard upgrades? usually you make 2 units for your army composition and in fortress age you’ll get them to veteran anyway. Which means in Age 4 if you send the card you essentially gain 2 guard upgrades. Not accurate 100 % of the time, but most of the time. Besides, Inca veteran cost only 200w 100g and 400w 200g, so that wouldnt change too much anyway.
So how much Value you get from that card?
1 Jungle Bowman = Worth 90 food and 20 wood = 115 food equivalent. Is transformed into a skirm with 125 food equivalent. So for each jungle bowman you convert, you’ll get 10 food equivalent, or a 8% Increase in value.
I ll do that for all Units and put the Value gained & Value Increase in % in the next graph.
Notice: You are loosing value if you are transforming huaracas and spearman!
The best absolute value give the clubman, the best relative value the chimu runner (90 % Value increase). Bolas are also giving very good value (72 % Value increase).
How many units do you need to break even with that card (Assuming you’ll get the value for guard upgrade and that Age 4 Shipments cost 1600 food equivalent.
Conclusion:
Tupac Revolution is a very VERY expensive card. But it is a complete game changer card, it can be very strong if you are working towards it. You should not convert huaracas or spearman. This gives you little value. Bowman converted are okay, but not broken.
What units should you go for if you want to use that card? The strongest unit is the light canon. Those enable your push and make that really powerful. So i’d advide, that you allways get some cluban out before sending that card (Even with just the comerce plaza big button). You’ll get the most value out of your bolas and chimu runners. So if you want to use that card, you want to use chimu runers and bolas throughout the game (Grenadiers without grenade launchers are really weak though, so the best thing would probably be just to use chimus). Remember, your vills are becoming Musketeers. That means if you just use chimu runners and some clubman, you’ll have a very strong push with musk/cav/Canon.
Video:
[link]
Chicha Brewing (Inca House Upgrade)
Kancha Houses
Naked gather rate 0.6
With card 0.9
Part1: How much is the card worth and when do you send it?
So what does that mean? When do you send that card?
Which means for each house you have the card gives you an additional gather rate of 0.3 f/s.
That means the value of the card is 0,4 villagers for each house you have, capped at a limit of 4,6 if you have 13 houses. So the maximum Value of the house upgrade card is around 4,6 villagers. For it to be somewhat worth you’ll need around 10 houses, better 12 (age 2 villager cards are 4 to 5…often you send only the 5 vill card)
Part 2: Break even times:
Break even times: Basically the time until your initial investments starts paying off.
Without Card takes:
A bit more than 5 minutes to break even. With card they take 3 to 4 minutes to break even.
Without card they are a bit better than banks, without they are a little bit worse than banks.
Compared to villagers, who take between 2 to 3 minutes to break even
Part 3: How does it affect the average build?
Background: Build of Diaruga. Build order guide:
Build up houses gradually until you have 10, the house card arrives at around 6 min. Then dont build more houses and switch your vills to food / gold
Look at the total accumulated ressources after min 10 by following that build and calculate the total food the houses gathered. I compare that to a build, where i dont send the card at all.
Comparing Card sent vs not sent
If you send the card at 6 mins you’ll have 720 more food gathered at 10 minutes.
Is that worth it? Seems a bit weak in my eyes, the 3 tps are probably better? Or more tempo with unit shipments / Crates.
Video Discussing that:
[link]
Dojo (Japanese)
Dojos are Japanese Mini Factories, who can only Produce units. How good are they in Practice? Is it worth it to send them?
What do dojos do?
They can produce japanese Barracks and stable units. They produce Ashigarus and Yumi’s in Batches of 5 and Samurais, Naginatas and Yabusames in groups of 3.
Also the Batches are created at different rates, where Yumi’s are created the fastest wheres Yabusame the slowest. You can decrease the creation time of your dojo armies with the shogunate and the Dojo Upgrade “Kamidana”. The Church Upgrades “Standing Army” and “Mass Cavalry”, which you can get with a dutch ally do not affect Dojo Armies. If you dont have Population for a army when the train time is finished, the cycle Starts again WITHOUT you getting an army. Changed with USA Patch, now the army waits until you have enough popspace and will get spawned
Without Upgrades Yumis are created in 2 minutes and 14 seconds and Yabusames are created in allmost 3 minutes. Ashigarus, Samurai and Naginata are all created in 2 and a half minutes.
The Shogunate decreases the Creation time by 10 % and the upgrade by another 33 percent (says the text). Both combined reduce the Training time by roughly 36 %. However the Math works out internally.
CreationTimeWithUpgAndShogunate = BaseCreationTime * 0.64
With the Age 4 Tech and the shogunate you can decrease the creation time to under 2 minutes for all units.
Now that we have the train time, lets find out the Value you are getting with each army.
For this i calculate the food Equivalent cost, because food is gathered faster than coin and wood (rates blended in).
The Yumi Army is the cheapest and the yabusame army the most expensive one.
Okay so we have the train time and the value of each army, now we can calculate how much Ressources our Dojo is gathering per second with the following Formula:
FoodEquivalentGatherRate = FoodEquivalentValue / TrainTime
I ll show you the results for unupgraded Dojos, for Dojos with shogunate and for Dojos with shogunate + the dojo Upgrade.
A few things i would like to highlight:
1) Yumis are the best choice when trained in dojos and yabusames the worst.
2) The Gather rate of a Dojo is consistently over 4 foodequivalent / s for all armies. With Shogunate and upgrades you’ll have a gather rate of over 6 food/s. For Comparison: A factory gathers at 5.5 Food / second and 7.15 Food / second. So Dojos are valuewise roughly 75 % of Factories.
How many Villagers does that equal? I ll assume you have all age 2 market upgrades with Japan. I ll blend in the Gather rate for this scenario for natural ressources.
To make the Calculation simple i’ll just divide the Gather rates i just calculated by the berry gather rate of 0,87.
For Yumis that would be :
Villager Equivalent =
= FoodEquivalentGatherRateOfDojo / BerryGatherRate
= 4.38 / 0.87 =
= 5.03
So in Age 3 your Dojo Shipment is worth roughly 5 Villagers. With Shogunat it is a bit better than 5 Villagers. With all the Upgrades your Dojos are gathering at roughly 7 Villagers.
Conclusion:
I ll do a quick list of the cons and the Pros of Dojos starting with the cons and then do my final Conclusion.
Cons:
No Population Space results in a massive loss. Also they stop producing value, once you reach 200 pop. So no Banking up ressources.
One time card. Once Destroyed, it is gone forever. Also “only” 2500 Hp, which is half of a factory or a wonder.
Units have to walk more until they are at the front.
Pros:
Dojos are harder to raid.
Dojos dont go Idle, unless you have maxed population
Dojos dont deplete natural Ressources and you also wont need a additional production building to use the additional ressources.
A Dojo is worth roughly 75% Factories or 5 to 7 villagers.
Training Yumis in Dojos gives you the highest value, while training Yabusame gives you the lowest.
Ashigaru, Samurai and Naginate give you roughly the same value and are between yabusame and Yumis.
Dojos are honestly better than expected. Are they broken? Probably not. Are they decent? Yes, Valuewise they are allmost as good as the 7 Villager Shipment, Especially if you get the shogunate.
Video:
[link]
Factories (European Civs + Chinese)
First of a little summary of Factories:
They Produce Food, Wood, Coin or Artillery. You can switch between the different Production Modes at any time. Switching takes 2 to 3 seconds, where the “old Ressource” is still gathered during switching.
Factories are Age 4 Cards and European Civs can send 1 Factory with two seperate Cards. That means you’ll usually have 2 Factories.
Chinese also have access to 1 Factory Waggon via the russian allies in the consulate. With the south africa revolution you also get access to a factory waggon (so up to 3 facts possible).
Loosing a Factory is permanent, there is no way to replace them.
Factory Gather rate 5.5 with upgrade 7.15 for all Ressources. No difference between food/wood or gold.
How does that compare to villagers?
A villager Gathers in Industrial age at the following Rates (with all market Upgrades). I ll Blend in the Formulas, I ll use the Walking factor to cover up the fact, that your villagers have to walk to the next Animal/ Hunt. If you are interested how I come up with that, see my earlier video (link in description)
FoodGatherRatePerVill =
BaseRate * (1 + Upgrades) * WalkingFactor
= 0,84 * (1 + 0,1 + 0,2) * 0,85 =
0,93
Same for wood and coin
WoodGatherRatePerVill =
BaseRate * (1 + Upgrades) * WalkingFactor
= =0,5 * (1 + 0,1 + 0,2 + 0,3) *0,95 =
0,76
CoinGatherRatePerVill =
BaseRate * (1 + Upgrades) * WalkingFactor
=0,6* (1+0,3) * 0,95 =
0,741
That means for my VillagerEquivalent i use the Formula:
So for Food That means:
VillagerEquivalent =
FactoryGatherRate / VillagerGatherRate
= 5.5 / 0.93
=5.9
So having a factory on food without upgrades is equal to having 6 villagers with all hunting upgrades on hunts. If you upgrade your factory, that is equal to getting 2 more villagers (roughly). This is consistent for all ressources.
What’s also obvious is that if you use your factories for wood or coin generation, they are worth more. Does that mean you should never switch to food? No, if you are short on food, then dont hesitate to switch to food. Better to have inefficient ressource gathering, than piling up ressources you wont need (in sup and dm at least, in treaty you probably have them on wood all the time anyway).
But what about the canons?
With British you can produce Rockets and with Ottoman Heavy bombards. All the Other Civilisations get heavy canons from factories.
They only get out of the factory, if you have the population space for it (6 for Rockets and 7 for heavy canons and bombards). If not, the cycle starts again and you get NOTHING! So if you use factories for Artillery, then make sure to have enough popspace. And yes, you need at least 7 population. You cant overpop with Factories, that doesnt work. Changed with latest patch. Now factories patiently wait until there is enough popspace
So lets first take a look at the Traintime:
The different Artillery pieces also have a different train time. You can Reduce the Traintime with Engineering School and with the Factory upgrade. With the Card “Team engineering School” from china and Sweden you can reduce the train time by roughly another 5 seconds (Half of the reduction the “normal” engineering school gives)
Generally: Heavy artillery is produced the slowest, wheres rockets are produced the fastest. Keep in mind, that Heavy canons and bombards have a higher value than rockets. Heavy bombards also get produced faster than the heavy canons (that change came with DE). Training Artillery takes around 1 and a half minute to 2 minutes. With upgrades that time goes down to roughly 1 to 1 minute 30 seconds.
But how does that compare to the other modes?
For that i calculate the foodequivalent gather rates for all modes. I ll use the cost of the tooltip of the canons. Rockets are the lowest value, heavy canons are the highest value.
So now we can calculate our FoodequivalentGatherRate for producing canons with the following formula:
FoodequivalentGatherRate =
FoodEquivalentValue / TrainTime =
= 825 / 115 =
= 7.17 FoodEq / s
I’ve done this for all Artillery and show you the results now.
So first of: Producing artillery in factories gives you the most value. Heavy Canons are generally the lowest value, while bombard canons the highest Value. Producing Rockets in factories is also a decent choice, if you just look at the value.
This assumes, that you are not getting housed. Also the fact, that you are getting all the value at the end of the cycle and not per second (like the other modes) is a downside and not reflected in the numbers, so keep that in mind.
With Engineering School you can get out even more value from your factories. With Engineering School + upgrade you can get up to 50 % more value with otto factories! This probably affects DM the most, since you wont send engineering school in supremacy and in treaty you usually have your factories on wood.
Summary:
Producing Bombard Canons gives you by far the most Value. Producing canons gives you in theory the most value. Practically you need to keep in mind, that your canons have to walk to the front and that you get all the value at the end of the cycle. So producing Canons is a good choice, but it also depends on how you use it to get the most value.
Factories is a high priory building like wonders. They are not replacable and give you some very good value. So try to keep them save.
Rule of Thumb: Factories are worth 6 to 10 villagers, depending on how you look at it and what mode the factory is in
Video:
[link]
Medicine (Villager Train Time + cost reduction)
So we want to talk about the medicine and related cards. What do i mean with that? All cards which do reduce the train time of villagers and affect the cost of villagers
Normal Medicine:
(German, British, Dutch, Russia, Sweden, Spain, Aztec, Inca, haudeno, Lakota, Porto (age 3))
-15% cost , -15% train time
Team medicine:
(India, Aztec, Inca, harden)
Team -15 % train time, NO cost reduction
Variants of medicine for the civilizations:
Porto (Age 3)
Inca, Aztec, Haudeno: Normal + Team medicine
Lakota: Medicine + adoption (age 3, -40 % train time)
India: 100 wood to 100 food cost changed (The Raj) + Team medicine
Japanese: Zen diet (100 food to 60 wood changed)
Civs who don’t have it:
CHINA
France
Otto
Lets take a look at medicine. First off 15 % reduction means your vills are getting trained in 21.25 seconds instead of 25 seconds and also only cost 85 food ).
That means for a scenario with medicine and without with 1 TC.
One TC can produce 60 villagers in 25 minutes and with medicine it can produce 70 villagers. Or with medicine you roughly get 2 extra villagers / 5 min/ TC.
Lets take a look at the Value of medicine: For the one TC Scenario and a Gatherrate assumption of 0.84 food/s, which is the base Gather rate from hunts and also no Idle/ walk time.
There are two ways medicine is giving you Value:
1) You save resources, because your villagers are cheaper
2) You gather more resources, because you have more villagers (or villagerseconds) compared to a scenario without medicine.
What of those Components has more impact?
In the next graph you can see the Value you get from cost reduction, from the extra villager seconds and the total Value of medicine.
A few words on the More food gathered Graph: Remember a Villager gets created in 25 seconds (without upgrades). With Medicine it gets created a little bit faster (see the jumps at the blue line), so you have 3 seconds, where you have a villager advantage (see grey graph). The next villager gets created at 43 seconds (compared to 50 second without medicine), so you have 7 seconds, where you have a villager advantage. After roughly 125 seconds, you do have 1 more villager with medicine and so the grey graph rises consistently.
At the start the cost reduction has more impact, but the longer the game goes on, the higher the impact of the train time reduction on the overall return.
In the next graph I will show the same only for 25 minutes, where it becomes even more obvious, that the longer the game goes, the higher the impact of the train time reduction.
The 5 cases i could think of:
1) Medicine with 3 TCs
2) Russia medicine (Base train time and costs are different)
3) Team Medicine (-15 & train times)
4) Adoption (-40% train time)
5) Zen medicine (Change food to 60 wood to Equal a 25 food equivalent safe per vill)
In the next graph the net food value of the different card/cases are compared with each other.
In red are marked the expected Value of a slow economic Card
Age 2 Card = 700 food, Age 3 = 1000 food
Read it like this: After 400 seconds i am better of sending medicine than sending 700 food.
Some Key findings:
Medicine is worth it after roughly 4 minutes with one tc. With 3 TC it is worth it after roughly 2 min 30 seconds
Russia medicine > Generic Medicine
Portuguese medicine > Adoption of Lakota (since you have 3 TC with porto)
Zen medicine is the worst medicine type card.
Also: The Technology “Christian School” from the Jesuits is the same as team medicine and costs roughly 250 food. So that means that one breaks even after roughly 300 seconds (1tc)
Summary:
With medicine, you have 2 vills more for every 5 minutes and every TC.
Cost reduction has better value at the start, while train time reduction of medicine gives you more value the longer the game goes.
Medicine with Russia is better than generic medicine
With 3 TC’s and sending medicine you are better off than sending a tempo card after roughly 4 minutes (so it is probably decent as porto).
Link to the Video:
[link]
Northwestpassage (French cdb Speed)
How good is Northwest Passage?
It increases the Speed of cub’s by 20 % and also gives them extra dmg vs guardians.
Is the Card northwestpassage better than a similar economic card (Economic Theory)?
First of you might say: Northwest passage doesn’t increase the gather rate it only increases the movement speed.
Yes, you are absolutely right, but your cdbs spend a considerable amount of time walking around, especially on farms/ estates.
I want to focus on the Effect of northwest passage on the Mill & estate gather rate in this video.
First of: What are the Tests I ran:
I made a scenario with 100 cdbs on Mills & Estates and let them gather for 5 minutes. Then I looked at how many resources were collected and calculated the Gatherrate / seconds. I will blend in the Formula
GatherRate = (EndRess – StartingRess) / Time / VillAmount
I did this for the following 4 scenarios:
Unupgraded
Unupgraded + NorthwestPassage
Postimperial
Postimperial + NorthwestPassage
Now let’s Talk about the Results:
First of Food:
If you look closely on your CDB’s they will Gather, then move to the next point and then they will gather more. They dont Gather when they are moving on the Mill. To describe this phenomenon I used The Factor “WalkingFactor” in the previous Video, which is the percentage of the Tooltip compared to the measured Rate. For CDB’s and this experiment it is at 69% (hehe) and consistent with my previous tests.
WalkingFactor = Tooltip / Real.
Now to the Results:
For Unupgraded Vills you get a Gatherrate Increase of 3.1 % and for Postimperial a GatherRate Increase of 5.2 %. This means, the higher your gather Rate on mills, the bigger the impact of the movement speed becomes. But even then, it is worse compared to Economic Theory, which increases the Rate by 10 %.
Formula:
GatherRateIncrease = (GatherRatePlusMovementSpeed – RealGatherRate) / RealGatherRateBaserate
= (1.15 – 1.12) / 0.58
= 5.2%
A similar story for estates:
Estates have a WalkingFactor of 0.74 and the Northwestpassage increases the Gatherrate by 3.3 % without upgrades and 7.1% with postimperial upgrades.
So Northwestpassage is decent but not better than economic theory. It is better, the higher the gather rates of your vills are. It affects coin gather rate more than the mill gather rate.
Video Discussing this card:
[link]
Resource Trickle Cards
What are trickle cards?
They give you a passive resource trickle, without any villagers/ Buildings working. Once you got the Card/ Technology you will get the trickle until the end of the game. There is no way of losing that income, compared to for example factories, which don’t give you anything once killed.
There are a few trickle cards:
Most civilizations do have access to at least a trickle card, except Portuguese/ Aztec and Inca, which don’t have a trickle card. French, Sweden and Dutch have access to the food trickle card colbertism. British Russia, India and French have access to the wood trickle card distributism and German, Spain, otto and USA have access to capitalism (USA has capitalism – I see what you did there).
Lakota and Asian civilizations do have some special Trickle cards.
The Lakota have the card earth bounty, which gives a trickle of wood and coin (also improves estate gather rates by 10 %)
Asian civilizations have access to sumptuary laws, which gives a trickle of all resources (including Export and Experience). By the way, when Indians send team sumptuary laws even Europeans get export, but it isn’t shown in the UI and you can’t do anything with it (Check resources after game).
Finally, Indians have access to the second wood trickle card, which is a better version of Distributism.
Most Civilizations have only one trickle card. Except Indians, who get 2 wood trickle cards & 1 team sumptuary laws and French, the lovechild of the TAD – Developers have access to food and wood trickle.
China technically only has one trickle card (sumptuary laws), but can get all the European trickles (including a weak version of capitalism with only 1.25 coin/s) from the German consulate. The Capitalism upgrade is weaker, because the capitalism card got buffed in the last patch and they apparently forgot the Chinese.
With what civilization can you achieve the highest trickle and how many vills is it roughly worth it (no upgrades)?
French with its two Trickle cards comes third (+ team sumptuary Laws). The second best trickler is India, with it’s two wood trickle cards + Sumptuary laws. And (you probably guessed it) the highest trickle you can achieve with china with an indian Ally. So you have Team Sumptuary Laws, Sumptuary Laws + Food/Wood/Coin Trickle from the German consulate. It is almost the rate of a factory (Note: In real games you probably don’t want to send sumptuary laws and team sumptuary laws). (China 9.5 vills, india 8.5 vills and French 5.5 vills)
How many villagers is a trickle card roughly worth?
To calculate this I used the gather rates of unupgraded villagers and assumed that xp = food and export = coin
0.84 food/sec
0.5 wood/sec
0.6 coin/sec
0.6 export/sec
0.84 xp/sec
to calculate the vill equivalent I used:
VillEquivalent = TrickleValue / GatherRate
If there are more Resources for a card i asummed the villequivalents for each resource:
VillEquivalent = TrickleValueFood / GatherRateFood + TrickleValueWood / GatherRateWood …
To Sum it up:
Trickle Cards are Worth 1 – 5 villagers. Age 1 Trickle Cards are worth 1.8 – 2.5 vills, Except Team sumptuary Laws, which is worth rougly 1.2 vills. Indias Foreign Logging is worth 4,7 vills.
Team Sumptuary laws is worst, followed by the food trickle (In reality I would rate Colbertism higher Sumptuary laws though, just because your Resources aren’t divided). . If you send both cards for India, it is equal to have 7 villagers on wood.
How do trickle cards compare to Economic Upgrade Cards?
Now I want to see, how many villagers you need on a specific resource until it is better to use the upgrade card instead. I mainly want to see the late game effects, so I look at the wood/ Mill and estates improvements.
Assumed Gather Rate (70% walking factor on Mills/Estates):
Food = 0.469
Wood = 0.5
Coin = 0.35
The Question now becomes: How many Villagers do I need on Mills/Estates/Wood until the Economic improvement is better than the trickle card? There are a few scenarios where this question is relevant: Dutch (low overall vill count) Swedes (when going for mercenaries they tend to have very few vills on food). Or if you are unsure in Supremacy if you should use the wood improvement or distributism (as India for example).
The Mill improvement cards give + 15% (age 1 + age 2) and +20% (Age 3)
The Estate improvement cards give + 20% (age 1 + age 2) and + 25% (Age 3)
The Wood improvement cards give + 15% (age 1 + more yield) and + 20% (Age 1)
Results:
If you have 22 or less villagers on food (mills), colbertism is better than food silos/ sustainable agriculture
If you have 34 or less villagers on coin (estate), capitalism is better than rum distillery/ cigar roller
Sawmills / exotic hardwoods are better than distributism, when have more than 18/ 14 vills on wood.
So for Dutch and Sweden it can be a good decision to use colbertism (If you plan to go for coin heavy units/ composition – I.E Mercs or Ruyter + Canon).
It might be worth it to use Capitalism instead of the estate upgrades, if you are going for food heavy composition (realistic maybe for spain/ USA. Otto and German are generally speaking to coin heavy and you usually have more than 34 vills on coin)
Summary:
Trickle cards generate resources worth 1-5 villagers (depending on what you assume). Wood/ coin trickle are more valuable than other resources trickle (sumptuary laws) or food trickle.
For Supremacy civs which don’t have access to the 3 villager card the trickle card are usually a decent choice (India/Russia). One more advantage I didn’t yet mention is, that when you are idled/ forced to stay in your tc trickle cards just still continue to work. So this is something to consider for Dutch for example.
China can get the most trickling, followed by India and French.
In late game the food trickle card is worth to consider for Dutch/ Swede, if you plan to go for coin heavy compositions (Ruyter/canon or mercs). Capitalism could be something for Spain/ USA, but it truly depends on the playstyle/ Unit composition.
Video: [link]
Disclaimer
Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition© Microsoft Corporation. This Video was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” ( [link] ) using assets from Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition, and it is not endorsed by or affiliated with Microsoft.