Destroying improvements. Help! no food!

To destroy an improvement, enter the city's build mode and there will be a tool that you can use to destroy buildings.

As for caravans, in the upcoming 1.1 update I believe they're supposed to be changed to provide gold bonuses and not food.. the current implementation is a bit confusing, but they're going to get changed at least.

One of the options in the build menu is to demolish.

pick target building (not so easy with the current UI) and it's gone.

As for caravans, the percentage bonus goes for the target city, so as long as you have even one city with decent base food, send all caravans to that city and you will never starve again...

Open the build improvements pane for a city and you should see a shovel looking icon which is the destroy building button. Press it and the select the building you no longer want.

This is all that happens with caravans. They give a multiplier to the production of food if and only if the city is already getting food. In general, I find that caravans are a bit underwhelming. If you look at GalCiv 2, traders could make up a very real portion of your economy and losing a even a single trade route could result in dire consequences. In Elemental, since having a negative food income only prevents some type of growth ( city leveling and not city spamming), there are few if any reason to worry about your caravans or destroy your opponent's caravans once your cities have reached a certain point. If a caravan change is in the works, it would probably need to go hand in hand with a fundamental shift in the resource mechanics, as currently all other resources tend to start having massive gluts due to the lack of meaningful resource sinks.

While it will change in 1.1, in the meantime you can use the spell "Nature's Bounty" to benefit from your caravan % increases. By casting Nature's Bounty on a city it will produce 1 food, and then that food will get multiplied. Not much for a city that has no other food resources I know, but it adds up across your kingdom/empire. Nature's Bounty is a 1st level spell found in the Enchantment spell book.

Thanks for all the quick responses, I remember now seeing the destroy building icon but did not know how it was used.

I went back and destroyed all my useless caravans and rebuilt them, sending them now to the farthest cities with the most food resources. There's a balance there that I haven't quite figured out yet, since the multiplier increases with distance traveled (don't know if it's distance as the crow flies or distance along roads, and trying to figure all that out is a bit more management than I want to bother with).

That being said, I'm still not happy with the caravan issue (amoungst many others), but am still greatly enjoying the game.

I have noticed that random maps will usually try and starve you of gold, but one time the map decided to starve me of food, in that case the game did not last very long at all! Food is not something that usually bothers me, but when it does, it has a very big impact (if its early game).

City spam + caravans from each city = no food problem.

This is going to change with 1.1 apparently, but I've never had a food problem in any version up to now.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't troops move much faster on the roads the caravans produce? That's the main advantage for me. The only reason I really put Caravans in the field is to make those roads so I can reinforce areas as necessary when teleporting isn't an option.

Theoretically yes - but in that game where i was starved of food, it was a large map and a long distance between any resources. So I'm not going to get even one full run out of a caravan once established because the animals are going to be falling over each other in the stampede to kill it!

That't the main reason to build caravans everywhere, the other reason is they provide food.

It's not theoretical, it's actual. I typically endgame large maps with 50+ food with over 100 cities. If you want to see my last game I posted it in the save games thread, can't think of the title right of the thread right off-hand. I had +96 food on turn 433 with over 100 cities and only 2AI left to crush in the game. Just, build a bunch of cities, caravans in each, and send them to food producing cities, you won't have to worry about food anymore. Of course, don't massivly be building houses everywhere either, just in the important cities.

Of course, this is going to change in 1.1, apparently caravans won't affect food anymore but gold instead, so enjoy it while you can

Theoretical for me - since i was never able to achieve it due to animals, so it won't be me enjoying it while i can, it will be you! I will prefer the gold option with the caravan, since it is gold that will pay the wages of the units i will be using to kill the basted animals that want to destroy the caravans!

True, on any given turn l average a loss of 1 to 3 caravans. It's not a problem replacing them, as they're so chea. The mosters tend to aggregate around certain areas like woods. By this time in the game (turn 300ish), I've got around 30 kill stacks that can level about everything, even a stack of just 4 heroes with longbows can take out most monsters. Putting them on horses and getting 4 to 5 mp, 8 to 10 on all the caravan roads is a great boon, making it easier to level-up a bunch of guys by killing monsters at the same time you're collecting food from the caravans.

Of course. the 1.1 will certainly nix the food-gathering part of my strategy, but I'm still all for the rapid expansion of caravan routes & roads they provide for army movement purposes. I'll have to see how hard it'll be to gather food in the upcoming expansion, since it'll certainly affect city spam to some degree (and indirectly, number of caravans and caravan routs).

with regard to 1.1.... At least farmer hero's will now be useful!