Trade routes (caravan not sent)

The listed bonus is the value of the trade route between those two cities. They only get that benefit if there is an actual caravan sent.

It's just listing all the routes that connect one city to another. If you sent a caravan to every city and deleted them, it would show you all the bonuses you could get sending one to every single city in your empire.

which is a bit of a silly way of doing things...

like saying merchants only sell things and bring gold home (wait.. doesn't that mean -ve gold on the other side?!)

I always figured the caravans took a day off upon returning from a trade venture.

Frankly, I think its a little silly that destroyed caravans don't re-spawn themselves, and that they don't stop running when you go to war with a country.

You all have it wrong.  What this means is you have a caravan incoming to a city from a different city, but no outbound caravan going back.  So if your city has 5 caravans coming to it, but you can only send out 3 from that city you would see caravan not sent for the two cities that you are not trading back with.

Another example

3 cities sending you a caravan, but you send your caravans to a different 3 cities.  Your city info panel would show 3 cities as caravan not sent and the other 3 cities names only.

This bothered me for a long time and I thought it was a bug in v1.09 something, but it is not and it makes perfect sense to me now.  Hopefully you understand what I wrote above, if not let me know and I will try to explain it a different way.

what you wrote didn't really contradict anything said above. the simplest way to get no caravan sent is like what you said.. incoming caravans but not the other way. which as i mentioned is a bit of a silly way of doing things.

other ways to get no caravan sent would be if the caravans you sent to another place are destroyed and you just didn't send a replacement.

mind you.. funny when the caravan sometimes is a bloke walking along the road with a sack on the back.. instead of ... you guessed it.. a caravan.

Sorry about that I should have read your reply a little more closely.  I hate the caravan bug that occasionally pops up that will not allow you to build new caravans for a captured city.  It happens from time to time usually once or twice a game for me on a large map.

Rebuilding them is boring micromanagement at it's worst, so that should change. It should still hurt to lose caravans though, so maybe re-spawn should take ~10 seasons and monsters that had a juicy caravan for dinner could stay around that trade route knowingly fresh food is on the way.

Edit: How about changing the bonus into a malus during automatic rebuild?

i reckon they should split roads and caravans... don't know if it's me or not.. but i think i've seen roads move before.

i think i saw a road change path after i terraformed a short cut around a mountain. but then again, it could just have been coincidence where the new caravan arrived after the land was raised (out of water) and created road there.

so.. you can have roads as an entity.. that upgrades on its own based on usage. (by whatever) and you have caravans that lvls up based on number of trades performed (ie.. number of trips)  don't know.. maybe more profits.. or maybe can evade battle or higher movement rate or something..

If you have one caravan going in each direction (one from each city), the road will upgrade twice as fast.

It's practically a necessity to reach the last level of roads.

...why is that though? for that matter.. imagine a 3 stop straight road. a-b-c... does it make it even faster with 6 caravans? a<->b b<->c and a<->c ...

The more caravans on a road, the faster it will upgrade. Seems logical to me. What isn't logical is a city can produce 3 caravans but is limited to sending 1 to a specific city.

that's logical.. but is it the way elemental works? do all the different caravans between the corresponding cities show the same numbers for the number of trips/turns/whatever till the road level up?

or for that matter, assuming ab and bc is same distance... and all caravans started off at the same time, do they show the right numbers (whatever they are!)

... if ab's caravan got destroyed and you build another one and send it along the same road.. will the "xp" of ab's caravan be reset to 0 or does it calculate the right number of trips left to upgrade the road?

"Frankly, I think its a little silly that destroyed caravans don't re-spawn themselves, [...]


Rebuilding them is boring micromanagement at it's worst, so that should change. It should still hurt to lose caravans though, so maybe re-spawn should take ~10 seasons and monsters that had a juicy caravan for dinner could stay around that trade route knowingly fresh food is on the way."

Yes, the monsters and bandits get 'home delivery.'  However, I am sure they will never consider it a fast food delivery.

I would say the easiest way at the moment would be to do a inverse economic starbase from GalCiv2. That is, caravans aren't attackable once set up; they no longer exist as independent units, only as (functionally) counters. Monsters can 'attack' a section of road. If they do, the caravan takes a hit. The longer a monster camps on a route, the less bonuses the caravan produces and the slower road development occurs until finally it stops all together.  A little (monster face)! would appear over any spot that a monster threatens so you can find it easily.

They need to make it that so that both cities benefit from 1 caravan moving between them. Isn't that the essence of trade? Right now, the city that sends the caravan gets the bonus. If the city it trades with wants a bonus from that route, it has to send a caravan the opposite direction.

That's rather silly. Sure, someone should get the lion's share of the bonus, but they should both benefit.

If a caravan going between two cities gave the bonus to both, it would effectively double the number of trades a city could get with its three caravans.

I think that's the element of this has confused people for a long time. Trades only go one direction, which is counter intuitive.

If Stardock wanted to get very realistic, caravans should provide a bonus to every city along their route, with the home city and the end city getting the biggest bonus and every city in between getting some amount less.

I also have a problem with caravans.  I get a "No Home Found" message when I sent a caravan from a captured city to another city.  The detail text of the message reads:

"The caravan cannot find a path home, and therefore cannot create a trade route."

Any ideas on WTH this means?   

Is it one you built after the city was captured?

It could also be your target destination was too far away. Caravans need regular intervals of claimed and revealed territory, to plot a path to a faraway city. Having a road between those two distant points might suffice. So if you have two cities on the opposite side of the map, and baby walk your caravan there, eventually it will get there and go "sorry, the path you're asking me to create is too far to calculate with what you're giving me."

It kind of makes sense because it gives you reasons to build outposts. But it's pretty annoying to see a caravan that's been traveling for 30 seasons have to turn around and find a closer trading point.

This.  Really hate the micromanaging of Caravans after they've established a route