Can you ever have enough houses and farms? That’s the question, isn’t it.
Oh. You thought I was talkinng about housing and agricultural policy. There is a presidential election happening. I’m talking about that, surely.
No, no. I was talking about Age of Empires II: Age of Kings.
From time to time, I play Age of Empires II, bought originally at Electronics Boutique #515 in Exton, Pennsylvania, where I worked, on my Linux Mint system. And I have a collection of game save files, from over the years. Sometimes I’ll fire up one of the save files, not sure of when I’d started the game originally, not sure of who my opponents were or what sort of strategy I had been pursuing.
One such file is called Baltic-1. As you might guess, it’s a Baltic map—a central lake/sea, with wooded land between the sea and the map edge. I had only a vague reollection of this game after I loaded it. I (Vikings) was situated in the north corner, to my west was an ally (Teutons, maybe?). In the south corner had been one of my enemies, the Goths. I say “had been,” because I had smashed them and effetively wiped them from the map. (No Goth buildings remained, there were three Goth peasants, and there were a few fishing boats.) And to the Goth’s east was my other enemy, the Persians.
Now, two of the relics were in and near the east corner, east of the Persians. I had thrown up walls between the relics and the Persians, running from the map’s edge to the water’s edge, backed by watch towers. I also had built barracks and archery ranges in the east corner, and I had lumberjacks working on the forest in the east corner.
This wall cut the Persians off from resources.
Meanwhile, between where the Goth’s town center had been and where the Persian settlement was, I had also built walls and watch towers, and where the Goth town had been I had built more barracks and archery ranges. (These were also near a relic.)
This wall also cut the Persians off from resources.
What I did not realize at the time was that I had built the walls and watch towers so close that, in cutting the Persians off from supplies, the Persians really weren’t capable of waging any sort of war. What military units the Persians had created my towers dealt with effectively, and the Persians didn’t have the resources to replace them.
In the Imperial Age, when I researched Spies (I had the gold, the cost was barely noticed), I could look at the Persian town and see the villagers standing idle where their farms had been, because the Persians didn’t have the wood to rebuild them.
As an experiment, I deleted one of my walls, which then drew a mass migration of Persian villagers toward the wall to harvest the wood that lay beyond… only for them to rush straight into the firing range of my watch towers.
So I did something madder than Mad Jack McMadd, the winner of last year’s All-Scotland Madman Competition, might have done. I could have crushed the Persians militarily fairly easily, but after starving the Persians of resources that felt unfair. With all five relics under my control, I decided to have fun with it, harvest all the resources I could, research everything, and build everything I could.
Build houses! Build farms! Cut down all the trees!
And whenever the relics timer fell under ten years, I would remove one of the relics from the monastery, have a monk return it, and restart the timer.
I can’t say it was entirely satisfying, but it certainly piqued my interest.
I eventually let the relics timer run down, pulling the plug on this and ending the Persians’ misery.
And, to answer the question I began with… no, you cannot have too many houses and farms. Farms, at least, are useful, if tedious—farms make food. Houses, once you have enough to support your game’s population camp, are wholly superfluous. (Age of Empires 3 will only let you build enough houses to support your maximum population.) But, they fill the landscape and the time, and with this game time I had aplenty.
