Alternatives to TC idle time visualization#26

While a very clear metric, the current idle time has a few side effects, (which can be good™ or bad™):

• Late game players often decide to make less villagers and focus on army, making the time go up constantly
• It increases with the amount of TCs a player, which could be intentially idle earlier.
• In nomad there is no TC to idle, but delaying a TC is very important still for similar reasons.
• It doesn’t show if a TC is idle intentionally (e.g. to go up faster) or a civ constraint (Chinese start)

We have a couple of ideas, but would like to hear some initial ideas from the community (like idle ratio suggested by RobChang on discord) before sharing them (that is: reducing bias of your otherwise perfectly creative ideas).

Not the best idea but hopefully helps triggering other ideas: maybe stop accounting for TC idle time after the 100 vils barrier? Is still very relative, but I think it’ll cover the most usual cases of idle TC time going up like crazy

First possibility:
You can get an indicator like “average TC idle time”

So when you have 1 TC, 1s idle time increase this counter of… 1 second

If you have 2 TC, and 1 of them is idle, it increases this counter of 0.5s

That increase the complexity of the indicator for sure. But it solves some problems.

To solve also the “Chinese issue” :

Another way, maybe clearer would be to get an “villager number indicator”. For example, you start with 3 villagers (usually), 1 villager takes 25s to make.
So you should get 4 villagers at 25s mark, 5 villager at 50s mark etc. If you do loom, you decrease this indicator of 1. So if you reach 6 villagers + loom at 6*25+25=175s into the game you get 100% accuracy, if you reach it at 180 you got an “efficiency score” of 175/180 (so best timing to reach current situation / current time)

At the time you do two TCs, you increase numerator of 50 each 25s (because you can get 2 villagers each 25s). For computing the formula you only need to know the “best possible timing to reach this eco” which only requires current time and time at which each TC have been added.

For Chinese you can adapt it i believe. You get between 1 and 2 villager lead i assume. The logic would stay exactly the same, but instead of having a numerator of say 5*25s=125s for reaching 8 villagers with a score of 100%, you have maximum efficiency at say 60s (you need to make 2 villager + say 10s idle time, an experienced player could probably compute this “table” for better accuracy).
In this cas of Chinese, if you reach 8 villagers at 70s mark you have an efficiency, in this example of 60 [or whatever the experienced player computed)] / 70 = 84% This is more convenient than the “20s idle time” because you counted that you get 10s (in this example) forced idle time, and 10s extra idle time.

This also solved the “multiple TC” i belive.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, great to have some more views on the topic :)

@Daniel Bentley had made some suggestions on a different item with some extra ideas:

1. Breakdown of the amount of idle time per TC (not just the total idle time of all TCs together)

2. Amount of idle time of all TCs before Imperial Age / 120 villagers only, since idle time beyond 120 villagers is generally not that useful as a statistic, particularly the longer the game goes on

3. Pro feature: Idle time vs. the average idle time of 2k+ ELO players over the past 1,000 games (or some other arbitrary number of games) to see how much better they are at macro and what we should be aiming for in the long run.