Aren't Caravans Supposed to Produce Gold?

I think they are; either gold or a resource bonus between the trading cities. Unfortunately, they are acting as a food multiplier... which doesn't make any sense to me.

I mean, food and roads are nice... but I'd rather see gold and resources being trades. That'd make them more worthwhile, especially for cities without any food production.

I don't think you're off-base on that RomanGuy.  It's hard to imagine a caravan creating food out of thin air.  Caravans increasing trade which would then increase gold -- that makes sense.

Yah, it seems quite absurd that they would create massive amounts of food... just like that.

Gold is the classic result of trade.
It is reasonable, that in an abstract way, caravans "create" resources by distributing them to where they are needed but then it would affect all resources, such as food, metal and crystal...

\That would actually help with the city spam.
You'd only need a small "mining outpost" to tag a metal mine but the production would be transferred to your capital (with mining guild and whatnot) where the multipliers are.

I'm thinking of the GalCiv asteroid mining there.

They produce food because the farmer driving it has to stop and shoot buffalo, even though he can only carry 200lbs of it back to his wagon.  Mary and Todd have cholera.

If realism is what bothers you, it does make sense.

No matter how much a city is be able to produce, the actual benefit to the kingdom depends on the logistic setting and on the question of how much you can move to another city before the food spoils. So think of the bonus as bringing you closer to the city's potential than to producing food in mid air.

In a way, It actually makes more sense on food, since it's the only resource that can't be stored.

In game play terms, food is probably the resource that needs the biggest boost, but yes, I would also like it if the caravans would bring a bonus to all production and not just food.

Not quite.... So you think its realistic that a wagon travelling from a city without a farm, arrives in a city with a farm, with fresh extra food in its cargo?
Then when it travels from the farm-city to the non-farm-city, it has nothing in its cargo.

Thats the problem, the caravans are essentially carrying food TO the food producing cities (hence the % bonus), if they carried food FROM the farms to the NON-food cities, the non-food cities would get a % bonus to slow their food consumption.

But as it is, farming cities get food from caravans, out of thin air. Its an extra % food that is being created, not a % food that is being saved by "shipping food to empty cities before it spoils".

Imo the caravans should provide a bonus to whatever the cities connected are producing the most.
If a gold-producing city sends a caravan to a metal-producing city, the metal city should get a slight 5-10% bonus to metal production, and the gold city should get a bonus to gold production.

It makes absolutely no sense to have a food bonus between non-farm cities. It just makes the caravans worthless.
AND another thing, since you CANT trade food via diplomacy (which i think you should be able to, like civ4's tradeing resource for resource (cancellable), there is even less point for the caravans. If they however provided a small materials/metal/gold bonus, a whole new gameplay aspect could open up, via setting up trade routes EVERYWHERE (and actually getting that extra trade route tech, ive never had to bother with it), including to the other ai faction's cities, and using the resources you gain from that in diplomacy or to fund your empire.

As it is now, trade is so unrealistic. Its just there to make food...... Trade has never been about making food in any other strategy game tbh

Doesn't the Caravan's info card say "The gold of the Empire and the Kingdoms looks the same to me" anyway . I also think trade shoud be determined by whatever resources a city has.

I think the logic behind caravans and food is that food is a perishable good.   A given city with a farm can produce a large amount, but it can only physically use so much of it, and a lot of it, theoretically, goes to waste.   Caravans that are linked from a non-producing city to a producing city make less of it go to waste by transporting it to places where it can be used before it goes bad.   This is represented by the output of the city increasing.  Perhaps the caravan operator gets a cut of gold for his services, but gold isn't conjured out of nothingness for our use.

That's still kind of an extremely roundabout and unintuitive way to do things.

I think caravans should provide a bonus to whatever resources the linked cities produce.   Not only would that make more intuitive sense; it'd make caravans important strategic targets.   In a war against the AI (or soon, another person!) you could send mobile, lightly armed, inexpensive raiding parties to disrupt the opponent's caravans and cripple their economy, kind of running interference while your main army does the marching and territory-taking.

In fact, I quite like that idea.

Easy.  City 1 produces enough food for two cities.  Half of it spoils.

Caravan is created between city 2 and city 1.  Now City 2 gets some of the food that would have spoiled at city 1. 

Food increased.

It would be cool, however, if caravans gave increasing benefit as the game went on like galciv.  Also you could add guard units to them if they level up.

City 1 prodeces 5 tons of food, city 2 10 tons.  Somehow, adding a caravan between the two cities gives >15 tons of food.  Said extra food miraculously appears out of nowhere.

Unless the caravans contain mini-greenhouses that grow food while traveling, or they hunt buffalo like BLoads jokingly suggested, caravans should reduce total food supply -- that should be the price paid for a global pool.

FWIW... my two cents  

I think the current implementation is a design trade-off decision, I have no actually proof it's only my opinion or guess.  I based this off existing game mechanics of Food Production.  Unlike most strategy games were food is a required resource to expand one's population AND farms or other food producing improvements can be constructed, in Elemental only nodes that are fertile can produce food, one cannot just construct a farm on a patch of tilled dirt and add water.  Therefore Food has be greatly restricted (possibly intentionally by design to prevent early game population rushes and overbuilding of housing and markets? IDK) but there mid game and late game needed to be another source of food and there is not except for caravans.

So does it make Real World logical sense?  No it certainly does not, though neither does imbuing someone with magic.  I think the mechanics could have been better thought out and communicated.  I also think there is likely a better way but do not know what that is unless SD shares there design criteria for why they implemented food production via only two methods.  Farms and Caravans.  I think the two are very tightly coupled.  If caravans were changed to produce gold w/o another source to buy food with said gold my game economies would collapse. 

I feel old for being the only one that gets it.

I think that variety is the true value of caravans. Regardless of what actual resource is being traded, the idea that you can get exotic foods and materials that allow you to do stuff you couldn't do before improves your life. This is why there is a bonus for traveling farther, because the farther you travel the more exotic your goods are.

So i think the current system makes sense (in terms of getting a net value thats greater than both cities production combined) but I don't see how this limits what resources a caravan could carry. Similarly this doesn't really force the developers to choose a particular method of food and resource generation amongst cities. I think caravans and resource production are 2 different issues as long as caravans aren't required to have prosperous cities.

Summary: I agree with OP and there is no reason why the Devs can't tweak the way resources work.

There are, however, other ways to expand mid/lategame food production. You research adventuring to get additional food sources, and you build granaries in food-producing cities. These things may not produce enough food to do without caravans currently, but that's just a numbers tweak - add another building or two like the granary, increase the percent food boost they give, and there's no need for caravans to produce food. It's not a bad game mechanic, and it could be kept, but I don't see the point in caravan food production when building a "mill" or "granary" or "slaughterhouse" is a more logical/intuitive way to accomplish the same thing.

And logical/intuitive gameplay is important, all comparisons to "real life" aside - if something makes sense, it requires less explaining and causes less new player confusion. You don't need to tell people that researching "trade" and building "caravans" produces gold, that's what they'd expect anyway - if caravans produce food instead, this is yet another unintuitive mechanic that needs to be carefully explained or it'll confuse the noobs and steepen the learning curve.

Don't worry, you're not the only one who gets it

I always ended up with dysentery and broken wagon axles.

Better ford that river.

Austinvn,  I think we are in agreement then I read your points and go yep them are the same points im making, I'm just sharing what is with how I see it and then it could have been done better/differntly. Cheers and thanks for being in agreement!

there is sense in this. but, two small points

- there is also the first level spell, nature's bounty. this adds up when cast on every settlement

- the situation is nothing compared to the necessity of finding metal resources. metal cannot be had from any other source (except from diplomacy) and without it you CANNOT build a military.

My main point is that caravans should provide boosts to the rest of the kingdom's economy, not just food.  I am perfectly fine with a food bonus, but I also want at least a gold bonus to simulate the economy boosts that trade between cities would have.  It even says that caravans provide gold in the description and in the unit quote, but they don't.  Like I said it should be an easy fix so get to it devs!

Sethai,

Good point on nature's bounty I did overlook that source but unintentially so.  Does Nature's Bounty +1 food occur before or after the food bonus from Graneries and caravans?  I sort of think there are bugs that the Champ bonuses and enchantment bonuses are applied after and not before the cities % bonuses.  These are minor compared to others but i hope they are on the list to get squashed at some point.

True and I totally see your point. I would add that it is a classic concept for our capitalist society. But there are other examples through history.

If you ever played Children of the Nile, for example, you would have experienced a society (Egypt) based on food as the means to trade anything.

So in a sense caravans that "produce" food is an acceptable thing in a society that has food as the basis of it's economy. Which isn't the case in Elemental.

I'm not quite sure how they worked during Beta 2 but I believe that caravans provided Gold and Materials when they reached their destination. Althought I never really understood how they worked, I know that since there was no limits on Caravans you could end up producing obcene amounts of gold and material per turn due to that mechanic.

While I hope they make trading a bit more interesting I also hope that they don't break caravans like that since they would go from "soso" to "omgbbqgood". There are many great ideas here lets hope the devs can use them in cool ways and give us a nice trading system!

If you are looking for real world logic to apply to a game like this then you need a new hobby.