Hey guys Spirit of the Wall here

I just find that amusing how you spectated 30 actual games, just to collect some data. This is real effort into making videos, and i absolutely appreciate your work as a whole, and hope that you find joy in giving us every chance to become even slightly better players. Just thank you man. - An average and curious player

I love using houses as walls while playing the Huns.

The real question is how much does not walling cost? Answer: Usually the game.

So you are saying the US-Mexico border wall should incorperate houses, markets and stables?

I swear spirit of the law has the best intro on youtube. It’s wholesome and nostalgic, but also exiting and hypes me up

When you're Khmer, every house is a gate.

I love how I haven't even played the game in ages and yet I still always watch. It's just interesting stuff!

Short answer: small amount of materials per wall. Sotl answer: build time, resource collect time, hidden shenanigans, wall quality, wasted time, walking time, and map type

*Why is it wrong to attack the wall when you’re frustrated?* _The wall has never been anything but supportive._ *Why do cemeteries have walls and fences around them?* _Because people are dying to get in!_

"Hey guys, Spirit of the law here, in this video we're gonna look at walls." Probably the best opening sentence to any video on KZfaq

Well this question seems to have an obvious answer, I bet Spirit will have a ton of interesting stuff to say about it.

My favourite thing about this is that the opportunity cost of "I could be doing something else more economically productive" (e.g., gathering resources) is also true of us building walls in real life. If I put up a random rustic-looking wall around my front yard to make it look pretty and / or keep out raiding scout cavalry I have to factor in the Spirit of the Law videos I don't get to watch / work I don't get to complete during that time into the equation.

Nothing is more frustrating than when you leave a hole and the opponent just wall-tz into your base.

6:40 thats me and the bois playing 1111111 We where wondering who spec our game yesterday 11! So funny to see our games being in your video. Rip the elephant spam q-q

"Did you wall?" "NO" "What did it cost?" "Everything"

Hey Spirit, could you do a video on relics - and how important or not it is to get them/when do they start paying for themselves

I started laughing at "Gates' Worth"

@5:50 "rush of 3 militia which cost a hundred and eighty resources" Uhm, excuse me SotL but isn't that (60 food + 20 gold) x 3 = 240 resources?

What do you think about the argentinian guy who won a match by writing *"advanced to Castle Age"* in the chat 😂

Thanks to SOTL now people understand the difference between accounting and economic cost.

Should do a follow up where you measure the “cost” of being rushed... if you do zero walls but get rushed in what scenarios do you come out ahead? Eg. Get pushed off a tree line for 45 seconds, but don’t lose vils, would you be ahead of someone who walled to keep a rush out? That’s what I’d want to know

501st comment. What I remember most about the rise of the empire, was how quiet it was.

I just realized that walls still look janky when built across elevations. Like at 2:44 I am surprised they didn't add sloping walls in Definitive Edition...

In the Huns video: The saved wood from houses isn't that big of a deal. Now: It's not cheap, have you calculated the lost wood in lAbOr?i

2:20 While 1 house is stronger than 2 palisades, the perimeter grows geometrically with side length, so depending on how many attackers you have it can go down about as fast. (Testing in the scenario editor just now, against 3 scouts or 4-5 maa, a house is much better; twice as many enemy units and a house is no better, and you have pop to lose.) Good example can be seen at 9:30 in this Hera game: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mLWKq89_2MeVfGQ.html

“Walls walls protect your balls.” -Hera and his chat

Your videos are excellent, I have seen almost all of them while we are in quarentine in my country. As a new player I am trying to learn and your videos are awesome for that propose, thanks for that. Could you also do a video about the best army composition? (Kind of how many of "x" unit, "y" unit, "z" unit, you need to have a balance "counter to all you may find" army). Great videos! Keep it up

I don’t know how Spirit of the Law manages to upload a killer video every single time I’m hella hungover but I couldn’t be happier about it, biggest mvp 😻

I like the HD segments of the classic intro

Recently, I've started building more palisade walls instead of waiting for Feudal stone walls and this has had significant benefits for me. The pros love and utilize palisades really well.

Spirit of the Law, hands down you have the absolute most slappin' intro to your videos.

i realy like, that he always adds the time you use the villagers fore something else than collecting. love your math

SOTL's intro is the only one I never skip despite having seen it countless times already. I like the 1.5x version best

The moment when you realize you're having a rating of over 1700 elo thus spirit of the law maybe has inspected your play xD

Great video. Would love to see one on the different forms of trample damage if there's enough info and unusual interactions to make a whole video out of it. I've been trying out the slavs and had some real trouble killing a few beserkers with a bunch of my habls. Not sure if I understand how that damage and other damage sources (like certain elephants and cataphracts) work.

4:01 Having such a easily wallable map is everyone's wet dream.

Villager: oh just cutting up this tree that will lead your base open.

Hey man, I grew up with this game in the early 2000s, and it had always had a special place in my heart, I'm glad to see that even 20 years later this game has gotten even better with the new editions and the DLC. I think what you do here is quite awesome and amazing, but you have essentially killed this game for me with all the math since I started watching your channel ... lol

7:56 8 villagers taking sheep a full two tiles from the TC, bold strategy!

the palisade wall has the theme of the Dark age, the Stone Wall has the theme of the Feudal Age and the Fortified wall has the theme of the castle age. Buildings that change their appearances up to the imperial age are the Town Center, The Market and the University. Towers also first appear from the dark age as the non-attack outpost in the dark age, the feudal age themed watch tower, the castle age themed guard tower and the imperial age themed keep. an additional assault tower called the bombard tower also gets unlocked after being researched from the university.

Not that it ever mattered but NZ fan here and love your content spirit of the Law! Might not be a popular opinion but I love the math related videos you put out. Keep doing you, hope you’re safe

Very interesting! I never thought about the hidden cost of walling from the "lost" resources" not gathered by the villager. I would have liked some more analysis on using buildings as walls, and on using stone walls. Even though stone walls costs 2x and in stone, their hp is >3x, so the investment in the upgrade appears important. Specially since later techs increase the hp of the walls, increasing the worth. So essentially, making stone walls attractive all the time (as long as stone is available and castles are not priority lets say).

I also think it's probably a good idea to put your most important defensive reinforcement structures in parts of the wall less likely to be targeted, but ideally still somewhat central and forward for mobility.

I noticed you remade your intro with DE even the goth game plan has a more definitive grass, nice touch man

4:30 But you did have a villager that had something to do almost right next to it? The vill that was walling the wall right on the other side of the forest :D So the only "wasted" walking was around the pieces of forest that did not need to be walled, but unless you have vills farming directly next to a wall tile, that might be a reasonable distance to walk for other random villagers to walk already (so unless you have archer raidable resource tiles you are collecting from).

I really appreciate the bit about alternative buildings for subwalling. House wall or barracks insert to wall to plug.

I have an idea for a new mechanic if they want to changes things up a lot. Make walls able to hold a garrison of troops, and have the capacity be determined by the length of the wall. However troops are evenly dispersed along the wall and may not be able to target the same enemy all at the same time. This will prevent huge sections of walls from being overpowered and still make towers useful for shoring up the defense of an area.

Can we just admit no matter how efficient it is, incorporating buildings into the wall looks ugly as hell.

tirips of the Wal

I'll keep this in mind especially when I decide to add a gate or two into my bases. With all of this in mind, gates are less efficient in terms of cost, build time and durability, but I still like having them with my walls for moving units to and fro the base.

Did you write your own intro song? Its bloody great.

Im here to hear "spirit of the law here". Well he's voice really calming me down. Dude you are really should cast programs about nature :).

I have a hypothetical for you, how much would the game change if Palisades and Walls actually reduced incoming ranged damage? Say palisades reduced enemy ranged attack power by 15% and 30% for walls, maybe making Foritified Walls upgrade affect it. The wall would need to be in the direct path of the ranged attack, and the wall would need to be either OWNED or a FRIENDLY faction to apply the bonus to the defending unit. You could apply hidden stats to units that are naturally more inclined to Indirect style attacking like onagers, archers and trebuchets to make them slightly more effective in those situations.

A really thorough look at another facet of the game! Great video, keep up the good work!

Also, a top 5 or 10 of your best unique units would be amazing. And maybe a video saying with wich other normal/trash unit you can use complement the faults of each unique units and make a great combo. For example Konniks with long swords man that can kill pikesman!!

In some competitive RTS, building positioning to act as walls are integral to the game. A classic example would be starcraft broodwar terran on lost temple, where it is mandatory to close the gap with a barracks and supply depot. Neat and efficient walling techniques are part of any defense in AOE 2, and it is a mental challenge figuring out how to wall properly given map generation is random. Walling a bigger area might give you a larger space to expand, but it correspondingly takes up more resources and may make it harder to defend if your villager is too far away. They key here is opportunity cost as you have well mentioned and calculated. I would even dare to say, if you can counter military with military and react well, there is no need to palisade wall too much in dark/feudal age, and save villagers with quickwall techniques as needed. Wall what is needed at the moment, to secure wood and gold, and in castle age, expand safely with more Town Centres at strategic locations. Edit: Since we are on the topic of walling, you might want to cover quick walling techniques and how to efficiently make use of them. There is indeed a science to it, besides mechanical skill and reflexes. example: building a gate perpendicularly to a wall being breached by enemy archers support, stone wall vs palisade wall, stone gate to make an emergency effective barrier against a large melee force, walling to remove aggo from boar or kill boar, walling villagers under threat, walling to cut off enemy units, walling to trap enemy units, offensive walling to protect towers/siege units, so on and so forth, walling to preemptively protect villagers building castles/tcs/structures under possible threat.

5 stone. Edit: Yeah okay It is more complicated than that.

Hey law we love you keep making content :) your my favorite content creator for aoe2 and 100% the most thourough in your testing. Id love to see more DE edition stuff but im happy with anything you produce. Keep up the good work man

Ah opportunity cost, we meet again... well played. Great video SOTL, my day always gets better when I see a new video by you. Plus always something new to learn :)

When he says let’s check it out and the screen dims... oooh yeah: intro music!!!!

Hey Spirit! Your AoE HD vids brought me here, sooo glad you also covering DE now! Subbed!

Great video as always! Some friends of mine just bought the game and we were trying different gameplay styles with the custom scenario maps. It would be really cool if you did another video about your favorites custom maps (I know you did one already, but with DE I think it calls for an update)

One of the gates saves your civilization while the other one comes to your house with a syringe lol

I was waiting for this video, keep up the good work spirit.

When you goth you don't need wall.

Whenever you think he must have covered everything about this game he shows up with another topic! Just awesome

I think you should talk as well about the effects. example: How much res do you loose, if the scouts of your enemie kill 2 vils because you did not wall. And compare this with the cost in a period till early castle age where u have more tcs. so the vils dont count as much any morge.i know this needs a little more interpretation, but its the actually interesting question, as you dont wall because of itself but because you wanna avoid this loss of vils.

Surprising to not discuss the hp comparison between palisades, stone walls, and fortified walls. They cost more than palisades sure but the value of stone walls seems higher to me overall for their high hp.

This slap chop commercial that I just watched was actually really entertaining

you know a topic I would love to see covered is the economic impact on monk healing. Could be an interesting subject to to the math on though it would be pretty damn complicated to calculate the resource per second value of a monk and how it would affect combat situation

I don't know if this will help me as a player, but it will definitely help me as a human being.

Could also make a video analyzing black forest walls and how much in total it costs / sets you back when you send 2 vills early to wall. (i know its a niche topic but so was the double H farming video and similar stuff xD )

Biggest cost of stone walling is now you have to mine stone or trade at the market to build your first two town centers. So wood for the mining camp, “idle” time collecting stone.

I build usually 2 or 3 sections of my front wall with houses and a barrack. Then when I hit fedual the 1 or 2 workers if they are Still needing to get defences up I assign them to build Wooden walls. even feudal age agression if they swoop down with say 8 or 9 man at arms then walls will be taken down usually within 10 to 15 seconds which may not be enough time to get vills to house wall behind it. Also archers get through it within a min So if your reacting to it with skirms likely You didn't get enough to counter him.

I always wondered what videos the separate slides in the intro correspond to.

Would be interesting to see an analysis of resources lost by walling compaired to being drushed.

Big, beautiful walls keep the Aztecs out! It's gonna be huge!

Is there a way to more efficiently queue multiple separate wall constructs with a single villager? After queueing all the walls, one must specify the order in which they are built, queueing each palisade individually. Otherwise, the villager will build the first palisade of one wall and then move onto the next wall and so on.

I am reminded of King Lycurgus of ancient Sparta. He was once asked by a visitor to the city about the absence of defensive walls around Sparta (this was unusual, since almost all cities in those times were fortified). Lycurgus pointed to his army and said, "There are Sparta's walls, and every man is a brick." [This is where we get the expression from that you can call someone a brick, meaning they are a solid, reliable person.]

Whatever it takes to protect you from rush players.

Never been this early

Could you make a video about Post-Imperial combat tactics? And another one about best use of walls for late game?

Just a quick note the costs are even higher... since there are no opportunity costs included. As in if you wouldn't gather the wood but instead food you could have potentially made more villagers in time and those would have gathered resources on top of your building cost and time of creation wasted. Or instead of collecting stone for the walls you could have mined gold and built or upgrade stuff that either impacted your military or economy etc.

Hey spirit, thanks for all the videos recently! I would have a wish/idea for a future video. I find that often my economy is very one sided (e.g. 3000 wood but 500 food) especially in castle age and after. I was wondering if there is some perfect ratio so that the economy is balanced. Obviously I could just take 10 lumber jacks and build more farms e.g. but maybe there is a better more mathy way. Of course economy is also dependent on unit choice/amount of military buildings etc. Anyway greetings from Germany, keep it up;)

Financial advisor Spirit of the Law here. Now ready your accountant calculators, paper rolls, fix your sun caps, and loosen your ties, and light your camels.

I love the intro!

Hey Spirit, would you cover the subject of recovered ressources upon deleting a partially built building? Like, what are the expected percentages of refunds, and what do we get back from a DauT Castle?

Love the intro

I feel the opportunity cost of having the villager building the wall is slightly more complicated than explored. What could the player do with the extra resources from not building the wall? Perhaps a faster upgrade or something.

The French got it right with the Maginot line.

Can you do a benefit analysis? Is there a way to quantify what benefit you get from walling?

I love this intro

House walls are a brazilian special tech dubbed "favela complex", you can also use them to funnel people into tight corridors for diminishing the effect of numbers

I often don get house walling... I know they can take a beat down, but you are losing 5 population capacity and that can wear down your retaliation capacity towards a raid or rush...

Updated stats should show that palisades are closer to 7 resources now, due to balance patches since then.

Sometimes if the space of the front is too open i make a wall going through the town center. So the only opening is having to space through tc fire.

I like the new Definitive Edition intro

The other problem with the first inefficient wall in particular, is the use of resources as barriers, if you are collecting those resources. They are an obstruction....for now. Are you going to keep on top of fixing the holes when they have been collected?

Great videos man! thank you!