Over the new year, I had the opportunity to exploring developmental economics in Age of Empires. While between semesters, my wife and I visited my family and we played that beautiful, classic game a LOT. My family likes to play as a team (too many childhood fights began on the virtual battlefield and translated over into the home), and as one unit we've been able to absolutely demolish any computer AI we're put up against. Naturally, we upped the difficulty so as to keep the game interesting, but we quickly found ourselves outmatched the harder the AI became. It was time to adapt. It was time for economics.
Before, we had all kept mainly to ourselves. We'd each develop our base, amass our individual resources, then unleash our military might on the rest of the world. This strategy simply did not work anymore against more difficult opponents.
As we started a new round, we took inventory of each of our civilizations' special advantages. For example, mine could produce castles at a cheaper price than anyone else. My brother could produce infantry at lightning speeds. My dad had an advantage in farming resources, and so on. By focusing on these unique traits, and assigning certain players to be our "financiers", we were able to allocate our resources most efficiently. I built fortifications, my brother supplied the armies, we each played to our strengths, and a couple players sat behind our defenses and gathered and distributed all the resources we would need to keep up our new dynamic. And it worked! When before we fell quickly and definitively, by restructuring our team and playing everyone to their unique strengths, we were able to not only hold our ground, but ultimately defeat the AI players that had given us such a hard time. Now why is that? I've covered the concept of comparative advantage and specialization before here on my blog and with my friend, Christian, on our "Eekonomics Podcast". When two entities that have an advantage over the other specialize in their respective strengths and trade with each other, they can save their time and resources to produce more of their own good and we see much more production than what was previously possible! That is exactly what saved us in Age of Empires. As we each focused on ourselves, we couldn't get big enough fast enough and were each swept off the face of the map. But by working together and enabling each other to work at what we're best at, we got bigger than the opponent faster than the opponent and secured ourselves a well deserved victory.
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