Repairing is an ability that appears in all Age of Empires titles. It is the structural equivalent to healing in that only inorganic entities can be repaired (as only "organic" units can be healed) to have their hit points restored. In all games, this includes buildings, while in Age of Empires II, Age of Empires III, and Age of Empires IV, siege units and ships can be repaired as well. Unlike healing, repairing buildings, siege weapons, and ships costs resources. Repairing also differs from regeneration in that the latter does not cost any resources and refers to the ability of a unit or building to restore its own hit points without the aid of another unit.
Age of Empires[]
Repair icons from the original and Definitive Edition of Age of Empires, with Villagers repairing a building and ship.
Villagers can repair buildings and ships. Land units, including siege engines, are instead healed by Priests.
In the original version of Age of Empires, the cost varies each time, but averaged close to 50%. Repairing in the Definitive Edition and Return of Rome costs 50% of the target's original build price. So for example, if a ship costs 100 wood, and 80% of its hit points are repaired, the repair will cost 40 wood.
Walls are an exception, costing just 0-1 stone to repair, and Return of Rome's gates are approximately a third of their original cost. In the original and Definitive versions of the game, Wonders are another exception, costing very few resources to repair and often being free.
The speed of repairs has changed in different versions of the game.
Original and Definitive Edition[]
Each Villager assigned to a repair job works at the same rate, so adding a second Villager will halve the repair time.
Repair time for buildings is 3⅓ times as long as their construction time. So for buildings that take 60 seconds to construct, such as the Town Center, it would take Villagers 200 seconds to repair 100% of the building's hit points; the repair rate is 0.5% of maximum hit points per second. Walls, which take 7 seconds to build, are repaired quickly, at 4.29% per second. Wonders take 8,000 seconds to build, so repair at a glacial rate of 0.00375% per second, or 26,666⅔ seconds to repair 100% of their hit points.
Ship repair rate is much faster, but still tied to their creation time, not their hit points. This means that if repairing the same percentage damage in a Scout Ship and Trireme, they will take the same length of time to repair, even though the Trireme has far more hit points.
The repair time for ships is half of their creation time. So for a Fishing Boat, which takes 40 seconds to build, Villagers would take 20 seconds to repair 100% of their hit points, a rate of 5% hit points per second.
Repair times are unaffected by Architecture (which increases building hit points). While Docks create units faster as the player advances through the ages, the repair rate remains the same since the work rate of Docks is increased, and not that the training time of ships is decreased.
Return of Rome[]
Return of Rome uses a different repair system that is closer to that of Age of Empires II. Villagers instead repair all buildings (including Wonders) at the fixed rate of 1.1 hit points per second, and ships at 3.19 hit points per second. This means that many buildings now take longer to repair, especially walls. For example, the Town Center has 600 hit points by default, so is repaired at a rate of 0.18⅓% per second in Return of Rome, compared to 0.5% per second in earlier versions of the game. However, Wonder repairs take a fraction of the time: 0.22% per second, rather than 0.00375%; towers are also repaired slightly quicker than before. Among ships, only the Fishing Boat and Catapult Trireme are faster to repair in Return of Rome; the Merchant Ship takes over twice as long.
Every Villager assigned to a repair job after the first will work at half the rate of the first Villager, i.e. 0.55 hit points per second for buildings, and 1.595 for ships. This rate does not diminish with each Villager; the tenth will still be adding 0.55 or 1.595 hit points per second to the repair.
Age of Empires II[]
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings introduced the repairing of siege weapons, instead of healing in Age of Empires. While players cannot construct allied buildings, they can repair them.
Cost[]
Repairing consumes half the resource cost of the building based on the percentage of the building's hit points restored. An exception to this is the Town Center, which does not consume stone when repaired, while consuming double the wood.
Unlike construction/training costs, repairing costs can be fractional. Since repairing cost is dependent on the original cost of the building or the unit, it is affected by the same bonuses. For example:
- Malian buildings cost -15% wood, so any player repairing Malian buildings has to pay -15% wood.
- Mayan-allied walls cost -50% to build. While the cost to construct is rounded (with .5 being rounded up), the cost to repair them for the entire team costs -50%.
- Shipwright also reduces the wood cost of repairing ships by 20%.
Rate[]
The rate of repairing is percentage based, with the percentage varying depending on the building. The percentage is such that the repair rate will be 375 hit points/second before factoring in technologies like Masonry or bonuses like the Byzantines. The first Villager is treated as if they were two Villagers for calculation purposes. These amounts are not affected by building rate increases like the one gained from the technology Treadmill Crane or the Spanish bonus. Due to the fixed rate, usually repairing a structure takes significantly longer than constructing the same structure, especially in the case of walls. Villagers repair ships and siege units at a fixed 187.5 hit points per minute (3.125 hit points per second) per Villager.
Anomaly[]
- The Serjeant can also repair (and construct) Donjons.
- Mule Carts can be repaired not only by Villagers as usual, but also when they are garrisoned in buildings. They are repaired at a rate of fixed proportion of their total hit points. The rate is 24% of total hit points per minute in Town Centers and towers, 48% in Castles, and 96% in Fortified Churches. They are repaired also when they are garrisoned in allied buildings. If the player owning the building has Herbal Medicine researched, the repair rates are tripled. This form of repairing is free, even though regular repairing by Villagers still costs resources.
Bonuses[]
- Georgians: Repairers in the vicinity of a Fortified Church work 10% faster.
- Romans: Repairers work 5% faster.
- Georgians (team bonus): Repairing (further) costs -25%.
Age of Mythology[]
Age of Mythology removed the ability to repair siege weapons and ships, which can instead be healed like other units. Further, repairing is much slower (at roughly 1/3 the rate) than building and much costlier than in previous titles.
In Retold, workers repair buildings at a rate of 0.5 hit points per second, and walls at a rate of 0.25 hit points per second. For example, a Temple takes 40 seconds to construct; therefore, it takes 80 seconds to repair it to full hit points from 1 hit point. If it was at 50% hit points, it would take 40 seconds to repair to full hit points. This means repairing adds less hit points per second to a tower than a House. When more workers repair one building, it speeds up proportional to how the building's construction speeds up. As for cost, to repair from 1 hit point to full hit points costs 50% the cost of the building, unaffected by any technologies or effects which affect the construction cost of the building.
Although ships and siege weapons cannot be repaired, some myth units can repair themselves. Automata can repair other Automata, even after one is destroyed, at a rate of 15 hit points per second. Unlike with workers repairing buildings, this does not cost any resources. On the other hand, the Colossus can auto-repair at 20 hit points per second by directly consuming the equal resource value from trees or Gold Mines.
Bonuses[]
Relics[]
- Five Colored Stone of Nüwa: Repairing cost reduced by -50%.
Age of Empires III[]
Repairing in Age of Empires III has been overhauled. Villagers are no longer required to repair buildings and ships. Instead, buildings not under attack have the ability to automatically repair themselves at only the cost of wood, and ships not under attack are repaired by nearby Docks or Ports for free.
Age of Empires IV[]
In Age of Empires IV, as in Age of Empires II, buildings, ships, and siege engines can all be repaired by other units to restore their hit points. Villagers can repair all three, Fishing Boats can repair other ships, and Janissaries can repair siege engines. Despite the fact that military units can build certain siege engines (and fortifications in the case of the Delhi Sultanate), they do not have the ability to repair them. Repairing in the context of this article is specifically defined as the ability for one unit to restore the hit points of another building or non-human unit. Other methods exist of restoring the hit points of these entities, such as Fire Stations for ships, Wandering Town for Battering Rams, and the Emergency Repairs for building, but these are considered Regeneration, as they do not require other units.
Repair rates[]
The rate at which repairing restores hit points depends on the unit or building being repaired, the unit doing the repairing, and how many units are repairing. A single Villager has a repair rate of 25 hit points per second when repairing buildings or ships, and five hit points per second when repairing siege engines. Fishing Boats and Janissaries repair half as effectively as Villagers, at 12.5 hit points/second to repair ships and 2.5 hit points per second to repair siege engines respectively. For siege engines and ships, the increase in repair speed per added unit is linear, that is, repairing with N units increases the repair speed N times. However, for buildings (including packed Mongol buildings) the increase in speed diminishes for each additional Villager, similarly to how it does with construction time. Since damage increases linearly with the number of attacking units. this means it eventually gets to a point where it becomes impossible to out-repair it by adding Villagers. The exact formula seems to be something close to:
where: is the repair speed and is the number of Villagers. The following table shows measured rates for different numbers of Villagers and how long that translates to repair a standard landmark with 5,000 hit points, along with the cost, which is explained in the next section.
| Number of Villagers | Repair Speed (hp/s) |
Time to fully repair a destroyed landmark (seconds) |
Resource cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 25 | 200 | 178 |
| 2 | 35.9 | 139 | 247 |
| 3 | 45.7 | 109 | 291 |
| 4 | 53.9 | 93 | 331 |
| 5 | 61.8 | 81 | 360 |
| 6 | 69.2 | 72 | 384 |
Repair costs[]
In Age of Empires IV, the resource cost of repairing does not depend on the cost of the building or unit being repaired. Rather, it depends on the number of units repairing and the unit or building being repaired. The only resource consumed during repairs is wood, except for defensive buildings which cost stone (Keeps, Stone Walls and Stone Wall Towers), which also cost stone to repair. Other buildings which cost multiple resources, such as landmarks, Wonders, and Town Centers, only cost wood, as do economic buildings which only cost stone, such as Cisterns and Aqueducts. The Castle and Fortress cost both stone and wood/gold, but require stone to repair. Repairing buildings, siege engines, and non-military ships (Fishing Boats, Trade Ships, and Transport Ships) costs 1 wood every 1.125 seconds for every unit repairing. Repairing military ships costs 4 wood every 1.125 seconds per unit repairing. Since repairing siege engines and ships with N units costs N times resources but also repairs N times faster, the overall resource cost is the same. However, since Villagers do not repair buildings N times faster, but still add N x cost, it actually becomes more expensive to repair a building using multiple Villagers. As seen in the above table, repairing with 5 Villagers costs ~2x more than with a single Villager.
Tactics[]
Even when repairing with multiple units, repair costs are still much, much lower than the thing being repaired, especially for expensive siege engines and ships. For example, it costs less than 40 wood to repair all of a Bombard's hit points, yet the unit costs 850 resources. As such, it can often be beneficial to bring along forward repair villagers with a besieging army. Similarly, it costs 900 stone to build a Keep, but costs less than 400 stone to repair it even with six Villagers. This is why if, for example, a Keep built to defend an area of the map is being attacked, the increased repair speed from repairing with many Villagers is much more valuable than the resources saved from repairing with few, if it means the Keep can be saved. If a building is not under threat, that is when it makes sense to only repair with a single Villager. The biggest costs of repairing are in the lost Villager gathering time, and the potentially vulnerable position it puts the Villagers in that could lead to Villager losses. Finally, repairing also gives a significant defender's advantage on water maps. Combined with the healing aura of the Dock and potentially its Naval Arrowslits, it can be fairly easy for Fishing Boats to out repair enemy damage and save resources in the long run due to not having to replace ships.
Further statistics[]
The only technology, ability, or civilization bonus which grants a bonus to repairing is currently the Malians' Banco Repairs technology, which increases building repair speeds by 50%. The Chinese technology Extra Materials can be considered to grant the ability to repair walls and gates to Outposts, but it acts more like a passive healing aura (although the term healing is generally reserved for organic units).
Changelog[]
- Originally, Villagers repaired siege engines at 20 hit points per second. With Season Two Update 17718, this was decreased to 5 hit points per second. With update 13.0.4178, "Villager repair rate on siege engines was reduced by 20%", but it is unclear if this was actually implemented, since in-game testing still shows the repair rate at 5 hit points per second.
- Originally, even buildings that cost exclusively stone to build would cost wood to repair. With the Season Two Update 17718, they cost stone to repair.
- Originally, packed buildings were repaired at the same rate as siege engines. With update 7.0.5861, they are repaired at the same rate as buildings.
- With patch 8.2.218, the base building repair rate was increased from 20 to 25 hit points per second. The return for repairing with multiple Villagers was diminished further such that repairing with 3-10 Villagers is approximately 5% slower overall.
Trivia[]
- The Artificial intelligence in Age of Empires is infamous for continuously attempting to repair damaged buildings, even when surrounded by enemy units.
- In Age of Mythology, it is not possible to restore the repairing of siege weapons via modding as the function code for repair is hardcoded to be exclusive to buildings.