Ideal Recruitment Times

[This came from headlessheep in World 20.]


If you want to master layouts, ideal recruitment times is one thing you should keep in mind.
What's an ideal recruitment time? The higher the better, right? Not always.

The game will round recruitment time to the nearest second, and you reach a point where no matter how many more stables/temples/etc, the recruitment time will not get better.

You can use this to your advantage in 2 ways:
1) Do not bother to increase recruitment time if it will not get you close enough to the next second.
For instance, if you need a min of 8000% for 2sec, and a min of 7000% for 3sec. Then don't bother adding extra buildings to go over 7000% unless you can go pass 8000%.

2) Cheat. Kind of. As I mentioned earlier, the game will round recruitment to the nearest second. This means that 3.4999 will be rounded down to 3 secs ;D So, this potentially helps you reduce your number of buildings even more.


So, how do you calculate the absolute minimum required?
I use: roundup ((basetime / (secsyouwant + 0.5)) * 100 + 1)
So, for 7 secs mages: roundup ((600 / 7.5) * 100 + 1) = 8001

Realistically, that means 8025 because of the building bonuses work, but I like raw numbers. Bottomline, as long as you're not too far above 8001, you're not wasting buildings on recruitment rate.

I'll be happy to share my spreadsheet, but for reference, here are the minimum recruitment rates for the usual # of secs used for all units:

City guards: 3335 (1s), 2001 (2s), 1430(3s), 1113 (4s), 911 (5s), ...
Berserkers: 8001 (2s), 5716 (3s), 4446(4s), 3638 (5s), 3078 (6s), ...
Rangers: 7144 (3s), 5557 (4s), 4547 (5s), 3848 (6s), 3335 (7s), ...
Guardians: 8573 (3s), 6668 (4s), 5456 (5s), 4617 (6s), 4001 (7s), ...
Mages: 8001 (7s), 7060 (8s), 6317 (9s), 5716 (10s), ...
Warlocks: 8389 (15s), 7880 (16s), 7430 (17s), 7029 (18s), ...
Rams: 8476 (29s), 8198 (30s), 7938 (31s), 7694 (32s), ...
Ballistas: 8435 (41s), 8237 (42s), 8047 (43s), 7867 (44s), ...
Catapults: 8423 (47s), 8249 (48s), 8082 (49s), 7922 (50s), ...
Templars: 7779 (4s), 6365 (5s), 5386 (6s), 4668 (7s), 4119 (8s), ...
Paladins: 8237 (8s), 7370 (9s), 6668 (10s), 6088 (11s), 5601 (12s), ...
Scouts: 8573 (3s), 6668 (4s), 5456 (5s), 4617 (6s), ...
Knights: 7694 (6s), 6668 (7s), 5884 (8s), 5265 (9s), ...
Crossbowmen: 7060 (8s), 6317 (9s), 5716 (10s), 5219 (11s), ...

For ships: Max recruitment rate maxes out at 1900%. but it can still be boosted with research, and from faith. Best you'll ever get is still: 3900% (1000% from max research and 1000% from 100% Humility)

Take advantage of this.

sure, but the equation I used is in the post, so you can easily make your own...

Better yet, check out this google doc sheet:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Anyaav0-uapTdHZjZWFJdmxCMkphWEVDOURkR1lENEE&hl=en#gid=2