I thought I'd throw this into the thread since I want this to be a little bit more statistically minded than other discussions and I like doing a bit of math for these things.
So the base price to buy a caravan is now 18,000 denars and they take about a week to start making money normally with wages of about 100 for a party size of 30. Income from them I think can safely average out at about 500 considering the time scale I'll be using and how they take a long time to start making the more significant amounts like 1000.
Initial investment: -18,000
Upkeep per day: -100
Income per day: 500
This means that you don't make your money back until about day 54, or late into week 7. Even if the devs' estimate percentage chance of 5% at a caravan being destroyed per day were correct (and thus this were actually going according to their plan), that would mean there is a 93.73% chance that you will lose money on your investment and a 30.17% chance of losing it by day 7.
The current numbers on the poll suggest a slightly higher rate of closer to a 40-50% chance of losing your caravan by day 7, so I'll lowball it a bit and say it's a 7% chance per day and thus 40% chance of losing it per week. That means:
- 40% chance to never get any income from your caravan.
- 64% chance to get back less than 20% of your initial investment.
- 78% chance to get back less than 40% of your initial investment.
- 87% chance to get back less than 60% of your initial investment.
- 92% chance to get back less than 80% of your initial investment.
- 95% chance to get back less than 100% of your initial investment.
- 97% chance to not get back your initial investment and pay back 83% of the caravan's wages.
- 98% chance to never be profitable.
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't think I'll ever be taking a 2% chance of making a few hundred denars off of a singular caravan, especially not when I have a 40% chance to just straight up lose as much as 18,700 denars. Mathematically, you're vastly more likely to make more money betting on who will lose a game of Russian roulette than you are using caravans as of this patch. Even if the devs' numbers were accurate, they clearly either hate caravans or didn't run the math at all considering that's still a 94% chance of never seeing a single denar of profit.
I rest my case.
