The "Caravan" mechanism

I think the farms are within the city itself. As has been stated before, to take a city one must conquer their way in to the keep. This means that food would be able to be cut off, but not by the caravan blockade. You would have to get to the tile which has the farms on it.

The multi-tile cities mean that there is no caravan, but you can still conquer the various parts seperately.

from what I understand the city expands with the buildings.  From the looks of it, rather than a small hamlet and a huge metropolis taking up the same number of tiles, the city actually grows.   Farms would be on the outscirts, however I do not believe they will need caravans into town.   I only see them being used in caravans in your City A and City B example

I would not expect 10% to be lost in transuit, but rather a certain set amount on upkeep (the way an army would require food).  I know its a subtle difference but it might be a difference.  I'd expect caravan transport limits to be related to some tech ability.

Any city that has a farm connected to it will be fine (rations wise).  Its the cities that are build away from 'fertile ground' that will need food transported to them.

Most of this process will be automated: cities with a surplus in any resource will automaticially send that off to a the neighboring settlement that is most lacking. If a 'Trade' treaty has been established, food (or whatever resource has been agreed upon)  will be sent from the closest/most bountiful city to the player in question.

That provides a little insight into a long debated question... during beta testing I'll do my best to stay off this issue since everyone already knows I don't like the idea of micro_managing and babysitting caravan trading.  For an 8 player game and each player has 10 cities on a large map I estimate each town to have 3 or more caravans traveling at anytime.  Then when considering a game with allies you'd also want to monitor those caravans because allies watch each others back... then also monitor the caravans of your greatest enemies.   Only the developers can truly know... how many caravans will the gamers be having to guard, monitor, change_moving_orders, use magic, etc.,  during mid_game?

 The number of possible problems and suggested resolutions have been deeply discussed within another thread:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/341171

Hopefully the recommendations for fixing these issues from myself and pidgeonpidgeon  are being reviewed.

So I am curious to hear just how devistating it might be if  a single shipment is missed?    in theory, a single missed caravan of food could be devestating since people are now starving, but at the same time they'd have stores (at least they should) for just such an occation.   In NTJedi's example, we'd have 3 caravans, if they miss 1 of these caravans are they going to fall ill?   Am I going to be forced to build a granary to store food 1st?

I guess my fear is that relying on other towns might make me extremely vulnurable to harrassment by other players.  (or maybe thats a good thing?   Rampaging monsters then)

The caravan system could work very well for a number of reasons.

Lets say town A has a "resource" of bears in the area,making it possible to build bear riders.For example they could cost 120 gold to train and 3 turns to make a unit in that town.

Caravans will make it able to transport the bears resource to a town B (a'la Civilization) but with restrictions,Town B 20 squares away could build bear riders,but because of the cost of travel and transport they will cost 240 gold and take 6 turns to make a unit,the bigger the distance the bigger the cost and time,making it alot harder to train bear riders in town C 60 squares away.

This would also help give a civilisation a "feel" to it and making each game feel different,a town would be well known for training a great number of bear riders,another town may be well known for training large amounts of a certain elite unit etc etc.

Just a basic idea that someone may have come up with before,but it seem's quite easy to impliment something like this with the above formula.

BoogieBac, thx for replying!

NTJedi (nice to see you here!)  & pidgeon's auction system seem very sleek, but I try to focus the discussion here to the caravan mechanism.  However, trading between players should be done by caravanning, too.

Just like NTJedi, I hate babysitting caravans especially there too many routes.  Whenever I start caravan in a game, I'll know this action is a strategic one; I get penalised if it is robbed.  But I should not need to think about it until I get robbed.

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There must be some resources generating structures like farm, mining/forestry camp, essence node etc hexes away from a City.  I want to make sure there is no player-initiated caravanning to link those to my cities.

One neat way (I hope/suggest) is treat all these resource generators as Victory Point.  As long as the Victory points (VP) is chained to the City (via other victory point in between) are owned by the same player, all resources generated by the Victory points is transparently provided to the City.  A Level 1 City is capable to chain up all VP surrounding it.  A level 4 City can chain up a VP radius of 4.

"cities with a surplus in any resource will automatically send that off to a the neighboring settlement that is most lacking"

This is where I have a different opinion.  As a player I'll like to make a choice to keep a city starved or not.  If I want to give the starving city B food, the player makes the choice and caravan food to City B; this action should NOT be automatic.  There are times I want City A overstock with food.

Player should be able to decide how many months the caravan last.  The speed of the caravan is the movement speed of its fastest unit the player able to produce (or some reasonably fast speed, no need to be too realistic here)

Anyone can rob the caravan, be it roaming monsters or etc.  Did I mention I can also caravan/vector units?  Anyone try robbing has to fight them if units are attached to the caravan.  Optionally, I should be able to hire Neutral heroes (that are 25% to 150% levelwise to my best hero) to guard them.

Caravans hold a unique opportunity for elemental depending on the level of interaction they can have on the game world. I would suspect that like GalCiv2 you will have a number of statistics for cities/villages. So the urgency of a particular caravan would largely be dependent on a city's past and the current situation. Caravans also open up the possibility of devious actions if you can interact with them directly.

For example lets say Me and Mr.X go to war but it becomes to costly and we declare a cease fire and I offer Mr.X a one time good will trade of 10 caravans filled with grain to  prove I'm on the level. Now it would be extremely interesting if caravans could also be hazardous or dangerous. If I make a slight alteration to my previous example in which I would still ship the grain to Mr.X but I had cast a poison or curse spell on the grain before it left my territory. Of course, Mr.X should have some options at his disposal to check the grain I sent him.  

Caravans can be very interesting, but myself and pidgeonpidgeon carried a very very long discussion on many of the possible problems, exploits, and concerns.  During the discussion it became clear one of the best ways to reduce micro_management, exploits, game_balance and babysitting_pains was having the caravans run by a 3rd party merchants guild. 

Otherwise the list of problems become very obvious especially for very large maps... check the Trading Ideas thread for details.  In the end we both found some very great ideas for caravans.