Village

The Village in Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties serves as the Chinese of Houses and Livestock Pens.

Overview
While much more expensive than Houses, Villages provide 20 population (twice than that of the Houses), which can be boosted even further with Chinese Home City cards and improvements at the Village itself. Villages also can serve as Home City drop-off points for shipments, act as Livestock Pens, train Goats and muster defensive units.

Improvements
All of the improvements listed in the table below are available from the Discovery Age.

Home City shipments
As the Village is exclusive to the Chinese, only their Home City cards are shown in the following list.

History
"During the late fourteenth century, the time of the Ming Dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor began a new policy of distributing vast amounts of land to local farmers. A product of a rural upbringing, the Hongwu Emperor favored farmers, and parsed the land, giving it to young boys who had reached manhood. To prevent the seizure of this land by corrupt landlords, he established non-transferable land titles and did away with taxation. The response was overwhelmingly positive. In 1393, the amount of land being cultivated rose drastically, at speeds never equaled by a later dynasty."

"Realizing that water conservancy would play a crucial part in the success of Chinese agriculture, the Hongwu Emperor focused on irrigation. He dispatched student from the Kuo-tzu-chien, or Imperial College, to develop massive irrigation systems and develop more than 40,000 ponds and dikes. Because of his decisive actions China experienced an agricultural revolution during the latter half of the fourteenth century."