Caravans and fixing city spam

The caravan system was nerfed in 1.1 and city spam is still an issue. Here is an extremely simplistic way of fixing both these problems.

Some variables to keep things simple:

cityOriginGold = the population of the city the caravan has left * 10%.
caravanTravelDist = the distances (in tiles) that the caravan has traveled from its city of origin to its destination.
originCityLevel = the level of the origin city (1, 2, 3 etc).
destCityLevel = the level of the destination city (1, 2, 3, etc).

The solution:

When a caravan leaves a city, the amount of cityOriginGold gold is automatically deducted from the player's reserves.
When a caravan enters a city, the amount of (cityOriginGold * (caravanTravelDist / 20)) gold is automatically added to the player's reserves.

What does this all mean?

Well in order for trading to be profitable, the distance between two trading cities must be greater than 20 tiles or the player actually loses money rather than makes money.

Sovereign bonuses, city improvements, spells and such can be used to tweak the 20 tile distance.

Thoughts?

*edited, thoughts on including a trading frequency:

The frequency of trading between two cities can be a function of their difference in levels:
- caravan from city A (level 3) to city B (level 1): a caravan would leave every 36 turns.
- caravan from city A (level 2) to city B (level 4): a caravan would leave every 14 turns.

Example formula for frequency in the above examples would be: (originCityLevel + destCityLevel) / destCityLevel) * 9 turns. Thinking was that trade from smaller cities would happen more frequently but in smaller amounts but trading from larger cities would happen less frequently but in larger amounts. Numbers can be tweaked.

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* implemented a time-based limitation on trade.

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Wow, not even one reply?

Is my idea just that terrible or is everyone's mind so blown away by the sheer awesomeness of the suggestion that they are unable to reply?

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I think it is a good idea to tweak the caravan trading system. Right now as it stands I find gold income way to easy to get to very large numbers.

My last game that I completed I had 12 cities and was making over 800 gold per season and had almost 160,000 gold saved up that I couldn't spend. This is just one of many things that need to be tweaked.

I think it would be if your city can support three different caravans it could pick what each caravan traded. One would trade for money, another would trade food and another would trade materials. You could pick and have them all do one type of goods or a mixture.

Materials also become way to easy to acquire but that is another issue. (Maybe get rid of materials and have gold only meaning you would need certain mines to build something ie iron for armour but if you don't have a mine you can't build it and if you do you just pay gold to build it so instead of 12 materials, 10 iron, 3 gold it would be 25 gold and upkeep per turn).

I guess we will have to wait for upcoming patches to see what can be done and will be done to the trading mechanic but a flat 10% bonus should go. Maybe bonuses based on city lvl would be better. A caravan from a lvl 4 city to a lvl 5 city based on a ten tile travel route would be only 8% bonus but if the lvl 5 city sent a caravan to the lvl 4 city it would be a 10% bonus. Each lvl equals a 2% bonus over each tile so each tile traveled would be .2% bonus up to the full 10%. I.E. If a lvl 1 city sent a caravan 15 tiles to another city the bonus would be 3%.

CITY SIZE(1 lvl equals max 2%) * TILES TRAVELED(.2%) = bonus

1 * 12 = 2 percent

1 * 5 = 1 percent

5 * 8 = 8 percent

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