[dragontamer]

It was always possible to do 18 pop feudal, but today's focus on luring deer is perhaps the biggest change to the meta?

There wasn't any real balance patch. Just people who have gotten much better at luring deer to improve early build orders. Like 3 years ago, you'd just assume 2x Boar + 8x sheep as your early food source. But today, people are adding 2x or even 3x deer to that.

As deer + boars collect food at the fastest rate, you can more consistently go up at lower villager counts. There's also much more precision: killing boars / deer / sheep under the town center more consistently today than before.

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TL;DR: Skill improved, people can do 18 pop today even though its always been possible. So people are just getting faster and more optimized.

[dayjaby]

Hera made a video about this recently and attributes it more to all the QoL updates like shift queueing. Sheep actually spawn next to your TC now. Before DE you had to find your first 4 as well.