1:  So I got tired of monsters eating my caravans in the forests and decided to give them a surprise.  Went to the unit design screen to create a unit with master heavy plate defenses, a high-level ax (more appropriate for forests than swords or bow, considering what I would like to do to those forests anyway ), and surprise, I could equip scouts pack, messenger's pack, ranger's pack, medical pack and pioneer's pack, but no caravan / trader pack.  Ouch!

What I wanted was the equivalent of the custom armed trading ships I used to make in GalCiv 2 to fight off pirates etc, but we need them more in Elemental than in GC2 unless/until they do something about the monsters spawning deep within our territory. 

Currently, caravans don't even show in the unit design screen as units we can upgrade.  That would be a good place to start.

2:  While I'm at it, I notice that when I build plain-old caravans the "party" option is greyed-out.  I wouldn't mind being able to build parties or even squads of caravans for bigger trade bonuses, and also better defense when/if they permit custom armed caravans.  (Then for balance reasons they might slightly reduce the effect of single caravans).

3:  Also, could they please tweak the caravan-got-killed messages to tell us where it happened and which cities it was going between.  I know this has been requested before, but its worth nagging about.  Maybe even give us a little notification on the right side mentioning the cities so we can keep it there until we get a replacement started.

4:  I tried an alternate way to automagically protect my caravans -- have an armed unit travel with them.  But when they got to the target city, they just sat there an garrisoned it, no trade route.  Back to my first request.