An alternate way of acheiving the same benefit might be to add a subsequent technology (one or two tiers after the initial caravan tech) that automatically gives your established caravans a combat rating / an always-present troop that defends the caravan in tactical battle if it is attacked.

You know, like hiring Mr. Reynolds.

- Ash

Having  a tech advance to allow guards is a brilliant idea and adds an aditional tech to the tree which is all good man.

Very good idea.

I've take a quick look at this and I believe this is something that could be modded in one of two ways.

First, the caravan unit is defined in the CoreVehicles.xml file. It's possible that you might be able to make this a upgradable unit. I'd have to play around with it. Idealy you would want it to have a group of guards, rather than one guard in a tactical battle.

The second would be to add a new Caravan unit, by adding a new Technology. The techs for the kingdoms are in the Techs_Amarian.xml file, but you would have to make sure that Kingdoms also had a tech upgrade path. You would then just define a new Caravan unit with a Attack and Defense rating.

If I have some time this weekend, I'll play around and see if I can come up with a method to make this work.

yeah, i would like this as well.

I rarely lose a caravan any more.. of course I do not build them until my cities area of influence has covers most of the ground between locations