Tribute

Tribute is the term used for sending Resources to other players. It has featured in all Age of Empires games.

All tributes in Ages I and II had a 30% 'tribute tax', which meant that you had to send 130 resources and they recieved 100. This had 2 purposes - firstly, to simulate how resources got lost on the way in the real-world due to corruption, bandits, tarriffs, etc, and secondly, to help prevent players from tossing around huge amounts of resources to allies without 'paying for it' (hehe). Thankfully, there exists technologies at the Market to lower or even expunge the tribute tax, such as coinage. Unfortunately, this Technology isn't available in Age of Empires III.