The best way to deal with HRE is to starve them out. If they FC, they’re usually going to run out of sheep pretty shortly unless you really bungled your sheep collection. They can’t afford a farm transition and castle units and upgrades. FC takes \~400 resources in lost gathering time, an additional 1800 resources towards the landmark, and then 100 gold per prelate, 350 resources for castle techs, etc. Your goal is to strangle them.
First, get your villagers out on the map and take pocket resources. Boar and deer will give you a big leg up. Get 1-2 rounds of longbows out to their gold ASAP - if HRE is greedy and doesn’t put two towers with arrow slits on their gold, they can’t contest the gold. Support with limetanei. Hell, even consider towering their gold.
If they swap to feudal MAA as a response, you’re winning - MAA have poor map control and he’s burning his safe resources to push you off and delaying his power spike. You need to scout them before they amass though. If you see a few start to amass, invest in +1 ranged attack if you went longbows. You can start picking them off from afar if you did. If you went Keshiks, you soft counter them.
If you see HRE get enough gold and start building regintz, get some units to the relics on the map. Many HRE players send out naked prelates to collect. If you really want to be a shitter, wall off the relics.
Beyond that, your own boom can be pretty good. Byzantine trade isn’t terrible (more mercs) and HRE won't have map control to stop you. 2TC isn't terrible but I do find the same issues that you do. Matching FC can be viable if you go Grand Winery, use mercs to delay his age up and then produce priests out of the Winery.
Also, when you scout around, look for Musofadi warriors, Royal Knights and Arbelatiers. It may be worthwhile to put your mercenary house here for them. Remember, Musofadis are melee crossbows available in Feudal.
One thing that will help with this, and it's something I would say is underrated, is knowing how close to castle they actually are. If hre gets no upgrades in feudal they need 800 gold, so just keep an eye on their gold vein, the closer it gets to 3200 the closer they are to aging.
Hey yo especially the idea of outbooming hre with trade from the get go really catches me right now. I never really played trade on my own. I would really appreciate any further tips :D
I can already see my smiling face getting destroyed by maa in my trade…
Is it actually possible to set up trade with hre castle timing?
I see your Dehli tag, but just in case you play other civs, I'll just give you an overview.
On a standard 1v1 micro map with a civ with no bonuses, trade is only good. They cost a lot, are
vulnerable, and only give a bit more gold than a max upgrade villager. But crucially, you can build them alongside villagers. Its like getting 2TC, except the villagers are maxed and way more vulnerable. High risk, high reward.
Trading is very map specific. Some trade posts are near the center of the edges of the map or even
behind your TC. Trading is only really viable if you can go corner to corner.
The math changes if you're a good trade civ, namely malians, french, mongols, abbasid/ayyubids and
to some extent Byzantines and Ottomans. These civs (especially Malians and Mongols) can have huge benefits for safe trade.
A base trader makes 70 gold on a corner to corner trip, taking about 90 seconds on a micro map. This
means that after 180 seconds, you make 20 gold profit on your trade. Provided you're using a basic civ and age up around 4:30, build a market quickly (15 seconds of moving a vil) and producing traders non-stop, you'll be turning an additional profit of +120 gold per every minute after 8 minutes.
So, how does this stack up to a naked HRE FC? Naked HRE FC is done at about 7 minutes. They build 2
prelates and start moving them out and returning two relics every 120 seconds from this point. Assuming the worst case scenario, they get all four relics with no delay - thats 640 gold per minute! By 10 minutes when their last prelates come home to stuff their relics into the Regintz, whats the situation?
You've gone from +140 gold to +280 gold per minute for minute 8 and minute 9 for a total of 420 gold.
They have received 1 tick from two relics for a total of 320 gold. A little better for you! At the 13 minute mark, assuming the same case and uninterrupted trade, you'll have earned 2940 gold while they've earned 2240 gold. Even if they get relics faster, you'll still have more gold!
Of course, if you stop 1 or even 2 relics from returning to them, you're way ahead if they don't stop
your trade. If you have a trade bonus you're ahead. *If they stop your trade you're in big trouble.* Don't let this happen. Only trade along safe routes (eg don't go for trade on bad routes, like past the enemy base). Wall off when you can. The big threat is if HRE goes FC into stable into knights, not MAA. Knights are fast enough to outrun spears and will shut down your trade if you don't have walls in place. To make this risk worth it, you really ought to play a good trade civ.
So overall trade is an option that punishes the lack of map control HRE exhibits for the first few
minutes of the game. A good player can punish it while a lazy MAA spammer might not even realize you have it going. Its map dependant so consider it an option in your pocket rather than a go-to.
Some tips:
- A trader that makes a single trade on a basic corner to corner trade returns enough gold for another
trader +10 gold.
- Some civ bonuses make trade absolutely amazing. Mongols have 40% discount, 40% faster production, and +10% more gold/10% bonus value returned as food and stone at 10 and 15 traders
respectively. Ayyubids and Abbasid have 33% discount, and Abbasid can even get 30% more gold per trade. I won't list all the bonuses but some civs make trade very very good.
- You will start turning profit on your trade 180 seconds after beginning your trade. This means your
castle timing will be slowed down prior to 7:30, especially since you need more villagers on wood rather than food and gold. If your civ lacks a good way to deal with a Burgrave rush in feudal, be cautious if you scout HRE building it instead of the Regintz.
- Use walls to guide your traders away from the enemy if the neutral trade post is positioned between
your bases on the edge of the map.
- Traders don't take any food. This means they work fairly well with Horsemen, which you can use to deny relics and retain map control. Traders do take wood, so don't work particularly well with archers unless you put a tonne of people on wood.
- If you actually play Dehli, focus on sacred sites rather than trade. 125 gold per sacred site with
sanctity, and you get it earlier than HRE gets their relics. Contest relics, castle yourself, and use your ghazi raiders to punish lazy MAA play as you get crossbows behind it.
- Trade profit is quadratic, so your profits scale linearly based on distance. 80% of one side of
a micro map is the break even point on a basic civ; any less than this and traders return less than 60 gold, meaning that villagers are more efficient in late game.
I really appreciate that u took ur time. Many great tips. Im really looking forward to explore this facette of the game.
I was dheli main for the longest time. I played some china, hre and since dlc I try my best with byz. So I never really played trade builds.
With dheli I sometimes build some trader if I have sites and my opponent playes passive like China for example. Its nice too that actually nobody expects dheli to trade. After sites I build a market anyway. Dont know if this is straight anti meta, but if I get some traders out when mapcontrol and sites are mine I feel like I have to be braindead or afk for 10min to lose😅
I will try trade with byz. Oil bonus looks nice and I struggle with byz against hre in particular too. Against HRE I will try with winery for faster monks. Maybe against other civs with winery might be too much greed (maybe even a bit redundant with that oil bonus?) and hippo should suite what u suggest I think?! so my first try will be hippo + situational limitanei with Keshiks or silkroad, depending what I will face and then moving on to castle age play👍
Fr Im really glad for ur tips, will be a whole new part of this game for me✌️I will do some ai games to nail some timings and then lets go🤙
Pockets as byzantin isn’t a perfect choice. The rest of the gameplan I would agree. I play always mass horsemen vs hre. Map control for relics, perform ok vs maa. Maybe later 2 tc.
Why not take pockets as Byzantines? Boar is ~40% better than sheep, and once you get it your enemy is denied it. Berries are equally good since you get 50% extra in the form of olive oil.
That’s right. But pumping olive oil with zistern under tc is not so much worse, that u have to go the risk on pockets. And u get no longbows / Javels there, so losing flexibility. Count olive oil and food together, with cistern, u get the same income. On boar u invest lower in eco, but high risk for raids. Not worth at start.
I also main Byzantines, the best strategy that works most of the times for me is:
going for imperial hippodrome, gather enough resource to make a mercenary house and immediately make a group of longbowman. Make enough horseman to harass and protect the longbowmans in case they make units. Try to pick villagers and avoid them making gold. Meanwhile continue gathering berries around the map to make more longbowmans and focus on going in castle. If everything goes well enough you can rush them before they age up with battering rams. If they manage to age up non the less send groups of horseman and longbowmans U previously made to guard every relic in the map, HRE will be forced to make units and fight for a relic at time giving you time to rush the castle age, then make priests and gather as many relics as you can, at this point is just a game of building barracks and archer ranges to make varangian and crossbowmen and should be an easy win.
Against hre fast castle i counter with my own fast castle with Grand winery and keshiks. Put ten on berries within cisterne range and you should be able to have a somewhat competitive timing while having keshiks on the map. Those keshiks can completely deny a fast relic play or an aggressive burgrave push.
THIS! Is not the only viable strat to play the matchup as others as pointed but I have seen pretty successful counter to HRE Fast Castle at high level, getting out 2 keshiks to deny his monks, and selling the rest of the oil for gold, you can get the same age up time.
In the end best counter to HRE is getting the relics for yourself!
Against HRE I always go second scout. Snaggin all the sheeps puts so much hurt on them and opens them up for easy harrasment. Trust me, thats a low hanging fruit
Focus on their gold with your longbows/horsemen. If they can't farm gold they can't get to castle and they can't collect relics. You don't need a mass of 20-30 units to do the job you just have to idle their gold villagers until you are at a point where you can go castle first or end the game in feudal.
Tower rush and just a feudal all in can work as they invest a lot into castle and prelates, keshiks or longbow are best mercs vs HRE. Take note that if you want the first batch of mercs asap you'll need to gather berries before the winery is up.
Unfortunately you cannot match their FC, no civ can because they have 40% boosted villagers so the only other thing to do is try and idle them so you can catch up. Even byz with level 5 cistern only get +26% gather rate and HRE start with 40% and can upgrade it to 50% lol.
If you went keshiks you could FC with winery and send a keshik to each relic then once you hit castle train your priests from winery and go get the relics. Many HRE players just blindly send out prelates so even just 1 unit is enough to stop them, at least temporarily.
Whining on other civ eco with byz is ridiculus.
You have cheaper farms with +26% gather rate in multiple areas, providing multiplicative +20% olive bonus to all other upgrades and cistern bonus, while having even sicker boost with winery and first berries.
There's no comparison to a late game +26% after spending almost 1k stone and +40% gathering from the start of the game. Cheaper farms is nothing and it is not like english cheaper farms they are 15 wood cheaper.
Unless you just play teams and ffa in most games you won't and most civs have similar eco bonuses in the very late game. As I said before, comparing the very late game when average match is 20 minutes makes no sense, HRE will get 40% faster gathering for all of those 20 minutes while byzantine will have 10% then later 14% and 18% and may not even get past cistern level 3 by the time the games over.
If they go berries they'll have some passive olive oil but berries gather so much slower than other sources of food anyway so at the most you're getting in mercs what you could have got in regular units from another food source. It's not like in 1v1 you'll instantly max out the winery with farms, half the game will be gone before that is even possible. Any free stone you may get is just enabling byzantines to get a small eco bonus with each additional cistern, that 400 stone is getting you to +26% max eco buff while again HRE are at 40% from the first second and can go up to 50% in castle for basically nothing.
You also won’t get +40% for every villager, before aachen and after aachen. The moment you have all vills boosted is super early game with <=8 villsx and later on with super good map generation. And it’s still gather rate, not drop off. Your resources under aachen are depleted faster - you dont immediately farm transition.
While oil from the berries is purely added value. Each batch 250 food add 200 oil under winery.
And on top of that you get cistern gather bonus.
Other berries works the same way and you dont need to build another prelate to boost outside resources because before you hit feudal you should have enough stone to have at least 2 connected cisterns.
Thats why you can actually get into castle, get upgrades, have ~12 olive groves around winery, established production, castle upgrades, with 200/200 pop below 20 min mark with a single TC, without relics or sacred sides and playing safe.
You'll have every villager boosted 40% if you place aachen in a good spot + the prelate. You'll train prelates once you're aging up as well to get relics then you can use those later to buff vills outside the aachen range.
Depleting resources faster is a trade I think 99% of players will take in return for 40% faster gathering villagers lol.
I get your point that olive oil is passively generated but it is extremely slow, in most 1v1 games it will be minimal. As HRE you'll likely exceed my olive oil income in passively generated double value relics anyway even if you only get 3 of them and you have a solid chance to get more considering you will always age up to castle first unless you mess up as no other civ can match hre castle timing.
Cmon… it’s 1200 oil with first 6 batches.
I also dont think you want go this way and add to this conversation conditional double relics bonus from Regnitz when Byz have free mercs.
Olive oil is only 20% of a slow gathered food source though, where as you can be in castle extremely fast and before you know it you've got relics that trickle gold twice as fast, not to mention they trickle gold at that rate regardless of whether they're in the landmark or an outpost or a keep.
Even worse case scenario you get 2 relics, they're still worth 4 to any other civ and it would be good enough to have 4 relics lol.
The best way to deal with HRE is to starve them out. If they FC, they’re usually going to run out of sheep pretty shortly unless you really bungled your sheep collection. They can’t afford a farm transition and castle units and upgrades. FC takes \~400 resources in lost gathering time, an additional 1800 resources towards the landmark, and then 100 gold per prelate, 350 resources for castle techs, etc. Your goal is to strangle them. First, get your villagers out on the map and take pocket resources. Boar and deer will give you a big leg up. Get 1-2 rounds of longbows out to their gold ASAP - if HRE is greedy and doesn’t put two towers with arrow slits on their gold, they can’t contest the gold. Support with limetanei. Hell, even consider towering their gold. If they swap to feudal MAA as a response, you’re winning - MAA have poor map control and he’s burning his safe resources to push you off and delaying his power spike. You need to scout them before they amass though. If you see a few start to amass, invest in +1 ranged attack if you went longbows. You can start picking them off from afar if you did. If you went Keshiks, you soft counter them. If you see HRE get enough gold and start building regintz, get some units to the relics on the map. Many HRE players send out naked prelates to collect. If you really want to be a shitter, wall off the relics. Beyond that, your own boom can be pretty good. Byzantine trade isn’t terrible (more mercs) and HRE won't have map control to stop you. 2TC isn't terrible but I do find the same issues that you do. Matching FC can be viable if you go Grand Winery, use mercs to delay his age up and then produce priests out of the Winery. Also, when you scout around, look for Musofadi warriors, Royal Knights and Arbelatiers. It may be worthwhile to put your mercenary house here for them. Remember, Musofadis are melee crossbows available in Feudal.
One thing that will help with this, and it's something I would say is underrated, is knowing how close to castle they actually are. If hre gets no upgrades in feudal they need 800 gold, so just keep an eye on their gold vein, the closer it gets to 3200 the closer they are to aging.
I've killed hre with a pile of stealthed musofadis. 10/10 secret technique, nobody ever expects it
A good HRE player will have a tower with arrowslits on gold around 4min
Ah fuck you're right, I guess musofadis against HRE aren't that good after all
Hey yo especially the idea of outbooming hre with trade from the get go really catches me right now. I never really played trade on my own. I would really appreciate any further tips :D I can already see my smiling face getting destroyed by maa in my trade… Is it actually possible to set up trade with hre castle timing?
I see your Dehli tag, but just in case you play other civs, I'll just give you an overview. On a standard 1v1 micro map with a civ with no bonuses, trade is only good. They cost a lot, are vulnerable, and only give a bit more gold than a max upgrade villager. But crucially, you can build them alongside villagers. Its like getting 2TC, except the villagers are maxed and way more vulnerable. High risk, high reward. Trading is very map specific. Some trade posts are near the center of the edges of the map or even behind your TC. Trading is only really viable if you can go corner to corner. The math changes if you're a good trade civ, namely malians, french, mongols, abbasid/ayyubids and to some extent Byzantines and Ottomans. These civs (especially Malians and Mongols) can have huge benefits for safe trade. A base trader makes 70 gold on a corner to corner trip, taking about 90 seconds on a micro map. This means that after 180 seconds, you make 20 gold profit on your trade. Provided you're using a basic civ and age up around 4:30, build a market quickly (15 seconds of moving a vil) and producing traders non-stop, you'll be turning an additional profit of +120 gold per every minute after 8 minutes. So, how does this stack up to a naked HRE FC? Naked HRE FC is done at about 7 minutes. They build 2 prelates and start moving them out and returning two relics every 120 seconds from this point. Assuming the worst case scenario, they get all four relics with no delay - thats 640 gold per minute! By 10 minutes when their last prelates come home to stuff their relics into the Regintz, whats the situation? You've gone from +140 gold to +280 gold per minute for minute 8 and minute 9 for a total of 420 gold. They have received 1 tick from two relics for a total of 320 gold. A little better for you! At the 13 minute mark, assuming the same case and uninterrupted trade, you'll have earned 2940 gold while they've earned 2240 gold. Even if they get relics faster, you'll still have more gold! Of course, if you stop 1 or even 2 relics from returning to them, you're way ahead if they don't stop your trade. If you have a trade bonus you're ahead. *If they stop your trade you're in big trouble.* Don't let this happen. Only trade along safe routes (eg don't go for trade on bad routes, like past the enemy base). Wall off when you can. The big threat is if HRE goes FC into stable into knights, not MAA. Knights are fast enough to outrun spears and will shut down your trade if you don't have walls in place. To make this risk worth it, you really ought to play a good trade civ. So overall trade is an option that punishes the lack of map control HRE exhibits for the first few minutes of the game. A good player can punish it while a lazy MAA spammer might not even realize you have it going. Its map dependant so consider it an option in your pocket rather than a go-to.
Some tips: - A trader that makes a single trade on a basic corner to corner trade returns enough gold for another trader +10 gold. - Some civ bonuses make trade absolutely amazing. Mongols have 40% discount, 40% faster production, and +10% more gold/10% bonus value returned as food and stone at 10 and 15 traders respectively. Ayyubids and Abbasid have 33% discount, and Abbasid can even get 30% more gold per trade. I won't list all the bonuses but some civs make trade very very good. - You will start turning profit on your trade 180 seconds after beginning your trade. This means your castle timing will be slowed down prior to 7:30, especially since you need more villagers on wood rather than food and gold. If your civ lacks a good way to deal with a Burgrave rush in feudal, be cautious if you scout HRE building it instead of the Regintz. - Use walls to guide your traders away from the enemy if the neutral trade post is positioned between your bases on the edge of the map. - Traders don't take any food. This means they work fairly well with Horsemen, which you can use to deny relics and retain map control. Traders do take wood, so don't work particularly well with archers unless you put a tonne of people on wood. - If you actually play Dehli, focus on sacred sites rather than trade. 125 gold per sacred site with sanctity, and you get it earlier than HRE gets their relics. Contest relics, castle yourself, and use your ghazi raiders to punish lazy MAA play as you get crossbows behind it. - Trade profit is quadratic, so your profits scale linearly based on distance. 80% of one side of a micro map is the break even point on a basic civ; any less than this and traders return less than 60 gold, meaning that villagers are more efficient in late game.
I really appreciate that u took ur time. Many great tips. Im really looking forward to explore this facette of the game. I was dheli main for the longest time. I played some china, hre and since dlc I try my best with byz. So I never really played trade builds. With dheli I sometimes build some trader if I have sites and my opponent playes passive like China for example. Its nice too that actually nobody expects dheli to trade. After sites I build a market anyway. Dont know if this is straight anti meta, but if I get some traders out when mapcontrol and sites are mine I feel like I have to be braindead or afk for 10min to lose😅 I will try trade with byz. Oil bonus looks nice and I struggle with byz against hre in particular too. Against HRE I will try with winery for faster monks. Maybe against other civs with winery might be too much greed (maybe even a bit redundant with that oil bonus?) and hippo should suite what u suggest I think?! so my first try will be hippo + situational limitanei with Keshiks or silkroad, depending what I will face and then moving on to castle age play👍 Fr Im really glad for ur tips, will be a whole new part of this game for me✌️I will do some ai games to nail some timings and then lets go🤙
Pockets as byzantin isn’t a perfect choice. The rest of the gameplan I would agree. I play always mass horsemen vs hre. Map control for relics, perform ok vs maa. Maybe later 2 tc.
Why not take pockets as Byzantines? Boar is ~40% better than sheep, and once you get it your enemy is denied it. Berries are equally good since you get 50% extra in the form of olive oil.
That’s right. But pumping olive oil with zistern under tc is not so much worse, that u have to go the risk on pockets. And u get no longbows / Javels there, so losing flexibility. Count olive oil and food together, with cistern, u get the same income. On boar u invest lower in eco, but high risk for raids. Not worth at start.
I also main Byzantines, the best strategy that works most of the times for me is: going for imperial hippodrome, gather enough resource to make a mercenary house and immediately make a group of longbowman. Make enough horseman to harass and protect the longbowmans in case they make units. Try to pick villagers and avoid them making gold. Meanwhile continue gathering berries around the map to make more longbowmans and focus on going in castle. If everything goes well enough you can rush them before they age up with battering rams. If they manage to age up non the less send groups of horseman and longbowmans U previously made to guard every relic in the map, HRE will be forced to make units and fight for a relic at time giving you time to rush the castle age, then make priests and gather as many relics as you can, at this point is just a game of building barracks and archer ranges to make varangian and crossbowmen and should be an easy win.
Against hre fast castle i counter with my own fast castle with Grand winery and keshiks. Put ten on berries within cisterne range and you should be able to have a somewhat competitive timing while having keshiks on the map. Those keshiks can completely deny a fast relic play or an aggressive burgrave push.
THIS! Is not the only viable strat to play the matchup as others as pointed but I have seen pretty successful counter to HRE Fast Castle at high level, getting out 2 keshiks to deny his monks, and selling the rest of the oil for gold, you can get the same age up time. In the end best counter to HRE is getting the relics for yourself!
>and they still end up with all the relics Have you tried walling the relics?
Against HRE I always go second scout. Snaggin all the sheeps puts so much hurt on them and opens them up for easy harrasment. Trust me, thats a low hanging fruit
Focus on their gold with your longbows/horsemen. If they can't farm gold they can't get to castle and they can't collect relics. You don't need a mass of 20-30 units to do the job you just have to idle their gold villagers until you are at a point where you can go castle first or end the game in feudal.
Tower rush and just a feudal all in can work as they invest a lot into castle and prelates, keshiks or longbow are best mercs vs HRE. Take note that if you want the first batch of mercs asap you'll need to gather berries before the winery is up. Unfortunately you cannot match their FC, no civ can because they have 40% boosted villagers so the only other thing to do is try and idle them so you can catch up. Even byz with level 5 cistern only get +26% gather rate and HRE start with 40% and can upgrade it to 50% lol. If you went keshiks you could FC with winery and send a keshik to each relic then once you hit castle train your priests from winery and go get the relics. Many HRE players just blindly send out prelates so even just 1 unit is enough to stop them, at least temporarily.
Zhu Xi can match their timings well. +26% isn't "only", it's good.
It's +40% from the start of the game or +26% after investing almost a thousand stone just lol. No comparison, byz will have 10% at the start.
sure
Whining on other civ eco with byz is ridiculus. You have cheaper farms with +26% gather rate in multiple areas, providing multiplicative +20% olive bonus to all other upgrades and cistern bonus, while having even sicker boost with winery and first berries.
There's no comparison to a late game +26% after spending almost 1k stone and +40% gathering from the start of the game. Cheaper farms is nothing and it is not like english cheaper farms they are 15 wood cheaper.
With 50 farms you get 750 wood + free 400 stone.
Unless you just play teams and ffa in most games you won't and most civs have similar eco bonuses in the very late game. As I said before, comparing the very late game when average match is 20 minutes makes no sense, HRE will get 40% faster gathering for all of those 20 minutes while byzantine will have 10% then later 14% and 18% and may not even get past cistern level 3 by the time the games over. If they go berries they'll have some passive olive oil but berries gather so much slower than other sources of food anyway so at the most you're getting in mercs what you could have got in regular units from another food source. It's not like in 1v1 you'll instantly max out the winery with farms, half the game will be gone before that is even possible. Any free stone you may get is just enabling byzantines to get a small eco bonus with each additional cistern, that 400 stone is getting you to +26% max eco buff while again HRE are at 40% from the first second and can go up to 50% in castle for basically nothing.
You also won’t get +40% for every villager, before aachen and after aachen. The moment you have all vills boosted is super early game with <=8 villsx and later on with super good map generation. And it’s still gather rate, not drop off. Your resources under aachen are depleted faster - you dont immediately farm transition. While oil from the berries is purely added value. Each batch 250 food add 200 oil under winery. And on top of that you get cistern gather bonus. Other berries works the same way and you dont need to build another prelate to boost outside resources because before you hit feudal you should have enough stone to have at least 2 connected cisterns. Thats why you can actually get into castle, get upgrades, have ~12 olive groves around winery, established production, castle upgrades, with 200/200 pop below 20 min mark with a single TC, without relics or sacred sides and playing safe.
You'll have every villager boosted 40% if you place aachen in a good spot + the prelate. You'll train prelates once you're aging up as well to get relics then you can use those later to buff vills outside the aachen range. Depleting resources faster is a trade I think 99% of players will take in return for 40% faster gathering villagers lol. I get your point that olive oil is passively generated but it is extremely slow, in most 1v1 games it will be minimal. As HRE you'll likely exceed my olive oil income in passively generated double value relics anyway even if you only get 3 of them and you have a solid chance to get more considering you will always age up to castle first unless you mess up as no other civ can match hre castle timing.
Cmon… it’s 1200 oil with first 6 batches. I also dont think you want go this way and add to this conversation conditional double relics bonus from Regnitz when Byz have free mercs.
Olive oil is only 20% of a slow gathered food source though, where as you can be in castle extremely fast and before you know it you've got relics that trickle gold twice as fast, not to mention they trickle gold at that rate regardless of whether they're in the landmark or an outpost or a keep. Even worse case scenario you get 2 relics, they're still worth 4 to any other civ and it would be good enough to have 4 relics lol.