Opponent Caravans blocking your cities

Noticed it...  I always thought the player was trying to establish trade with that city, but for some reason the caravan wouldn't establish a trade route.  We can't park our caravans on their cities, after all.

Yes,

I get a bit pissed about this but then depending on the caravan I just RolePlay it away and I can say I've fought a few wars over illegally parked caravans.  The offending traders stop once executed and war is declared...  I know its a harsh solution... although it works...

I tend to wipe out their caravans unless they have a treaty with me, so I can't say I've had this issue heh.

My guess is:

• To initiate the trade, the caravan has to touch the city
• at that point it is teleported to the center of the city
• being surrounded by city tiles there, it cannot find a path back out again because touching one of the adjacent tiles would enter the city.

Oh man, this'll be a fun multiplayer griefing technique if it is still possible there. ... especially if it makes it impossible for the person to click their city to take out units to destroy the caravan.

Well they can always get to the city via clicking the icon on the Empire Tree, but shhh they may not know that

This is an annoying problem.  Please fix it.

You can click on any part of the city to select it. You don't have to select the city center.

NOT TRUE when attempting to send a caravan of your own to that city ...It must go to the city center. (or at least it must in patch 1.07, I am assuming that mechanic did not change in patch 1.08)

in a few centuries politicians in your world will lay down wreaths at the monument of the unknown caravan driver

The fact that you can't enter tiles occupied by allies, and it's very difficult to click on something that's behind a unit are both serious issues.

Caravans need a bit of an overhaul. You can't click on the functions of any tile that has a caravan on it. It's like the caravan trumps everything on that tile until it's moved. I did have a city in my latest game that simply would not accept any caravans. I couldn't move any of my caravans to the city at all. Couldn't even click on the city to bring up options (it was an opponent city).

TAB should not cycle through caravans. This is so annoying. There should be a separate hotkey for cycling through various types of units.

I hope they add in more road graphics at some point. The purely linear roads are really an eye sore in some parts. Also, the algorithms for road placement need to be updated a bit. Often I get a zigzag pattern of roads with circles along a particular path that should simply be a straight road. Again, this is more for aestetics than anything.

It would be nice to have more control over where the roads went though. Often time an existing road will simply be used whether or not another path would be quicker. I had a few cities next to some opponent cities and the pattern of the cities sort of made a U shape. I wanted to connect my 2 cities (top ends of the U shape) directly so I sent a caravan from one to the other, but all it did was connect a piece of the new road to the existing road that went completely down and around through 2 enemy cities. Those caravans were destroyed quite quickly.

Caravans should respawn automatically when they are destroyed. It becomes cumbersome when you have 20 cities and suddenly 3 caravans get destroyed and you are clicking on every city to see which ones lost caravans. Then you rebuild the unit and, because the game doesn't tell you when a unit is built, have it sit there for a dozen or so turns before you remember that you were building them in the first place. Then you have to try and remember which city they were previously going to (which isn't that big of a deal because establishing a new trade route gives the option of making new roads to new places anyway or creating a longer trade route for more benefit).

Ultimately caravans need to be more integrated into the game system and far more automated. For the most part they should be mostly transparent to the player after their initial creation. Perhaps they could automatically adjust their own trade routes as the game progresses. Could even have a threshold for when to trade with foreign cities (like stop trading with a city of an opponent that just went to war with you). Should be based on city size and distance and establish new roads and routes as better possibilities arise.

Those are my thoughts on the caravans anyway.

Easy fix.  Kill them.

FYI: the game DOES tell you when a unit is built, its on the top right corner, its all those messages, I also get a "Caravan Limit has been reached" pop up.  And when your caravan dies, it tells you with city it came from.