This Article is written by Ptee and edited by Jupe
Creating villagers from start to the finish of the game seems like a very small task, but surprisingly over 70% of the playerbase cannot actually not idle their TC. (This percentage can be and probably is a lot higher.) I can’t stress the importance of this and no one really cares as they are “casual” players, but the impact of not idling is huge.
Now let’s say the game is 8:40 in game time, you’re at approximately 21 villagers, you have idled for one villager worth of time. That is 25 seconds of your TC time, does not sound significant right? Well if the game lasts for 50 minutes, we got 42 minutes of work time being lost for one villager… Well that is not much you might think right? Let’s calculate it out. 42 minutes is 2520 seconds and each second a villager at worsts gathers wood at a rate of 0.39 per second. That is 982 wood you’ve lost over the course of the game. “But I saved 50 food” that villager collecting wood would have gotten without wood upgrades in 153 seconds the wood for one farm and in 94 seconds paid for itself. So in a bit over 4 minutes of game time the villager has already gathered over double the resources that was spent on it.
It’s very easy to think that you being down 2 villagers only means being behind 50 seconds, but sadly the resource difference might keep climbing over time as additional TCs come into play and the opponent might have more army that trades cost efficiently against your army. We’ll get back to this later in lanchesters law chapter.
Now if this does not seem significant nor important to you, you might as well give up trying to understand the math behind it and accept that good players do not idle their villager production under normal circumstances.