As already mentioned in one of the Journal entries, I think that caravans are greatly misbalanced at the moment. Currently it is most effective to simply build all caravan routes. This way your food production is more or less doubled and your guildar income increased a lot.
Therefore the number of caravans that you typically want to run is N * [(N - 1) + M] where N is the number of cities in your empire and M is the number of cities of Neutral/Allied empires.
Considering only a medium sized empire of 5 cities and allied with a 3 city empire that is 35 Caravans and it is growing quadratically with the number of cities. For a larger empire this leads to a map really cluttered with caravans. For instance i had a game with 9 Cities and an neutral trading partner with 4 Cities resulting in 108 Caravans running.
On the one hand this leads to a dramatical increase in guildar (in my example the guildar income was more than doubled) and additional food income which also increases quadratically with the number of cities. This easily offsets the administration cost. It further results in the fact that income produced by the cities themself is only a minor contribution to your gold income. On the other hands this also leads to massive lag, especially on older machines.
I would propose to reduce the number of allowed caravans to only a few per city, and rebalance the economy on this reduced guildar income. The limit could either be fixed, and depend on some Diplomacy research, or it coul be capped at the level of the city. This would further encourage the building of larger cities instead of a number of small ones.
And yes, I specifically build cities without any resources to make a point.
Yeah I agree with you totally here. I hadn't actually got a chance to build such a large empire to notice though!!
Perhaps a trade route system like Birth of the Federation would help here. In BotF trade routes from a given "city" (planet in BotF) were limited by the amount of population. The trade route income was dervied as a function of population of the receiving "city", so if you created a trade route from your city to a huge city, you would get more income than if you made the same trade route to a tiny town. BotF also had a limit on the number of incoming trade routes based on a first in basis.
The BotF system took out the need to actually "build" a caravan to start a trade route. You just chose a "city" and set the available trade route to where yuo want it (those cities with trade allowed, so no trading with warring nations!!).
This is good but we have a nice clean way to handle how many trade routes a city could support. Just limit the number to the city size instead of trying to use population. A level 1 gets 1 caravan, a level 2 gets 2, etc. The city level and population are already tied to one another so this seems cleaner.
For the other points, I really like them. The system to set up caravans could be a lot cleaner than having to build them and then move them to a city, this should be handled automatically. Imagine the scenario where you want to set up a route over a dangerous stretch. Everytime a caravan gets captured you have to remember to build a new one. Could be very tedious. That and the size of the destination (or maybe it's economy level) should definitely reflect the bonuses you get from trading if it isn't already. I don't know how to tell what I am getting from these routes currently so I have no clue.
I like the simplicity of this solution.. but then again may be I just like simple...
indeed love the one caraven per city level idea, we would need a "trading" tab somewhere, whcih we coudl use to canlce or redirect trade routes.
"indeed love the one caraven per city level idea, we would need a "trading" tab somewhere, whcih we coudl use to canlce or redirect trade routes."
Yes.
But FWIW, in my games I can never get nearly an many caravans as the OP. There are always forests along my trade routes and the monsters that spawn there keep eating them. Kill the baddies and they respawn soon.
Good point about using the city level rather than populaiton. Just on balancing, I think that you should need a lvl 2 city for 1 trade route, lvl 4 for 2 and lvl 5 for 3. But it all depends on how much stuff caravans provide. The more benefits a caravan provides the less you should be able to get with small cities.
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