Age of Empires IV: How Many Villagers Should You Have?

Villagers are the most important unit in all of Age of Empires IV. No matter what players’ goals are, villagers will be needed to accomplish them. They do all the resource gathering and construction, making them the backbone of the entire civilization. They are also key in quickly constructing Age of Empires IV landmarks, which allow civilizations to age up. Many players, especially those using more offensive Age of Empires IV civilizations, will prioritize military units, taking away resources from villager production.

This can get players into a bind since their civilizations’ economies will end up moving too slowly. Without adequate production of food, wood, gold, and stone, a civilization that started hot can easily plateau. Stalling like this gives Age of Empires 4 co-op and multiplayer opponents time to catch up. The later in the game that this plateauing takes place, the more dangerous opponents become. As a result, an early focus on villagers can make a game much easier. The key is to find a balance between the expenditure of food to create villagers, and their ability to generate consistent returns.

While villagers in Age of Empires do cost food, they will quickly provide returns on what is spent on them. Players shouldn’t just constantly tap out their food reserves to pump out villagers, but starting with around twenty villagers by the end of the Dark Age is vital to ensuring that players can keep up with their opponents. The number of villagers that they continue to produce will depend on certain in-game circumstances.

Optimal Villager Population in Age of Empires IV

With twenty villagers in Age of Empires 4, players will quickly be able to utilize all the resources around their town center and age up to the Feudal Age. The pace at which villagers will be created will vary at this point depending on players’ surroundings, but there will definitely need to be more than twenty active villagers moving forward. The two things that Age of Empires IV players should keep their eye on are their resource income and the amount of each resource left to harvest on the map around them.

At the beginning of the game, players should liberally create villagers to ensure that they can quickly harvest all the wood, stone, gold, and even food when playing an Age of Empires IV civilization that can’t build farms that spawn around the town center on the map. This will increase the pace at which players can buy, and complete the construction of, landmarks.

As the game nears the end, and players enter the Castle and Imperial Ages, villager production should either wind down or halt completely unless enemies come and kill a few. This is because there should already be enough villagers to produce resources needed for things like walls, troops, and siege engines at a rapid pace since the player will no longer be spending their labor on landmarks. The focus at this point should be producing and organizing Age of Empires IV’s military units.

The one exception to this guideline is when players are looking to build a Wonder to win Age of Empires IV. In this case, creating more villagers can sometimes be useful to gather the massive amount of materials needed for a Wonder. It is still the case, though, that villager production should slow down as the game goes on in favor of some defensive military units.

Age of Empires 4 is available now on PC.

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