Stolen farms give slightly additional food every time because we all know eating food that's not yours always tastes better.

I like the image of a monk preaching a sermon to sway the hearts and minds of a field of carrots

15 is the size of resource capacity a farm have (you called "the food basket" in another farm video). That's added to the total food of the farm when it's stolen.

"Farms are lower priority than other buildings when attacking" Well, my fully upgraded siege rams would like to have a word with you

Re: Extra food. In a previous video, you've shown that farms themselves generate harvestable food. That meant that no farm can be harvested faster than at the speed it generates food, even with edited farming rates for vills. A farm's food count as shown in-game is always the sum of the food the farm currently has generated on it and the food that it can still generate before running out. That generated food on the farms must be what is carried over in addition to resetting the food count the farm can generate to whatever your tech allows. To test that: If you were to let the enemy villager harvest from the farm until they're at maximum carry capacity, then immediately kill them and take the farm for yourself as quickly as possible, it should give you only very little bonus food. On the other hand, if you were to kill the enemy villager and then let the farm just sit there for a minute before taking it with your villager, it should give you more bonus food - up to 15, the cap for generated food a farm can store.

Oh, my childhood memories I distinctly remember finding this during the 3rd Barbarossa scenario. I spent so much time as a kid trying to avoid destroying farms to later take them

Paying your Teuton ally 50 wood per constructed farm actually seems like a great business model😂 the first time I’ve thought about offering goods and services in team games apart from normal trade routes hahaha

This could be turned into the most tedious "nothing" map yet. Teams of two who have to keep switching their farmers around.

The extra food is the food generated by the farm. It should be roughly 1-20 food depending on the time between harvesting and stealing.

Upon hearing "Spirit of the Law here" I always feel like I am getting a 20% IQ boost. Which is actually 25% when you crunch the numbers; But when you add in the boost from the civ bonus, it's actually 33%.... after some testing there is a hidden bonus against cavalry which makes it 45%. However, this is subject to my mechanical skill, which really means it's only a buff on paper.

it reminds me of the Viper's trick of stealing an enemy's fishing traps with a converted fishing ship, and basically deleting the opponent's fish boom

The ally-steals-farms-to-replenish trick is insane! One allied farmer would be enough to run around the base to replenish all farms. If the villager replenishes 50 farms (that are down to 50% capacity on average), then it's worth 1500 wood. If this took the villager 3 minutes to touch all farms, then this would be equivalent to a staggering 500 wood/minute gather rate. According to SotL the post-imperial Celt lumberjack (best in the game) are 31 wood/minute. So the replenisher would be worth 16 post-imp Celt lumberjacks during this period. Obviously the actual farmers have to stop to allow the take over, but this reduction of gather rate is negligible compared to the benefits. Especially when we consider that the farms don't have to be regrown with this method. It does cost micro and coordination by both players but gives them a very strong macro advantage.

I guess the "swap farms (or fishtraps) between allies" could be exploited by teams of allied AIs much better than by humans.

My main take away from this was that I can delete defeated teammates' buildings. I did not know that was a thing.

man, the amount of wood saving by intermingling farms via a timer app with allies on a cell phone that makes a beep every time you need to swap out farms would be amazing, not to mention unlimited food. Trash Wars would become less about "trash" and now the majority of your military, and elite units would be so much more elite.

Wow good to know how the slav farming bonus works behind the scenes. As a slavs main, I steal farms for two reasons: To delete them and be annoying. As a power move in order to assert dominance.

Best use would be if you need wood for farms... your ally could build them for you instead to avoid the tribute fee

Spirit of the chad

This man will stop at nothing, before he acquires the last remaining food on the map! I'm proud of you, Spirit!

On the note of deleting buildings, I once had a game my enemy was being cheeky and started trading with my defeated ally's market I promptly deleted my former ally's market to stop them from getting free gold

I can't believe SotL forgot the best farm bonus of the game: is stolen Inca farm rebuilt faster? Edit: also do stolen Burgundian farms generate gold? (after their castle age tech ofc)

Teuton bonus with allied farm steal is hands down THE best way to sling in the game. Me and one of my friend regularly pick Teuton + food intensive late game civ (Most of the time Indians) Especially in TG arena and BF I sling around 50sh farm. -50 farm is 3k resources for non-Teuton civs. -If you want to sling someone 3k resources you should've sling 4k resources. (Due to %30 tax) -If you sling 50 farms with Teuton you pay 1800 resources instead of 4k! This allows you to comeback relatively early. This is important at closed maps. Your buffed teammate gonna hit extremely hard and most likely won't need any help at all but why wouldn't you send some trash units too? -SotL is right about "Right click - stealing allied farms using villagers takes so much effort" BUT if you don't build your farms, your ally can give a way point from TC. So they search nearby unfinished farms and start gathering from them. So there is actually waaaaaaaay easier method. Your teammate should know he barely needs wood after building additional TC's. (Basically you leave 3-4 dude on wood for houses/blacksmith and send every single villager to other resources.) This allows 4-5 TC boom with castle to protect yourselves. As a slinger (yeah I play slinger...) I prefer going 23 feudal > get Double axe, horse coller and WB> Castle age. %99 of the time your sling target will have a huge army and you can catchup somewhat easily. (Cheaper farms help here too) From this point I only make halbs... We are not typical hardcore aoe2 players but using his tactic we manage to beat pro players like Ganji, mBl, slam etc. on closed maps. We had %80 winrate after 40 Arena/BF TG's. Unfortunately my friend bored being 1 trick pony. So I'm left alone again :( Soo.... There you have it. I can send replays too but they are older versions....

I didn't even know what game this was about when I clicked on it. I then proceeded to watch the whole thing anyway. Great video!

My man had yet another farm video idea.. damn

I always felt so powerful when I steal enemy farms. Great to see an SoTL video on this! XD

came to know more about stealing farms, learned that you can delete your defeated allies' buildings too. Thank you SOLT

what a classic! SOTL and farm videos.

Great video as always. I noticed the audio comes and goes, like someone was playing with the volume.

"Units will target other buildings, so farms are the last one to be destroyed" Rams: Lets us introduce ourselves

15 makes me think that it is the amount of food a farm can store in its 'theoretical basket'. Maybe it has something to do with that

Only when you play this game for an absurd amount of hours do you find these exploits, AND I LOVE IT! Thank you for putting in all the time to show us plebes. lol Great day and continue conquering.

Hey SOTL, I have a rather specific question regarding the Poles. It wasn't clear to me if the folwark doesn't work at all - or if it does in the case of stealing a polish farm. I mean, if a bunch of polish villagers go to steal farms of an abandoned polish base, would it be worth it to build the folwark before stealing them? In other words, does the bonus kick in with stolen polish farms, if you have a folwark built up right next to them? Thanks for another great video, I've been a huge fan of yours since before coming back to AoE2 in 2019 :)

After watching this, and given your attention to detail and game mechanics, I'm sure there's a speedrunner lost in you :D

This is an incredible new exploit to find out. I think someone should develop a map game mode where stealing/trading farms is the only way to maintain a food income

My Man changed the title for the algo. I'm impressed. Commenting for the algo.

Oh Boy, it's farming video time!

8:40 Viper uses this trick sometimes on ranked, he sends in a sneak fishing ship to convert all enemy fish traps and then deletes them. Funny as hell.

This video mostly made me laugh. Thanks SOTL 😂

Hi @spiritofthelaw, I have an idea for a video. Which Civ would be considered the best when played with full tech tree. Thanks. Love the vids

I like how spirit apples his newly found search radius knowledge to this new video

I could see teammates swapping fish traps in an island game or something similar where wood is scarce.

Would love a video all about the civs with skirmisher bonuses or unique techs. A "skirm-off", if you will. Which skirm to rule them all?

You know, I am not an expert, but I think by the time you managed to cap an enemy base you don't really need to save some wood.

If you're destroying and opponent's base you may also wanna avoid destroying his market as you can use it if you defeat the opponent and then set it on Neutral, or you can simply leave the player set as Enemy. That's another way to steal sth from an opponent. It often works, although it's not an exact science, the opponent may delete it.

The greatest work of science in recorded history

I always remember when I built my TC on enemy farms on Attila the Hun campaign 11

Spirit of the Law: "How to get free farms; the secret ingredient is crime."

If there is a new civ abiut siam(thailand) i suggest 'two crop farming' which produces +200 food more and additionally +100 after upgrading crop rotation and 2 vil can work in 1 farm

RIP Iliketoesatnight for his legendary callouts

This is an OG spirit video. Nit picky math nonsense

Only SOTL can make a 9.45 min video on how to steal a farm

Hey i just recently found that there are Fire Towers in the Tamerlane Campain i think it was. Would love a video about them if you havent already done so

Could the extra food come from the villager who was previously farming it? It sounds like if the farmer barely touches it (and thus has very little food) it doesn't get the bonus food.

Never short on farming vids ideas, I see

Could 2 allies coordinate by just trading farms over and over again so they'd never have to build new ones? It'd be very micro intensive though so it would probably only be worth it when there is barely any wood available.

I learned this playing the conquerors campaigns

video idea: when you first start playing the game there is a benchmark test for multiplayer that runs a large battle, would it be possible to figure out who would eventually win this battle?

I remember a 2v2 tournament game where the teuton bonus was actually used( I think at the 2v2 WC but not really sure who)

new strategy for team game: keep a villager near your ally farms, convertall of them when they are about to expire and then let him convert it back

Just to be precise, building tc/mill near abandoned farms converts them or is it just specified as auto-conversion because villagers automatically go to gather from them?

I already know that trick, you can also use this trick at aom, especially good on Atlantean

Stealing from your allies reminds me of a game I played in the original AOE2, no expansion, old graphics. I was using bombards or trebuchets to destroy all my allies buildings. Eventually the AI said something like "please stop," gave me all their resources, and quit. I can't remember if I just imagined this or what.

If I understood the implications of this, food is no longer tied to wood at all and this could spiral out of control with food meta involving swapping farms intentionally.

could teutons perhaps build farms for their allies?

I wonder if the pre-change malay fish traps (never expire) was also carried over when stolen.

Also, did you check if the "random bonus" matches the amount the last villager collected before you converted the farm?

Normal brain: forward villager tower rush Big brain: forward castle drop Galaxy brain: forward farm stealing

my suggestion: converted farms keep the food that were previouly deposited from them before. That's how the food number is in most cases slightly above the maximum.

Honestly my favorite strat in team games is progressing base to base by stealing farms

all that im getting from this is that the newest rush is just going to your enemies base with 1-2 vills and deleting all their farms. are the farms assigned when the vills are town bell-ed/ or otherwise in a building?

So technically if you were voice comming with an ally, you could have 1 side stop all of their farmers for a few seconds while the other quickly claims all the farms with a single villager from anywhere else on the map, and then have the first player reclaim their farms with a fresh food supply? That would potentially save a lot of wood on a decent scale, kind of like trading ~20 -30 food for 200-300 wood

So, if I'm to wall my 6 villagers inside my base and send archer/skirmisher harass enemy villagers under Town Center. The moment enemy villager get hit, I order one of my walled villager to gather from enemy farm, even though he can't physacly reach it, *does that means I can lame all enemy TC farms?* Early feudal is quite a crucial moment in terms of wood and food.

now we get to look forward to a bunch of Teuton-Khmer teams in the future.

Stealing? That's not very Lawful of you.

1:36 That Halberdier was attacking one of the farms right. And a villager still converted it so that Halberdier stopped attacking and went to attack something else.

That feeling when your ally goes on and takes all your farms for himself.

Imma start doin this

So if you do a feudal Rush and they garrison the villager.. could a few (2 or 3) villagers come and delete all the farms?

I could imagine the food resseding with no wood cost via swapping could be op for team ai's given that they can have perfect macro and could keep track of all their farms like no human could.

AoM's default military behaviour is that units don't attack farms at all unless tasked to do so. Only the AI players seem to prefer auto attacking farms with their armies. Very useful if you plan to steal farms!

I find it surprising that the farms reset their food amount. It seems like it'd make a lot more sense for them to just keep their current food amount. I wonder if this was an intentional game design/balance decision or if they didn't think about it so hard and this was easier to code.

Some of these genuinely sound like they might see use in high level team games.

Could the extra food gained on the farm be dependent on how much the prvious farmer had farmed but not yet dropped off? Maybe this amount gets added to your total amount?

Awesome

How does it work when Teuton place farm foundations. Then Slav build it and finally it is stolen by Teuton. So, do you have a cheap superfarm?

i now have to know if converted buildings have weird properties

So can you make your opponent town bell by raiding and quickly right click a bunch of farms with your villager and delete them all?

In multiplayer, can a team of 3 or 4 [slavs, byz, etc] play hot potato with a farm, and ideally stack some bonuses on it?

did anyone else think that trading farms with a teammate might eventually be worth it with a teammate that is khmer somestime? just send some khmer villagers to your teammates farm and rotate with him sometimes

That 15 extra food is the dead farmer >:D

Do the farms have extra food because it also steals/adds the total of food held by the villager that was previously assigned to it?

as a Software Engineer, I can see the Dev guy handling the farm stealing logic would get excited of having his work being talked about by some guy on the internet. NGL, these things would woosh over normal people's heads,heck, wouldn't even be noticed coz who even do these frequently irl?

watching this made think of a new civ bonus, what if a civ still gets 50% of the ressource cost back if the civ deletes a full hp building? this could potentially be a massiv bonus as you always get half of the cost for farms back whenever it replenishes, right?

I can see how this could change the meta and tip the scale a lot towards players with a hight cpm rate.

how great would be a video featuring SOTL and sandy petersen?

can you make an infinite farming reset with 2 players and destinations?(shift click)

Do stolen farms not get the food extra from what already has been collected by the other vill? Example; blue vill has collected 15 food. Red Vill takes over, gets his farm starting food + food already taken by blue vill.

Do bonuses persist across a reseed, or does reseeding a slav built farm replace it with a slower replenishing farm?

So... If there's a feature that allows 2 villagers to work in a single farm, if the farm is being used by 2 different players on the same team, does the food refreshed each time they drop off the food? (Like fish trap exploit?)

I knew you could steal farms but I didn't know all of this was going on in the background.