Considerations on When To Avoid Guard Upgrades

So if you have 1 of a unit, it might seem questionable to research an upgrade for that unit. But what's the breakpoint? How many units do you need for it to be "worth it"? I checked this out for Veteran once, which is simple math, but I also realized I was looking at Guard upgrades the wrong way.

First, and quickly, the vet math: Based on base gather rates you need about 28 Musketeers to get the same value out of upgrading to Veteran than you'd otherwise get from just training more Musketeers with your resources (assuming you manually gather it all with equal access to the resources, which I know is unrealistic).

For Guard, one might think the same math would apply (just 30% more value per dude based on base stats/cost) - but there's a caveat. You're now already training Veteran dudes. This makes the Guard upgrade lower in value than it might seem on the surface (25% relative increase in value rather than 30%).

Here's how the formula shakes out: Guard Musketeer tech costs 2200 Villager-Seconds, boosts Veteran Musks by effectively +25%. Alternatively, you can train ~25 Veteran Musks. This means you need 119 Veteran Musks for the Guard tech to give you the same volume of stats that you'd get from just macroing for more dudes.

Imperial's even worse - grants a mere +33% marginal power gain over Guard, but costs 5500 VS. This means you need 185 musks for it to be of equal value to training dudes.

However, there are some alternatives. The Portuguese Royal Guard tech for Musketeers, for example, garners +10% more than the usual Guard stats and for not too much more - 2750 VS for the +40% (+33.3% relative to Vet) means you only need 93 vet musks on the field to break even, which is 26 fewer musks than normal Guard.

This is a super simple look at this math ofc. The math changes depending on civ (Natives get cheaper unit techs) and other unit types (like artillery, which scale off of veteran stats as base). This also ignores every consideration for things like max pop, value of more units (less overkill on enemies, bodyblocking, etc), value of less units (easier to attack with full force at once, etc), and housing cost (which some civs, eg Brits, effectively don't pay).