Switching Villager Tasks in Age of Empires II

I just watched a video from Spirit of the Law about switching villagers between tasks (constructing buildings; gathering food, wood, stone or gold; repairing) in Age of Empires II. I learned some things that I didn’t know about task-switching before which could improve worker efficiency.

Here’s the video:

Switching Villager Tasks in Aoe2

And, here’s a little summary I shared with my AOE2HD Facebook group:

Good video about switching from one task to another with villagers – like going from gathering food to building or repairing, or from one food source (berries) to another (sheep), or from different resources like gold to stone or wood.

In general, you can switch between food sources w/o losing anything – like gather 5 food from a sheep, 5 more from berries, and drop off 10 at the mill or town center. Switching to/from a completely different resource makes the villager lose anything being carried – like going from food to wood.

This is useful to help with villager efficiency. Its also interesting that when you build any building that acts like a drop-off point, ANY resource being carried is dropped off into it on completion. For example, if you pull villagers off of berries to construct a lumber camp, they’ll drop off the food at the lumber camp and it adds to the food stockpile.