Are Caravans Worth It?

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They’ll be worth once they realize gear sales make NO SENSE in the system they’ve laid out. The only bodies you outfit are named characters. Everyone else is “auto-spawning” their stuff. In a system like that, it should then be an “assumption” that your men are scavenging and gaining gear after battles and doing their own deals behind the scenes. This should be where the gear goes.

Caravans aren’t worth it because everything from raiding bandit camps to fighting open field battles is so obnoxiously profitable, these “profit parties” can’t hold a candle to them. The biggest thing they do is assist one of your named characters to develop without risky sudden drops in cash
+1
 
that is a good point, if you spend for upgraded troops does the game take that into account or when they lose them do they just start taking tier and 2 from towns so they are really weak @SadShogun any idea?
Caravan party limits are very low (30 to 50), because of this they generally max out however as the game progresses and bandits get stronger and this adversely affects the caravan survivability. Also after a caravan is attacked they lose some of their portion and become even more vulnerable. We are trying out different size modifiers to improve caravan survivability in the mid and late game. Also we're considering the nerf 100+ doomstack looter parties into something more meaningful. (Either destroy them after a while (because they're bandits which are hard to organize) or make them sensibly smaller)
 
Caravan party limits are very low (30 to 50), because of this they generally max out however as the game progresses and bandits get stronger and this adversely affects the caravan survivability. Also after a caravan is attacked they lose some of their portion and become even more vulnerable. We are trying out different size modifiers to improve caravan survivability in the mid and late game. Also we're considering the nerf 100+ doomstack looter parties into something more meaningful. (Either destroy them after a while (because they're bandits which are hard to organize) or make them sensibly smaller)
limiting the looters would be great for caravans mid to late game, I do applaud that idea. My one question for profits is that (former) Dev mexxico and I had this talk many months ago as profits dropped so bad, he said that he reduced the barter reduction penalty by 2% and that completely solved the problem and made them totally viable. I am wondering if you could look into that as well. If you are able to do it that could also solve it quickly, so those 2 things could potentially solve both issues with 2 quick changes. Thank you again for the communication, means a lot
 
Currently, as our investigations show, the profitability problem stems from a lack of relative scarcity of goods. I.e. all goods are prevalent in all areas (while it's possible for player to exploit certain trade routes with use of intuition, AI uses a more algorithmic approach and cannot find this routes.) Also it's not ideal to maximize the profits but also improve the distribution of the goods as well. Minor tweaks to prevalence of many items through increasing demands actually helps with the average profit of caravans a lot. (About %50 increase in profit) This is the current way we are approaching the problem. Of course we still require manual testing so that the trade is fun and meaningful to the player character as well, but we can see from the data that the caravans benefit from high demand and scarcity.
Another additive benefit of this scarcity is to introduce some heterogeneity accross the lands of Calradia, where different places have very different market configurations (not just high number of the goods produced by the bound villages, but e.g. no dates in Sturgia).

For the trade penalty of the caravans, yes we can change them, however currently trade penalty is already very low for caravans (about ~2-3% of the price for buying and selling.) Though we will look into it as well.
 
Currently, as our investigations show, the profitability problem stems from a lack of relative scarcity of goods. I.e. all goods are prevalent in all areas (while it's possible for player to exploit certain trade routes with use of intuition, AI uses a more algorithmic approach and cannot find this routes.) Also it's not ideal to maximize the profits but also improve the distribution of the goods as well. Minor tweaks to prevalence of many items through increasing demands actually helps with the average profit of caravans a lot. (About %50 increase in profit) This is the current way we are approaching the problem. Of course we still require manual testing so that the trade is fun and meaningful to the player character as well, but we can see from the data that the caravans benefit from high demand and scarcity.
Another additive benefit of this scarcity is to introduce some heterogeneity accross the lands of Calradia, where different places have very different market configurations (not just high number of the goods produced by the bound villages, but e.g. no dates in Sturgia).

For the trade penalty of the caravans, yes we can change them, however currently trade penalty is already very low for caravans (about ~2-3% of the price for buying and selling.) Though we will look into it as well.
Thank you again, of course I will run my own extensive tests and get you the results each branch that is released, thank you again
 
... e.g. no dates in Sturgia).

I believe that would be a good idea, plus it makes more sense that certain areas do not produce certain goods (I had just made that comment in a different post).
Is there somewhere in the script file one can try different values related to the Caravans in order to experiment and figure out what would work as far as variables are concerned?
 
We are trying out different size modifiers to improve caravan survivability in the mid and late game. Also we're considering the nerf 100+ doomstack looter parties into something more meaningful. (Either destroy them after a while (because they're bandits which are hard to organize) or make them sensibly smaller)
I think some clan parties should actively and deliberately hunt bandit parties and hideouts. Meaning they do not raid or join armies because their JOB is to do this. This would help them level troops and finance their clan too in a way that doesn't look completely fake while also increasing the perception of NPCs being characters and functioning in the world, not just a number that must be reduced every few days, forever. If there's not manhunters or other patrols it makes sense for some parties of every clan to be dedicated to this.
 
I think some clan parties should actively and deliberately hunt bandit parties and hideouts.

I think that would be a good idea. I don't know everything that's going on in the game at this time, as I am new to it, but instead of using unprofitable caravans to level up companions, may be we can assign them to patrol certain areas to actually hunt down looters/bandits and be useful and level up their skills.
 
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