SP - General Caravans needs serious help in 1.6.4 (Dear Devs) Post #2 15 days later

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Flesson19

Not a Cookie
Knight
This is my second post regarding this, now in a new patch, how bad caravans are. For the second patch in a row I won't even be making a caravan guide video because caravans are so terrible. Last time I focused on profits which are worse now. but this time I will focus on survivability to get you all to understand. I sent out 10 of the same stat caravans for 10 years with upgraded troops for 2 years which TW said is the average a caravan should survive an at day 100, I did that 50 times for a total of 500 caravans sent out. 88% of them survived. When subtracting the 22.500 start cost. the average profit of a caravan "per day" was 1.66, that's right just under 2 profit per day.
Now the real bad news, as I have requested from TW for 6 months is caravans need help as the game progresses. As the game advances you get bigger packs of looters and bandits, Once again I did the same setup sending out 500 caravans and did this from day 600 and only 58% of them survived the 2 years and because of the that after factoring the 22,500 start up cost. Not ONE of the 50 runs could I get my 225,000 investment back. When I added all the money I made from the 500 caravans and averaged it out per caravan/ per day I lost an average of 50 denars per day, per caravan. I didn't even waste my time to advance to day 1,000 to test.
Plain and simple. I have 2 simple ideas to solve this problem and make the completely viable and have asked for a Dev to give me a little bit of their time since caravans haven't been "great" since 1.5.7
Why not let me help solve the issue. Plain and simple just answer this question....Why have a mechanic in the game that is totally worthless and you will do nothing to fix it? It makes no sense. I have been making suggestion for almost 6 months and nothing is done? why since a dev has a post saying they will work with the community to fix things and I ask for 6 months and nothing is done. I have videos each patch to show the progression of caravans that I do each patch and this is the second patch in a row where caravan are so bad it makes no sense to even make a video. I beg of you, put your pride away and take the help from someone who knows what is wrong and knows how to make them a great option again.
 
@Duh_TaleWorlds @SadShogun hey what are the chances you guys could make the total party size of caravans scales up when bandits party size scale up. Not exactly sure but it seems like AI caravans do this (or is their party size always 50?) Flesson is right that in the late game player caravans survivability to bandits drops drastically.

Caravans need to be successful when you are at peace, I don’t think increasing their party size will improve their survivability to enemy Clan parties, just bandits. So I don’t see the major gameplay issue with a change like this.
 
I suggested awhile back just adding 1 to max caravan size for each clan tier to help as the game progresses and was shot down as they were happy with the survivability. but the more I think of it, I would think +3 size per clan tier is closer to what is needed. I spent 12 hours testing these numbers. we have RNG but testing 500 caravans is a pretty good way to minimize it just a little. I hope
 
@Duh_TaleWorlds @SadShogun hey what are the chances you guys could make the total party size of caravans scales up when bandits party size scale up. Not exactly sure but it seems like AI caravans do this (or is their party size always 50?) Flesson is right that in the late game player caravans survivability to bandits drops drastically.

Caravans need to be successful when you are at peace, I don’t think increasing their party size will improve their survivability to enemy Clan parties, just bandits. So I don’t see the major gameplay issue with a change like this.
Party size changes do have effects regarding party speeds and increasing sizes without accounting for the speed changes can also have adverse effects.
We are currently investigating the reasons for the caravans' unprofitability. One thing we found in the game is the excessive availability of certain trade goods. Even after extensive campaign time progress (15 years+). These reduce the amount of profit a caravan can make.
We will also investigate the reason why caravan parties are destroyed through event logging. Certain events are more complicated and require a dedicated "tracking code" to be able to be logged in our automatic statistics collector. After their implementation, hopefully, we will have an answer in the near future.
 
Party size changes do have effects regarding party speeds and increasing sizes without accounting for the speed changes can also have adverse effects.
We are currently investigating the reasons for the caravans' unprofitability. One thing we found in the game is the excessive availability of certain trade goods. Even after extensive campaign time progress (15 years+). These reduce the amount of profit a caravan can make.
We will also investigate the reason why caravan parties are destroyed through event logging. Certain events are more complicated and require a dedicated "tracking code" to be able to be logged in our automatic statistics collector. After their implementation, hopefully, we will have an answer in the near future.
Thanks for the info. Best of luck with the implementation and investigation! (y)
 
Party size changes do have effects regarding party speeds and increasing sizes without accounting for the speed changes can also have adverse effects.
speaking of which, it would be nice if you guys would set a limit to the party size of the villagers.
1.0 speed is bad(when a village was under development for several years).
 
We will also investigate the reason why caravan parties are destroyed through event logging. Certain events are more complicated and require a dedicated "tracking code" to be able to be logged in our automatic statistics collector. After their implementation, hopefully, we will have an answer in the near future.

I appreciate you will want the "hard" data on this, but its pretty obvious why caravans get destroyed so often - we can see it just from playing the game. There's 3 issues at play:-

  • Bandit party spam
  • Bandit party size increasing with the player level (why is this even a thing? It's unnatural, not adding any positive gameplay value and just causing problems)
  • Being at war with multiple factions (which is often the case in medium-long games) leads to caravans being captured frequently by enemy lords because there's so many of them roaming around
 
Why is this an issue?
The act of enemy lords capturing caravans in itself isn't an issue & should definitely happen, but its undeniably a major contributing factor to how worthless player caravans are in medium-long campaigns. if caravans are constantly being captured long before they turn a profit, whats the point in paying 22k for them? As it stands, there's no point in using caravans past the medium game length because of how quickly they get captured by bandit parties or enemy lords.

The devs need to make caravans worth the cost somehow, be it greatly reducing their startup price, increasing party size, or preferably (imo), by reducing the bandit spam and removing the silly bandit party size scaling based on player level.
 
Party size changes do have effects regarding party speeds and increasing sizes without accounting for the speed changes can also have adverse effects.
As a player, attacking caravans is not a good idea because of the relationship hit vs what you get out of it, so maybe giving another speed boost might not be a bad idea to make up for the slight increase in size, or for 20k maybe they should have way more horseman?
We are currently investigating the reasons for the caravans' unprofitability. One thing we found in the game is the excessive availability of certain trade goods. Even after extensive campaign time progress (15 years+). These reduce the amount of profit a caravan can make.
I could think of a recent change that messed the economy up : Wine and oil became none consumables, only big cities consume them at a very slow rate. Maybe that needs to be reversed :p
Another thing i could think of is to make villagers buy stuff they need for their village after they make a sell, for example, if available, tools and pots and if the village is prosperous, maybe even gear for their militia (It would also boost workshops).
We will also investigate the reason why caravan parties are destroyed through event logging. Certain events are more complicated and require a dedicated "tracking code" to be able to be logged in our automatic statistics collector. After their implementation, hopefully, we will have an answer in the near future.
I appreciate that you guys have a method to track and fix things, and it has worked wonders in many aspects of the game. However, players feedback should be regarded equally if not slightly more importantly then statistics. We are testing the game we love and we are trying to do our part, the statistic could be used to confirm or to improve on an idea but please listen to us :*

I wish you luck and i thank you for all you do for us. Take care
 
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