Multi Player Strategies

The Minoan Fastboom revisited

by Peter


The fastboom means you make 20 FBs and 12 Villagers in Stone to reach Bronze in about 12 minutes. I’m saying here that this is simply impossible. To prove that I use the following simple model:

The first dock will be up at 2:40 (earlier is almost impossible anyway). Assume the next docks are finished with intervals of 90 secs (50 secs building time + 20 secs building time for a house and 20 secs for finding a next spot for docking). I stopped at 3 docks.

FBs are assumed to be built as soon as the dock is ready (I’m assuming there is sufficient wood and housing). In fact the wood cutting will be completely ignored here. Finding fish is taken for granted. That means that each FB will be fishing right away. The mean gathering rate (including transports to the dock) is assumed to be 0.33 (tests with a map with lots of fish near four docks with 5 FBs apiece gave results of 2000 f in 5 minutes).

This results in the following table:
 
 
time m:s food  time m:s food  time m:s food 
2:40 0 6:16 270 V 8:13 900
3:52 15 6:25 285 8:22 975
4:19 30 6:34 330 8:31 1035
4:37 45 6:43 360 V 8:40 1080
4:46 60 V 6:52 420 8:49 1155
5:04 75 7:01 465 8:58 1200
5:13 90 7:10 495 9:07 1275
5:22 120 V 7:19 555 9:16 1335
5:31 135 7:28 600 9:25 1380
5:40 150 7:37 675 9:34 1455
5:49 180 V 7:46 735 9:43 1500
5:58 195 7:55 780 9:52 1575
6:07 240 8:04 855

This shows that you can train the first Villager at 4:46 (hence the V) and the next only at 5:22 etc. The necessary 500 food for upgrading is available at 7:55. Then you enter Tool at 9:55. You have to build 2 Tool Age buildings straight away to upgrade to Bronze. Say that costs you 0:20 and you upgrade at 10:15, so you’re in Bronze at 12:35. If you want to train 4 Villies in Tool that means 1:20 extra.

This tells us that it’s barely possible to hit Bronze in that time (if you interpret 12 minutes rather liberally) if you don’t have to look for good fishing spots and fish, don’t have to trouble about sending out your FBs and Villagers (when they appear almost simultaneously that’s hard to do without loss of time + ordering new ones to be built).

As I generally ended up with loads of wood, building a granary and pick some berries rather early seems a more sensible thing to do.

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