"the strange, or perhaps more accurate to say BAZAAR strategies" Well done sir. Perhaps your finest work yet.

Remember when team bonus is +1 attack against building and galley attack 20% faster? It was thanks to SotL that the dev changed the description to match the actual bonus.

Your starting 200 stone can become a loan of 245 gold, to be paid back in castle age when you can buy that stone back again for 263 gold. Despite the 5% trade fee effectively being assessed twice, the loan only costs about 7% interest due to the way that you are altering the price at the market. If other players sell their stone, the deal only gets better. It is a bit tricky to do exact math on the bonus, because there are effects from fractional resources. Not having to plant farms immediately also creates a loan. If you can delay planting 10 farms, you essentially have a 600 wood loan until the point at which you need those farms. Paying the loan back can get messy though, as you need both the resources and the APM to plant. An 800+ resource loan in early feudal age can yield quite an amazing power spike.

The Saracan's market bonus to me is the most hidden and difficult to notice bonus. But one that has one of the highest potentials of all bonuses.

What one should keep in mind is that the market makes the Saracen's economy *flexible*. In the midgame they have a small to nonexistent penalty to changing horses midstream, as they can just buy their way into the 'right' resource distribution when surprises make them reevaluate their resource allocation.

One aspect of the bonus that you didn't talk about is the fact that your eco upgrades temporarily skew the balance between two resources. Let's say you need stone, gold and food. Rather than picking up the gold mining upgrades and the farming upgrades, you can just pick up the stone mining upgrades. That saves you resources upfront, and shifts the "fair" price by making your stone miners more efficient compared to your gold miners.

Can we all take a second to just appreciate how excellent this channel is? True quality work

The fact that stone is "overpriced" at the market (judging by the collection rates) is due to the fact that stone is a much more rare resource on standart maps. That's why I always felt uncomfortable selling stone for gold. I just want to save that stone for castles later. I know this late game thinking doesn't quite fit into high player's paradigm, but for me it is a comfort play.

Fun fact, Bazaar بازار isn't really Arabic (Saracen), it's Persian, the Arabic word is Souk/Souq سوق.

Bravo, surely my favourite civ bonus in all of AoE2. I have been asking for this video for years! As a Saracen main I am always selling at least 500 wood in feudal age, selling stone, and buying food till atleast 130, if not higher. The villager efficiency combined with the lack of farm wood investment is just a huge resource lead. Another part of the value comes with being the first to sell down to below 50 in imp to take advantage of above-bottom rates - this is usually achievable as Saracens since you have such good rates and nets you at least another 1000 gold. As some of the pros pointed out it prevents your opponent guessing your build by checking your eco, although at my level that isn’t as helpful. Lastly the simple ability to adjust your economy on the fly to, say, go up to imp quickly or react to a castle drop with your own castle is really valuable. You can then use the market prices to ‘guide’ where best to put your villagers. All in all a really solid bonus throughout.

You gotta appreciate SOTL he breaks every little number in this game, when 90% of us see "COST -100 LESS WOOD" and go: NEAT *CLICK* and forget about it later on.

One way I like to think of the market, is that you can take very cheap "loans" out that can pay itself back if you do something with it. If you were to buy a resource and then sell it back later, the amount of gold lost in the process is very little compared to other civs (you can use the map editor if you want to get a feel for this). The amount of total gold lost (let's call this the interest on the loan) by buying a resource(s) and then selling it back at a later point in time is very small. So for example, if you want to take a "loan" out to advance quickly by selling a bunch of wood to get up quickly, you can immediately buy the wood back (assuming you need it) and while you may have lost a tiny bit of gold in the process (the interest), you've gained a really fast up time which can pay itself back (the investment) if you use that really fast up time to kill vils or units. And you didn't have to move any vils around to do this which is both costly in micro and idle time. Their are other little things you can do too. You can manipulate the market to work against your opponents favor. If you just crashed the market for food, and you happen to be raiding your opponents base, prioritize raiding your opponents food source. That way he won't be able to use the market for this resource because it's already been crashed. That's why all-ins work so well with Saracens. If you go all-in and take out the opponent's TC that has all the farms around it, it's even more game ending because not only has he lost his ability to boom but he can't buy at the market to buy himself time. I also like to use the market if I'm going for a unit spam. Using the market can help the stream of units going if I start to have some surplus in something.

Great video as ever, Spirit.

I haven’t played AOE2 in 15 years, but I still watch your videos all the time. Love the math and analysis you do!

I actually really like the Saracens market bonus. The thing I find great about it is it helps me in both of the two situations I want help the most: When I make a mistake, and when I'm evenly matched with someone. A lot of people I've noticed tend to analyze a civilization's tools from the perspective that the person playing them won't make any mistakes. However useful that analysis might be, it's totally unrealistic. Players make huge mistakes all the time, even at very high skill levels. When you've messed up and your economy doesn't have the resources you need to avoid a loss, the Saracen's market bonuses are there to help you back to your feet. Yeah, in an ideal world you where you have perfect information you'd never need to lean on it. Sure. But given that we don't live in that world, who cares? In this world, the bonus is great and puts you back into games you'd otherwise be forfeiting. The other situation it shines in is when you're against an opponent who's just as good as you are. In that situation what is very likely to happen is both you and your opponent surviving and heading into lategame. When that happens, the bonus kicks into overdrive and gives you a boost forward right when any advantage is enough to tip the scales. Here's the advantages it gives you in lategame: ・You don't have to buy Guilds, your opponent does ・You economy becomes more efficient than your opponent's even if they do buy Guilds ・You gain more advantage than your opponent from draining the market prices for Food and Wood ・You can buy Stone more easily than your opponent, which under ideal circumstances might not only mean an extra Castle for yourself but could also at the same time mean one less Castle for your opponent. It's a huge, flexible combination of effects; some immediate, some long-term, some economic, some military. In short, I think this is one of the most powerful bonuses in the entire game. It's helpful in just about every type of game, no matter what strategy you're going for or how long the game lasts. The implication of the potential advantage you can bring to bear alone may be enough to cause some players to forfiet in situations where they would not do so against any other civilization.

Man, i have been watching you for 5 years and i found you back on this account and seeing you grow so much made me tear up 😅

0:22 SOTL with his genius puns, Classic!

Great word play with Bizarre and Bazaar.

so, just because I'm curious: has anyone done the math on how wonky the lategame prices would have to be so you could buy food / wood with wood / food respecively?

- The bottom text at 2:34 is incorrect. It should say '21.5 gold/min' instead of '21.5 stone/min'. - The text at 4:21 is incorrect. It should say that it is profitable when the price is over 105, not 95.

Finally. Waited for this for 20 years!! the Gold-Food relation worth research!

That bonus is underrated imo. Just difficult to use properly.

After years of hearing T90 mention the Saracen market bonus, I finally know what it is

if SotL was a velociraptor he would be Spirit of the Claw

Not sure why but I found this video to be your best one yet. I've been watching for years so I have to say congrats on continuing to improve your craft.

It felt long since your last upload. Really missed you man!

Also consider that heavy market use early on (selling wood, buying food) by the Saracen player will further lower the efficiency for other players doing the same and increase the advantage even further. Also consider that SHORT TERM farming is even less efficient, because in order to benefit from a farm, you FIRST need to invest 60 wood and time to seed the farm and start harvesting. It is only towards the end of a farm's life span (I think 8-9 minutes), when that theoretical farming efficiency is reached. Means, in the short term, the boost gained by trading food is even greater. Even with the "fair" price, you're minutes ahead and before you know it, you're already in castle age and your boom pays back the investment. Also consider from the start of the game on, we are floating 200 stone that we don't need until castle age (unless going for towers). With the Saracens, you can transform those into something of immediate use in early feudal age. The Saracen's archer bonus against buildings makes them actually quite decent against buildings, which might be a way to save some gold otherwise needed for siege units. In general they have a lot of fully upgradable units, which nicely takes advantage of the economomic flexibility provided by the market. Update: I just tested the gathering rates in AoE II Definitive Edition and the rates are significantly different from yours. With only the first wood, stone and gold upgrade, gold mining is roughly 8 and 6% more efficient than stone mining or chopping wood, while farming is nearly 20% less efficient and that's not even considering farm costs, which take the difference closer to 30%. This suggests to me that trading stone for gold is slightly less profitable, trading wood for gold is not profitable, but trading gold for food is very profitable and you can delay farming a lot.

Thank you for this video. I should have realized after the ones on Guilds that this bonus was better than I thought (since it's better than Guilds, costs nothing up front and becomes active in Feudal Age). With 5 gold per sale over a generic civ without Guilds, you're going to see this add up fast. Gains over 1000 gold per long game and hundreds in short ones sound pretty sweet, albeit less decisive than some eco bonuses in the game.

So that's why saracens rarely got a change in their civ bonus in the past few years. Because the market bonus is good if you know how to use it.

Spirit of AOE, recently got back into AOE 2 DE on console , your content has been so useful 😊

The real question now is, how much gold do you get as the polish if you mine Stone with 4 vills and sell it at the market compared to Saracens mining and selling stone.

Part of me wishes AoE2 had a mechanic where market prices would slowly return to normal over time (faster the further they are away from the starting fair price). AoE2 games span, in theory, several hundred years, so why does bottoming out the Stone market in the Feudal age still affect prices in the Imperial? Just some food for thought.

Daut beat Liereyy with a saracen market scout rush few years ago. Epic

4:10 could you consider it worthwhile for the polish? as they'll get gold from their bonus as well as from selling stone

That scout rush guide was the first BO I ever did wow brings back memories

I love that Bazaar pun.

Looking forward to watching this

I remember Saracens actually advancing slightly faster than Mongols, but Mongols is very easy to do, pretty much play normally and make sure you do some hunting. Saracens need to mine and sell some stone and mine some gold and then buy food and maybe some wood and change their economy a few times etc. Quite a bit of work for something another civ can do nearly for free. Can also be a huge waste of gold and stone if you screw it up or are a bit slow.

Appreciate the lack of meme images in this. Good video.

Another thing to note is that some other Civs can take advantage of this bonus. Turks gather gold 20% faster, so when buying their rates are equivalent to a 8% fee. Koreans also may be able to sell more stone, especially if they invested into stone mining tech while making towers.

The delayed farm effect can be leveraged in castle age to assist with 3+ TC booms. You can justify even higher prices in this case. The higher the market price the smaller the +3 difference makes to the overall price so even if you max out the price to a ‘fair’ trade you can go beyond with limited penalty, likewise the trade gets rapidly worse as you get towards 20.

We need a build order on the Smush to high light that unique bonus!

There was a strategy where you buy and sell and were able to put up a castle I believe around 10-11 minute mark.

T90 beat the 160% handicapped AI with Saracen market abuse. He mostly collected gold and bought food to go for knights. This was the only strat he was able to win with. That also shows the strength of the Saracen market

SotL you should do a 1v1 ranked or non-ranked game where you play as Saracens and tryout the Scout Rush from 16 years ago all the while using the market AS much AS possible too. I think it'd be a good companion video to this one.

On about weird strats, remember the saracen monk rush? 20 pop up fast castle into full monks and just abusing that market. It's quite fun strategy.

The stone selling allowing all civs to mine stone and sell for faster gold for at least a couple sales becomes pretty interesting with the Poles.

Your videos make me download the game again and do weird strats in multiplayer games.

Bizarre bazaar puns aside, this was an excellent video. 👍

Shocking! See this youtuber break the secret of market exploit! Tatoh hates him! :D

Watiching this video one year later still makes sense, but i'd better if someone (or even the pusblisher) makes a chart for easy reading instead to be "calculator-man-2000v5" every time i would like to use the market to exploit this bonus. to wrap it up, i know this is "an old video" nowadays, but it's still important as "academic theory" and would be even easier to understand with a chart alongside, to be more interpretive of (vast amount) numbers that "i should remember"... i hope this comment get noticed :D

What about using that other players "bottom out" prices? Like, if you know your enemy likes to dump tons of food onto the market, you could buy food for cheap. Meaning you need less farmers. Asuming you invest the population space into Tradecarts.

It seems like an exceptionally flexible eco bonus that rewards players who pay attention. But there really should be better tips since market prices just aren't an intuitive thing

The video I've been waiting for!!!

The Saracens bonus is so weird to think about. It's both underwhelming and crazy at the same time, and as SotL pointed out, you can do stuff like skip farms and sell stone to buy food, then use the time rushing up to Castle to get stables up, or drop two quick TCs, or be even more crazy and buy the stone back to do an immediate Castle drop.

100 food = 173 gold And thus you have discovered the true majesty of Hoang.

Now we need a video about Mamelukes and how good they are vs some units... god like efficiency

Happy Valentine's Day, Spirit of the Law.

I think a good follow up video would be, does market greater market use impact win rate.

I'm also curious if you could coordinate with other players, e.g. you buy one resource, making the price go up, then another player sells that resource, making the price go down, so both of you get a good price. Because in most games with heavy market use, you typically end up with food and wood at rock bottom price and stone constantly getting more and more expensive. Having one player e.g. only cut wood and and sell it to buy food, while another player only makes farms, and sells the food to buy wood, would cause the prices to balance out, so that both players get a fair price for both buying and selling. That said, there's probably not a compelling reason to not just have both lumberjacks and farms.

If you take ideas for your videos, I always wondered if Bulgarian Scout Line with Stirrups or Milita line with Bagains become a decent counter to the Knight line, when you want to preserve your gold in later game when gold starts to run out, but your opponent managed to secure more gold mines than you, or you try to save your gold.

Realy great and detailed

4:12 youpudding enters chat with Sicilians

At 2:32 and further, the lower text was supposed to be '21.5 gold/min', right?

When you crash the market; Low prices for Wood, Food or Stone. Either he can buy wood if it's low price, or he can buy food if it's low price, or he can buy stone if it's low price. Meaning an opponent can always buy if he has a relic or trade or is gold mining. The problem for your opponent lies in the long run. In terms of Gold he can not keep up like saracen can.

Mind you, what opportunities does this market strategy give your opponent? You are affecting the global market as well after all. Should opponents of Saracen players watch the market on occasion?

Do a video on how much of each kind resource there actually is on standard Arabian maps and larger maps, or island maps etc.

i would have loved to see how much more than an opponent do you get by selling First to the market if you opponent also want to sell but does so just a bit later, how much ressources with the fair price + the bonus does it give you as an advantage. Great video again btw!

0:18 Bazar strategies, i see what you did there

as a Saracen person, I approve what sotl was speaking about.

"Both you and your opponent forget relics exist" Why must you call me and my buddy out like that?

I feel like this video will change the saracen meta forever. I'm never going on gold now.

SOTL, would you consider doing a video about the best strategy for Mangrove Jungle maps? Naval or land units? What is better on that map?

I know you briefly mentioned Burgundian Vineyards, but is that including the food the vineyards/farms are also bringing in? E.g. if a Saracen player saves an equivalent amount of food, and/or only sells wood, how does it compare to Burgundian Vineyards? I'm also curious how it compares to the Feitoria, both for raw gold income, gold and stone together (e.g. for a Saracen player buying stone), and for total resource production (e.g. for a Saracen player saving some food and wood while also buying stone). All three of these civs have a lot of potential to get an edge if the game lasts until the trash wars. Though that is kind of an edge case, I'm still curious which one is best.

T90's next video be titled: "Bazaar New Saracen Strat? 40 Stone Miners in Feudal Age? Low Elo Legends"

Tatoh liked this video

I know this isn't really a build order channel but it would be nice to see what the timings are for the saracen stone scout rush

Great math

Now I'm wondering, what would happen if you combined the saracens' bonus and gilds?

how about videos about which civ have strongest generic units? For example which civ have strongest swordsman line, spearman line...

Ok, now for the real question: does this stack with guilds in all techs mod???

In which comrade SOTL embraces the labor theory of value

8:52 Nice!

Whenever SOTL ran out of ideas for aoe2 video he went back and re-examined the Saracen market bonus or Portuguese Feitoria

When u let the fact that 2006 was 16 years ago sink in...

Wow, I actually remember that old strategy website 🤣

4:22 should be "If price is over 105"

Does this mean any civ(except vikings) could buy food up to 173 at the market and be more efficient?

I hate when casters say "market abuse", when it most often is only "market use".

Do I sense a Saracens Breakdown remaster?

When you sell wood and stone for gold first, how fast you could do a monk rush with saracens? And more important: How much faster is that than other civs?

You didn't account for the increased market prices for your opponent to sell wood and food. I would expect that to be an important factor.

Where's ilicktoesatnight?

Uhm, don't Saracen even trade at a profit, if they get a resource to the lower cap? F.e. Wood on 20 gold: Saracean buy it for 20 + 5% = 21 gold -> Prize goes to 23 Gold --> Saraceal sell it for 23 -5% = 21.85, rounded to 22 gold.

4:24 should be 105 instead of 95?

What is the song at 2:00? The second one you use?

Spirit I was wondering if you could show us your stats? Games W/L and hours played etc

So we should all Saracen Hoang rush, just buying all food?

Saracens are one of the best civs in all AOE2. Maybe that's why they haven't modified the civ's attributes so much since 1999.

Kinda off topic, but when do you guys think the "Porto" DLC will be announced?