trade increases gildar production, i think it also spreads around excess food, thats how you feed a city if you find a good spot with lots of resources but no fertile ground... i think, could be wrong, but it seemed like thats what it did.

what I want to know is how to change a trade route once its established. in the early game i often have my cities trade between each other, but as more cities are established and i make friends with neighbors, it would be nice to be able to retask caravans. so far the only way i'v found to do this is to desband a caravan and build a new one.

i thought i heard in one of the recent video tutorials that food was also global resource (brad pointed this out as one of the areas where EWoM differs from other 4x games)... this enables players to setup a city in some really fertile part of the map, and leverage it as the food producer for the rest of your empire...

I found they boost your food a bit. Generally I can't place that last house I need to grow the city until I make a caravan. At the very least they generate money which is beneficial early on (from what I've found anyway... I could be doing something wrong). Anyway, they are cheap and they make those nice roads (I wish roads would reroute if you cast a mountain raising spell on a tile with a road. Instead it just goes up and over and my caravans get stuck sometimes because they cant go over.)

If you click on the little trader guys wandering along the roads, it does actually tell you what they're boosting and by how much

What is annoying to me is that there is zero in-game text that I noticed that tells you what to do with a caravan, and none of the unit's actions are "build trade route" or "build road".  Mabye it's in the hedge-thingy but my few attempts at using that made me wanna punch something.

I knew what to do with them from reading here and from general TBS/strat concept of, hey, a caravan unit probably involves trade.

So when I built them last night, I just sent them off between cities in hopes of roads and trade happening, and what do you know, that's what happened.

Using common sense isn't allowed here, you're supposed to come here and start an angry thread instead.

Caravans can be amazingly useful. 1/2 the time i only have one city out of maybe 10 making food and that one city is getting thousands of % bonus food production. just send all ur caravans as far away as possible, especially to the distant ai cities. Im lookin at 50-80% on average per trade route for the closer cities.

Just make em, then send them to another city. More distance, more bonus food they give. Not 100% sure, but it seems that foreign trade routes give bonus as well. A road will appear that will have little caravans or traders on foot depending on the distance that can be intercepted by the enemy.

no there is no curernt way to directly protect a caravans(other manual escort/guard) .. However while in area of control the caravan is far less likely to be lost as the only time monsters/brigands will get at them is when  the wander into your territory.. the no longer spawn in player controlled territory..

Edited, as I saw an answer after I posted, should have refreshed first Guess I'll need to keep a traveling guard to prevent wandering monsters.

I've used the "Lower Land" spell to lower an area of land enough so my caravan could get through, then make a handy little road to use to boot.