Mule Cart has cute animal with it, so it wins, at least my heart.

Since they don't occupy pop space, what happens if at the very late game you just send 300 mule carts along with your soldiers to the enemy base? Just overflow the enemy base and at the very least bother the enemy farmers, forcing your opponent to collect inefficiently or surrender.

the mule should have a key to fix it on the ground as well as the trebuchets, so that it does not get stuck when ringing the bell or moving it by mistake with the villagers

I feel like a castle age test is important here. That's often when your wood crunch really hits and it also allows an easier comparison as there's no techs missing. Also to see how it compares against civs that lack two man saw but arent the Celts. Something else to think about is mule cart vs no replacement camps, both representing a sort of fire and forget kind of deal. Attention is limited and time you're checking wood lines to see if lumber camps need rebuilding is time you're not spending other important things. Most players aren't being optimal in camp replacement because you'll forget and if you are being diligent that has its own tradeoffs. Put another way, a Georgian mule cart with no church will bring in about 3% more wood than a civ with two man saw given the same amount of attention. In order for that civ to flip that equation they need to invest time in rebuilding camps. If you assume a split difference here (since players rarely rebuild camps at exactly the optimal time and distance) then Georgians have about the same resource collection despite not having a 500 cost upgrade and the impact begins immediately. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but the cost of two man saw wasn't included correct? Now that part gets trickier since you'd have far more lumberjacks than what we see in these tests, but it's still a nontrivial upgrade at 500 resources and takes 100 seconds to research, further delaying the time until they'd have net overtaken them. It also means the Armenians are absolutely cracked in the late game having about 24% more collection over a generic civ with all upgrades for the same attention.

Pro tips from an AOM player: use mule carts offensively to bodyblock while fighting off raids. Think of it like a vil who can't fight back but is very tanky. Against archers of course you can run and relocate for free. Also the key to a mule cart economy is extreme flexibility. At any moment you can switch all your lumberjacks to miners or etc, for free, and also switch back. This is held back a fair bit in Aoe2 since mule carts can't collect everything (it should at least be able to do all "natural" resources including fish and berries, farms can stay at mills and TCs), but the flow of eco timings will be a bit more toward large batches of resources as your bands of vils + carts efficiently roam around rather than trickles that get built up around infrastructure. Edit: oh and the tactical advantage is that if you have great scouting, you can just preemptively avoid the enemy so your army doesn't have to come home.

A small advantage the mule carts have over a lumberjack is that if you were to be towered. Simply moving away and not having to rebuild a lumberjack saves you a lot of wood

man the amount of work this guy puts in his videos is amazing...

Seeing mule carts reminds me about Age of Mythology (even though there are ox carts, not mule carts) I want to get my hands on AoM: retold so bad... 😱😅

Great video! I definitely don't push deer, so it's an early food bonus for me!

Excellent video! Also goes to show that Celts really need not just wood upgrades but handcard and wheelbarrow for thair wood bonus

I thought they were going to be much more powerful than they actually are. I can say I'm pleasantly surprised

great stuff! thanks for making this great coverage of my favorite RTS :-)

I’d be willing to bet on the mule cart winning in a head to head race, that’s for sure xD

One cool thing not mentioned here to the full extent is to be able to change between resources more easily. Basically hunt, wood, gold, stone all can be changed as mule cart speed is vill speed so just go with the vills to the other res. This gives more tricks available to pull off when doing early game build orders (like all on hunt, then on wood - etc.)

"Heat of the Moment" being capitalized in the subtitles made me laugh, and it's stuck in my head now

I love the thumbnail, love all your videos, keep up the great work!

I have to say the camps are surprisingly not as broken as I thought.

The Age of Mythology mechanic for the Nords! I love it!

That's cool and all, but how does mule cart affect forest nothing 256 tech speedruns?

Impressive work as usual, thanks man

Calling the Celt strategy in feudal age for converting mule carts for a tiny incremental bonus now. Definitely worthwhile to investigate

Huns, Mongols, Cumans, and Tatars should get the Mule Cart, too. They should also have a Livestock Pen that replaces the Mill and be able to automatically train and fatten herd animals at the cost of wood (to replace farms). 🙃

this is some quality content, as usual

Now all the new players can break their wood-floating records with the Armenians! Also nice callback to your video about refreshing lumber camps.

Ive watched alot if not all of your videos. The level of precision it feels like the devs has in regards to expected with actual bonuses and preventing "op" stuff. It makes me think that behind the scenes, when they make new civs or changes, they go through all the testing that you do after the release. It really goes to show the effort and care that the devs go through to have the game balanced.

Honestly the concept of a mobile building is fascinating. I'd love to see like, house carts or something. That'd be an interesting thing to give nomadic civs

Sorry SotL, can't remember if you addressed it in a past video, but how would Bohemians fit into this wood collecting ladder? Given that most of the wood collecting time is taken by walking and Bohemians have the fastest moving villagers in the game, I imagine that they could dispute maybe something more than beating the generic civs being that they also have all good upgrades, probably making them better than Georgians in the late game? But I wonder how they compare to Celts, mostly, as I don't think that they'll get close to Armenians. Also, I'd did an honorable mention to Burgundians with their one-age-early eco techs (and discounted price) that surely boosts the wood collection significantly! Bonus track: Bohemians get redemption, so... Bohemians with a mule cart sound pretty strong!

Between a structure that can't move vs a slightly more expensive, yet mobile, general resource drop off point. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but I'm fine both and are accustomed to them. Not spending wood on additional lumber camps is probably my favorite positive for the Mule Cart.

I simply love you, please never leave us.

Putting the question to rest. Fantastic!

something forgotten in this is also that Mule Carts replace building new Mining camps for additional Stone/Gold

Love your work! And I love the way you structured that one disadvantages first, the pros and than your huge comparison test showing all information well organized, simplified and summarized! Simply an awesome splittscreen visualized showdown. Since Celts are not a top tier civ anyway, it might be reasonable to increase their carry capacity for lumberjacks. Please some love for all the alltime classic civs - Persians being a perfect example of a nice ovehaul to make classic civs feel more 2023 than HD… One side note / question after how long a new church would be needed?

The mule cart is fun to scout with on nomad maps too.

Spirit, do you ever think about how many faces light up with a smile when they see that you posted another video? 😊

As a Mongolian enjoyer, I would LOVE to see Mule Carts added to the civ, but it might tip them into OP territory. I love their hunting bonus, which is already very good especially in the dark age, having that with little/no travel and easy forced drops could lead to some insane advance times. And between the Mangudai and strong Siege, (I find) they're usually pretty wood-intensive.

im curious which civs would benefit the best from converting Mule Carts?

IMO Mule Carts should cost 20 Food 80 Wood i.e. -20 Wood compared to right now, but same total resource cost as Camps

Nomdic civs getting mule carts would be super cool.

This will help me the next time I'm deciding whether to build a mule cart or a lumber camp /s

What this taught me is that, the difference between all setups is minor. Except celts in the early/mid game, and armenians in post imperial. Everything else hovers around a +/- 5%. Which matters a lot for high skill compeditive, bit only limitedly for casual or lowskill compeditive. Most important though, replace your wood camps every 1-2 tiles! Otherwise youre effectivly playing with a handicap.

Need a scrub version of the video where everything is compared to forgetting to move your lumber camp up, cause that's my life.

There is one more advantage to resource collecting buildings have over to mule cart, but it is very hard to quantify. Map vision. Even after a building is no longer being used to collect resources, it still provides map vision coverage. I can recall several experiences where a building I made the the early game tipped me off to a sneaky raid or flank attack, and I would not have had that tactical knowledge without the vision of the building. Again, it is really hard to quantify, but it is an advantage.

The blue "set and forget" lumber camp looks suspiciously like one of my bases 11

A lot could be learnt from how top level age of mythology players use there ox carts. Hunt is something that becomes a heap more efficient for one. Also in late game to overcome the low hp of the ox carts maany players just send 2 to vulnerable wood lines

Now THIS is quality content

Props for the thumbnail, got me giggling irl

you could say some are still muleing over this question, while others a pretty encamped

Spirit of the Law!

Great video as always

With the December patch, wood gathering is now an additional 4% and 8% faster than before after lumber camp upgrades in feudal and castle age. In imp, you lose the 15% upgrade, so net 7% slower wood gathering in the late-late game. Overall, I think it is definitely a buff since you are saving on upgrade costs of two-man saw and benefiting also with faster stone and gold gathering. Also, in a post imp game, it just isn’t that important having higher wood gathering as it is earlier on.

Ah, aoe2 wood chopping, the most therapeutic sound.

one day Spirit of the Law will meet that patch note and Developer Dude at the AOM Team , thats whole purpose it is to keep updates interesting :)

Lots of work., Thanks

The fact that you don't have to spend wood in new lumbercamps is being understimated.

In the near future, Devs will probably rethink the idea of the mule cart and may also grant other civs access to it. It's just a fine idea.

a strat I believe people aren't looking into is the fact you can kite boar with them very easily. they run around the carts very awkwardly.

Ty for ASMR spirit!

Spirit i think the other thing to remember is while stats on the same wood proove they are efficient i think that the bigger take home for me was that being super efficient building new lumber camps every 1 tile vs not bothering only led to a 4% efficiency. In games that are super close that 100 wood could possibly be used earlier to create a bit more pressure earlier on?

Nice analysis. Though it confirms the main issue with the mule cart that I was suspecting: great on paper, but much less impressive in practice and pays off too little too late. All the downsides are in the practical aspects. The benefit of not needing a new lumber camp/mule cart only applies to the same group of wood choppers when they move far away from the camp/cart. However, early enough in the game I usually have more than one wood lines, and the benefit of mule cart doesn't translate towards it -- I still need two mule carts for the two wood lines. Therefore, I think the not needing to build a new camp pays off too late. Overall in practice I don't think I made fewer mule carts than I would make camps in the early to mid game, unless RNG works in my favor in map generation where I can delay a cart by sharing one between miners and lumberjacks. I also think having to wall more to protect the mule carts may neutralize their efficiency early on. One thing mules carts are amazing though is when I bring one cart with a hunting squad of villagers around a nomad map to hunt, if my opponents don't find them :) Maybe someone else can enlighten me otherwise.

Question here do you think we should give the mule cart to steppe civilisations? Just to represent that they are more nomadic and prone to wander. Also a novel idea what about a house that's mobile in the form of a tent setup for the Huns to lean into the migration identity. Rather than just no houses.

Question: Does the 200 wood for the church have a bigger effect on the efficiency the shorter the measured time? I just felt like changing to 40 minutes for the second test would leave the Georgians & Church looking slightly better than it is. Maybe I'm wrong or you accounted for it and I missed it.

The video we all needed but didn't deserve.

Back in school I did never understand what math was good for, so I didnt care and always had bad grades. I wish u were around back then.^^

This video really signifies to me just how directionless AoE2 civs have become. The new civs just steal bonuses from others (if not outright supplanting them) as well as other games like AoM. I’m not saying that the OG civs should remain untouched or go unopposed, but as more new civs get added with similar bonuses, they actually start to feel less unique.

Would it be better to test with just 1 or 2 vils to minimize them running into each other? Or is them bumping into each other an important part of testing?

Great video❤

Merci, très instructif comme d'habitude🤩

I wish those eyes where on both objects for the whole video

"I'd go back to choppin', but someone has to pet the mule from time to time" - stuck villagers, probably

I still think that historically nomad civs should get mule cart as well. Mongols and Huns for instance

Hi Spirit of the Law. I really enjoy your videos. You are so good at presenting differences in how stuff works in aoe2 . But I see in important topic that you have not yet covered. . The issue is that many people and even the pro players, when they get / pick armenians and georgians and have mule carts, I see that they still, probably out of habit, push in the deer in to the TC, and that confuses me, as the mule cart is the perfect tool to not have to push deer. There are many aspects to this. Using the scout to push deer delays scouting. Many times deer path in weird ways and you have to start over. Would it make sense to have 3-6 vils + a mule cart go to the initial closest pack of deer and hunt it before sending them to gold or wood? Would it make sense to allocate same team to just continue hunting all over the map unit they can find no more deer? Is it more efficient than just sending them to farms? I would love to see an in depth video about this topic :D Hope you make it. thanks anyways for all the great videos you do . All the best!

When you tested the wood collected from 1 tile lumbercamps, did you include the 200wood cost to replace them? If not then real difference should be even bigger

They 100% can be used as a wall as long as you do it right. Just make sure you don’t move them when they get attacked

Interestingly the efficiency depends deeply on pathing. So if pathint improves it will get better.

Anyone else noticed how grouped units suddenly stop moving when setting a waypoint? Just stopping after a few steps and remaining clumped up without facing any obstacles that would cause them to get stuck. Pathing gets worse and worse with every update

Hey Spirit of the law, guys here

Who has the strongest villager ? Spanish : **huff confidently** Armenians : 'I can carry *14* farms on my own !"

The Mule cart might be weaker, but it can also move, and garrison, so it's by no means certain it will go down quicker than a standard camp. And that raises an interesting question, does it heal while garrisoned, the way villagers do?

Yes, water is wet, and now you know exactly how wet

After seeing this in depth comparison i thruly believe that all the nations that dont have «Two Man Saw» upgrade should have the «Mule Cart». They could make the more "Nomadic" civs have the «Mule Cart» as standard and dont have acces to the «Two Man Saw», and the other civs should be the other way arround. I believe that some could even have both the lumber camp and the «Mule Cart», but never the «Mule Cart» and «Two Man Saw» combo. (that would be broken probably lol)

What about the other resources a mule cart can receive? How good do they compare to mining camps and are they useful or convenient when it comes to food from boars and deer?

I am curiouse about what would happen if celts convert a mule and use it

i don't think they should get buffed, as that would make giving them to new or already existing civs more dangerous. instead buffing the currently very weak early game of the new civs should be the priority

Will this video get remade when all the pathing/selection issues get bugfixed out?

In the end of the video you show how many farms a single village can support in some examples. What is this for a civilisation without a wood bonus? Is there a completely list of lists for all civs somewhere?

Then the next question: because the civs that have access to woodcarts do not have all wood tech, which is better? The cart or the camp?

Celts need to get two hand saw to protect their identity

Mule carts are effective when I don’t feel like spending on infrastructure. More so in contested unstable territory

More nations should get the Mule, like the Huns and the Mongols.

What do you mean there's a way to just select eco units? I didn't know this for over 20 years!

Celts being dethroned feels wrong

The mule cart slaps on mangrove jungle since it can walk on water

So this video then raises the question of, can I gift the mule camp to my teammates, and what does that mean for the existence of team building?

but how good are mule carts on forest nothing? can you fit one in your starting area as armenians?

I find rather that there is CONSTANTLY a villager stuck because of the cart

do u have to manually drop off hunt before moving to wood?

Have you considered a career in management consulting Spirit of the law??

Does it make sense to compare the escenario of having a church in feudal?

But what if Kelts Woololololo a mule cart! WHAT IF THEY WOOOO A MULE CART!!! XD

The problem of Mule Cart are cost food earlier this hinder early economy of start since food are important at early game.