For me, the answer is pretty much always: Get it when housed.

personally i subscribe to the "never deliberately research wheelbarrow, simply save it until you inevitably get housed to stop your tc going idle" school of thought

I'm just going to stick to Vikings and not worry about this

Tbh, getting wheelbarrow at 300BC sounds like a better timing then 1300AD to me.

It would be cool to see villagers actually using a wheelbarrow or handcart.

EZ strategy: 1. Pick Burgundians 2. Get Wheelbarrow at the start of the game 3. Works every time, 100% win rate

SOTL: "When should you get wheelbarrow?" Vikings: "I don't understand the question."

Hey Spirit of the Law, people here.

I haven't played aoe for more than a year, but I still religiously watch every SotL video as soon as it comes out.

Cumans: Behold, my second TC to research Wheelbarrow

It's crazy to go back and see the old videos. He's more confident and well spoken and like you can truly see the skills grow over time. I got DE cuz these videos get me so hype

Can’t wait for aoe4 math vids

Of course the right answer for the ammount of villagers is 42. Why did you even calculate that?

i just get wheelbarrow when i eventually get housed in feudal (and handcart when i remember)

Hey SotL, if we are revisiting some old questions it might be worth looking at mill placement around berries again! Since DE changes to villager pathfinding, I haven't noticed much difference between 1 tile away and adjacent to the patch, especially when the berries are saturated with 4-6 villagers. If there isn't much difference, it might mean 1 tile away is better since it makes walling out scouts and militia way easier (similar to the mining camp next to gold).

One helpful thing I use, click wheelbarrow as you enter into a micro battle with your army. Gives you a bit of time to not have to micro your TC/eco

“When to get wheelbarrow and hand cart?” *laughs in Viking while drinking wine in my foe’s skull.*

Hey Spirit, since I'm an AC technician I just wanted to mention that modern ACs also work as heat pumps and can warm you during winter.

I would say that probably one of the reasons a lot of high level builds recommend getting wheelbarrow so early, even on an archer build (i.e. right before you click up to castle age) is because wheelbarrow is a much higher initial food investment than a single villager is. So you can potentially queue up bodkin arrow, crossbowman upgrade, bow saw, and a villager all once you get to castle age right away, then continue villager production while you get the next upgrades (like archer armor, potentially expanding tcs, etc.), but never be floating enough food to easily get wheelbarrow without idling your TC. In contrast, you are going to be floating a lot of food as you prepare to go up to castle age, so you can afford to pay the 175 food all at one time rather than spreading out the food costs, because your castle age preparation removes that bottleneck.

The casual version of this question is, do you research it when you age up so you don't forget it or do you simply forget about it and research it later when you remembered it exists.

7:55 man with armour is faster than man with just pants. but man with no clothes and bongos on his head is still the fastest

I don't even play Age of Empires 2 on the regular. I play only Age 3. These videos are so intriguing I watch literally every single Spirit Of The Law video. They're just too good.

5:10 Another thing is that you don't have to build the 1-2 extra farms as soon, giving you both some short-term Wood savings and also another efficiency advantage since the extra farms would have been the furthest from the TC.

Lots of good points here. I like to get wheelbarrow based on the farm number. If I'm going scouts -> knights, I go up to 15-18 farms in feudal age before clicking up on 33 villagers + wheelbarrow. For this, I get wheelbarrow after I've placed 15 farms, even if I'm not at 33 villagers yet (sometimes I'm at 31-32 vils). As stated in the video, wheelbarrow mostly helps farmers to be efficient. At this point, increasing the farmers efficiency is better than adding more farms, as more farms cost wood, which you need to invest into more stables/tcs/siege workshop/monastery/etc... You also would rather wait until you have heavy plow in castle age before seeding additional farms so increasing the efficiency of your farmers lets you have less farms that only have horse collar.

its over 100F in washington state US right now. what a time to be alive

Imagine being MbL. You just don't care, you just get it when being housed

Nicov: don't get wheelbarrow and yet beat your oponent!

I feel like getting Wheelbarrow before Castle Age is about the opportunity cost compared to delaying it. What I mean is that if you want to Boom and/or go Knights you really can't afford to idle your TC when you need constant Villager production in Castle Age.

I know I am late to the party, but I think I have an aspect that might be impactful enough to be relevant that is not considered at all in this video: If wheelbarrow makes your farmers more efficient it allows you to use the farms you already payed for faster. So it does not only give you the villagers, but also the farms you would have to build for them to use them to give you food. This does not hold up long term, because farms run out, but they do so with a very significant delay, so I don't think that caveat really negates this point. A small addition is also that it allows you to have more farming eco without needing more farming space in the second row or on the exposed mill etc. I don't want to do the exact numbers myself, but if someone wants to crunch them I'd be very interested to see, how they'd look. As a first guess I'd just take the 13.6% times the woodcost of the farms you already have, that don't expire soon, times the 60 wood it would take to set up that farming eco. So if we say 12 of the 16 farms are reasonably fresh, that would be about 100 wood. As a probably smaller factor in the other direction the tech does not only cost upfront, but also works with more delay, because the created vills would already have gathered some res with 75 seconds of work time + the additional res cost, but I think those factors are a bit more obvious.

_Refreshing Homepage_ "Ah, I know that SOTL video. Wait, 2 Minutes ago?" Can't wait to see what changed :D

What about Khmer, could they just ignore it? Since their farms dont depend on dropping nor walking.

I like both techs for hunting. Lowers the amount lost in food to decay when I'm doing something like raiding or exploring and can't micromanage hunters to herd every deer type animal close to a mill.

Small brain: Get wheelbarrow as soon as possible. Big brain: Get wheelbarrow at the inflection point. Galaxy brain: Get wheelbarrow when housed.

One important omission here is how wheelbarrow increases your food income without needing to spend wood on more farms - it isn't just about the food cost of the villagers. At around 14-15 farms, wheelbarrow is like having +2 farms, and so potentially saves you 120 wood. Usually, with an archer build you want to move a bunch of villagers from farms to wood after clicking Castle anyway, so this is the justification for getting it a little "too early". Also, any farmers added after the first 12-14 will be 2nd layer farms(unless you build another mill), so they cannot be assumed to gather at the same rate. It's impossible to quantify all of these factors (villagers being safer from raids due to faster walking speed for example), but I would for these reasons advise getting a little earlier than suggested in the video.

Faster villages have other advantages too, if you're being raided or need to move further from your base to wall or collect resources etc. I figure that if you're being raided, taking wheelbarrow/handcart earlier can be worthwhile - if it lets one or two villages escape being killed, for example, that dramatically swings things in your favour

Our boy SOTL is from B.C.? Did not even know that, let's gooooo! Me too, and the last few days were an absolute scorcher XD around 40 degrees C!

I find with archer builds a good reason to get it is actually lack of wood - you don't have 180 wood to build 3 more farms, but you have 50 to make the 14 you already built work better with just 25food more investment. Basically a way around wood scarcity delaying food gathering for castle without resorting to a market which would be 175 wood you don't have

Spirit of the Law, I was looking at the Aoestats and I noticed one weird thing: most civs drop their win rate at the 30-40 min game length, but there are a few that peak at this point: Aztecs, Berbers, Saracens, Sicilians, Tatars and Vietnamese. That's all of them. I just can't figure out what happens during the 30-40 min mark that only 6 civs have a good time and everyone else suffer. I can't find out what those 6 civs have in common either. I'm talking about 1650+ ELO, btw.

People really underestimate how big of a boost this is for Vikings.

I play 500 pop 8 player AI games where I usually hit 160-180 vills. I usually pick up handcart when I get housed, same with the sight line upgrade. This probably doesn't affect anyone, though.

Greetings from Van Isle!!!! GL in this heat Brotha!!! Thx for all your AOE info!!!

"Maybe you put a lot of value on faster moving villagers." I love the monkey head

Did SOTL consider the cost of Wheelbarrow vs the cost of 3 villagers + Extra farms (0 to 3 more farms) + 1 house (or at least 60% of a house)?

Is Spirit from Lytton BC? I just read it’s been completely overrun by fire. Just wondering if so and if he’s okay

I tend to research wheelbarrow or hand cart as i am going into a intensive military micro phase, generally at 35-40 vill pop using some archers or scouts. I justify that if i can distract of weaken enemy eco enough i will be in a better position either way.

Thanks for the vid and the hard work Spirit, your channel is fascinating. I have been going for a "20 farms, then wheelbarrow" rule, some random guy give it to me in Voobly quite a few years ago when I started playing and never forget it.

I think hand cart has a much bigger effect on overall wood and gold collection since the drop off rate is dropped by almost 50 percent. (8 trips down to 5 for ~100 resources) Less time walking means more collection! also the bump in speed helps with wood collection, something I see as a hidden benefit with Berbers since their villes are that much faster from the break.

SOTL, you're too humble. We all know that the top 5% of players are approaching 42 vils because of your video 6 years ago, and thus making them top 5% players.

Give me more complexity and more content Spirit! What about an episode about possible combined arms formations. Like, 8 crossbows in the rearguard.. what is the optimal investment in Xbows to cover a zone from pikemen, what is an optimal mix of unit effectiveness V cost for a civ with a variable stable like mongols? : Does a mix of steppe lancers/knights/light cav perform in multiple scenarios? Can't wait!

Wheelbarrow & hand cart are essential in Campaign missions where you have a limited pop cap and need to maximize the villagers you can afford.

All good and nice but can we appreciate how swiftly Spirit entered the topic???

I haven't played age of empires for about 15 years. Why am I addicted to this videos?

By the end of this channel spirit will have calculated the mathematical formula for the perfect game.

Great update SOTL. Great use of your past video inside the new version (Thanos reference very cute).

As someone else pointed out - what about the fact that 3 villages have massive potential additional hidden costs whereas wheelbarrow works instantly with no other costs! To get 3 villages working on farms, you need 150 food, then 180 wood, 3/5 of a house so +15 wood, 75 seconds of build time (37 food). +walking to their location time. Therefore the 3 vills, if they were to be farmers, actually cost 190/195 to WB 175/50. Or 385 vs 225 resources. This cost is staggered with the vills, as you pay in instalments of 50, then 50, then 60 etc. this would change the inflection point further unless they were going to wood. It also means that WB is a way to expand a food eco when wood starved, as the wood cost of the villagers is nearly 4X!!! If you're making archers ... you could make 4 archers for the cost of getting the villages onto food to age up to castle.

Wow, I usually get wheelbarrow when I'm into 100 villagers, probably to late

I always wait until Castle and use my TC that's far from all my resources to research it as they have to walk far.

We love it when you do a lot of maths. It suits you well.

Great video. Also, I want to see an updated trade video since all of the ones on the internet say that the farther the markets the better. That is true however there is a variable that is not taken into account and that is the population that you require to spend on it. In other words, It is useless to me to get 1000 gold per trip if each trip takes 1 hour to complete. Players' solution is always to add more trade carts but I will give you an extreme example to illustrate my point. Let us suppose you are playing at 25 population limit. You can't just throw in 25 trade carts or you're done. Therefore you need to find a balance between how far do you need the markets to be and how many trade carts you can afford without limiting your military capabilities

Your first video on this was 6 years ago? I would not have guessed I've been watching your videos for over 6 years. I feel old now. :P

What would have been interesting is looking into the ressources you save up with wheelbarrow while researching castleage for almost 3 mins

perfect timing, less than a week before a farming update

Adorable, SOTL thinks 33⁰ is a heatwave, love from Australia.

Currently 32C in the PNW. After the 45C heatwave, it feels lovely.

One thing i know for sure is if i have no more pop or don't want any more villagers but want more economy i should get it because it's population efficient.

Hey Spirit. I have a modding/Genie Editor dilemma for you if you're interested. I've been making some custom civs to upload to the Mods page using genie editor (not the website you showed in a previous video), and I've run into these issues. 1. is it possible to make a unit with an attack bonus vs villagers? There is no "armour villager class" and even when I give villagers a rarely used armour class like the turtle ship armour class, they don't receive any bonus damage from units with an attack against it. 2. is it possible to make a "forage bushes last 40% longer" eco bonus? All food sources (with the exception of herdables) are governed by the same food stat, namely "food productivity" so there doesn't seem to be a way to modify forage bushes without also affecting farms, fish and hunting animals. 3. is there a way to make a "targets receive 25% less damage when uphill" bonus? (essentially the Tatar bonus but reversed)

the way I handle it is this (for fast castle into booming) 27 vill dark age, 2 more before clicking castle, after castle make a villager to build a house, church, then another two houses, then just builds anything else I need (Dedicated build vill basically). Another vill to place my 8th farm (Assuming Black forest, I'll have 7 vills hunting down Sounders, so only 7 farms at this point as well) 4 vills created to build a TC, 4 vills created to build third TC, then fill out the rest of the farms around my starting TC (up to 12), then research both techs back to back since the other two TCs will be built by this point and can start pushing out farming vills since the vills who built the TCs go to wood. I feel more comfortable with this method since losing out on five vills on one TC doesn't feel like a big deal since I'll get 10 vills from the new TCs in the meantime

I'll be honest, I always save up the resources to research basically every eco upgrade right when the research for the next age completes, that way I forget to do them less often. Occasionally I'll queue up a vil or two beforehand if I feel like I clicked up a little early, but I always find that I'm never sorry for researching early. The only eco upgrades I routinely forget now are Crop Rotation and the last lumber upgrade 11

I do it when I'm housed. End of story.

Commenting the same way again here (I usually have a comment that ends up getting discussed as a fringe case in the last 40% of the video or so, then end up deleting it), but now that my Vietnamese have no wood cost to their economic upgrades I think getting it slightly earlier for them might be good. Since you can just go slightly more into farms (+1 or 2) than normal and recoup your food cost much earlier. Whilst supplementing any skirmisher production or advancement into the Imperial age. Also like so many I've been confused at 'misplaced' farms for a long while now. Would have always loved a small bonus for T.C. or Mills to give to farms right in their vicinity. I know this isn't the game for that, but things like 'Water/Irrigation' quality has been big/influential & a crucial yet intuitive addition to a number of games before.

Nice update :) i like the farmer general rule. Certainly something to think about as I'd always either ignore it til I had 3 TCs if fast castling or get it just before clicking castle if there was prolonged feudal... Figured you'd earn more in the time it took to reach castle age. But the differentiation between the military and eco setup is especially useful.

2:07 look P3, that british player from the clip that mangonel shot his own xbows.

imagine playing this game during a lan party, and you just pull out a Ti-84 mid match to find the ideal time to get wheelbarrel and whatnot

Another strategy based point is if you are going to make forward siege (or any other forward strategy), as walking villagers across the map takes a lot of time and reducing that time both increases your chanses of not getting spotted and villager efficiency as waling back on forth across the map takes a lot of time and even a small percentage increase adds up fast to a large total depending on how many villagers going forward. This is hard to quantify though as in this scenario the distances will vary and the benefit is more militarily and not economically.

There should be a civ bonus where food can be dropped off at a castle. Or perhaps all res. No idea which civ that would be best assigned to historically. But this is a useful mechanic to keep in mind as the game grows.

I like getting wheelbarrow when I'm attacking or defending since it's a good chunk of time where I don't need to care about my eco and can focus on micro a bit

Spirit of the Law is my favorite edutainment series, and I don't even play AoEII anymore.

6:12 Lierrrey : being here is better than winning a redbull

Okay so, great video as usual, but... that article said Lytton, and I just saw the news about the evacuation. Are you okay? Are you safe?

Lmao the segway at the beginning was so clean

Very glad to see this video, was just wondering when to get wheelbarrow.

I have two main strategies for Wheelbarrow. For when I want to do stuff in Feudal Age, I go up with 22 villagers and then make 3 vils -> wheelbarrow -> 2 vils -> town watch -> 3 vils. For a fast castle, I go up with 28 villagers, then make 2 more and then get wheelbarrow.

Would love to see when the best time to get the eco techs for Burgundians is!

8:14 So you're essentially getting second Loom.

Consider getting a AC with inversion option. It turns out the heatpump in the average AC is a ludicrously efficient way for heating stuff. As in "> 100% efficiency". As in "we needed to invent the coefficient of performance just to get some useable numbers." Inverting the flow of a heatpump between heating and cooling is technically very simple, just for some reason most of them do not have that option.

Analysis (or lack thereof) of hand cart undermines all of the analysis of wheelbarrow.

"90 Degrees heatwave" Me laughing in the current 117-degree weather that is normal for where I live in Arizona...

Whenever in doing a fast castle I get wheelbarrow as soon as my second TC can make villagers.

I live in the middle of the High Desert. And I just have to say, 90F is COLD for summer.

A follow up could be: when is a new mill better than adding farms further from the TC and other mills?

Thanks for all the work you do, Love your channel.

Hey, you can take showers with salt, it doesn't help you with the heat but makes you tastier. Thank you for the data.

I just get pop capped and decide now is a perfect time for the upgrade

Wow that’s lots of stuff I don’t understand but I will use all of it! Great video! 😁

Definitely get wheelbarrow later as an archer player. i often let farms run out and dont reseed them at first when reaching castle age.

This is why I LOVE math

Ty for this video

Just heard about the fires in Lytton, hope you're ok

Let's say I have 18 farmers for a knight build, but I plan on putting up a TC right at the start of castle age as well. How many more resources am I collecting during the age up with WB than without, and is it worth considering getting WB once the 2nd TC is up so I never stop vil production (not counting the age up) and I get to castle age and knight production 75 seconds sooner? It's an interesting tradeoff to consider, I think, unless I'm really off and the difference in resources isn't as marginal as I think it is

The offices of Spirit of the Law have adjusted the wheelbarrow rates for the Q3 and Q4 2021.