In early stages you can come to the conclusion that it is only interesting to use the TP for wood because the TP costs 250 wood which would be <2.5 villager. On other maps (less XP per TP) it is lower and with market techs it is lower too. If you have a TP yucatan and you will upgrade it then it's worth about: To research this, it's good to inflict the gather rates (for European standard villagers): Update: So TP's for resources 'are they worth it?' If you have more then it will be beneficial earlier. But I didn't take in the 400 resources it costs to upgrade it so it's actually it's (400+406) after 806 XP which is after shipment 7.įor FF a shipment is worth about 1000 resources so that will be (42% of 1000 xp subtracted + 400) 980 XP which is after shipment 9. Because it also makes it 42% faster (42% will be subtracted from the 700) it's beneficial when shipments cost more than 406 XP which is after shipment 2. So you want to upgrade the traderoute to get resoruces instead of XP when the amount of XP needed for 1 shipment is >700 XP. A colonial shipment is worth an average of 700 resources. The upgrade to a stagecoach costs 200 food and 200 wood and makes it 42% faster. Beneath a list of the amount of XP needed for each shipment: So when should you upgrade your trade routeĪ question that a lot of people ask themselves.

Great Lakes was very disappointing altough a lot of people use a TP strat on that map.

Mongolia has a very short trade route but a high XP/sec so this map is also very good. However, the trade routes are quite big so it takes long to arrive and you can be unlucky if the trade cart just passes when you are building the TP.

Yucatan, GP and Ozarks are the best for trade posts. These are the results (right you see the XP per second):Īs you can see, the differences are quite big. The calculations can be found here (Excel 2007): To prove this, I did 3 tests per standard map (which was enough because the figures didn't deviate much) where I divided the amount of XP with the time it takes which results into the XP per second. Most people think the trade posts give the same amount of XP per second for each map. I did some calculations regarding the effectiveness of trade posts and found some striking results.

Age of empires 2 trade cart