Caravans should be safe income source or not?

Should caravans be safe money sources like current design?

  • They should be sometimes get caught and destroyed

    Votes: 234 81.0%
  • No, they should be safe income source

    Votes: 55 19.0%

  • Total voters
    289

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To all the ones saying they are balanced, you guys dont seem to have used one yet...
Right now my caravans are pulling in 1.8k eachday, this is way way too much they earn themselves in just a few days and never losses.

So i would say they should die sometimes and as someone mentioned maybe make it easier to make the caravans somehow without breaking immersion, maybe send a messenger to a companion when they are back in a tavern.

On the other hand each caravan you made cost you a companion who could otherwise be serving in a war party that you could be using to bolster your own military power by forming an army. Parties also bring in income of their own which means caravans need to directly compete both monetarily and in utility as a military boost.

Then once you have one or two fiefs you have more than enough passive income and those caravans that are using companion slots start getting less desirable. I actually shut down all my caravans once I had a second fief so I could support more war parties and have more companions to serve as governors (not that having governors seems to do anything, which is a separate issue that needs to be fixed).

And as multiple people in this thread have said they do sometimes die and you do have to go find your now lost companion and spend another 15K to get the caravan running again.

If you nerf caravans to die more frequently than they do now there's a high chance they'll stop being profitable at all and then it will become an outright dead feature.

Rather than nerfing caravans it makes more sense to simply make other roles your companions could be serving more rewarding. Specifically governors who, as I said, don't seem to do much at all.
 
By all means make caravans more vulnerable but you have to then make the rewards much larger or reduce the amount lost if the caravans are attacked. 18k is a huge expenditure for something that may or may not pay out and that you have no control over. I'm afraid I have no interest in playing what amounts to a slot machine just so I can pay for my troop upkeep.
 
Maybe you should be able to declare a caravan to be a domestic one that trades safely (bigger caravan, stays in friendly territory, less income) or a frontier caravan that is more risky (travels lighter, doesn't restrict its own movement, etc.) which makes more money but is more likely to get attacked. Either way though caravans should not be in a position where they are always being lost before they can even recoup their cost.
 
Y'all just needed to make them catchable and maybe let bandits summon armies to ambush them rather than break another feature that costs the player a companion and gold. I was hoping later there'd be an expansion to running trade empires vs the bandits who prey on them instead of repeating warband's mistake of shoving players into the feudal slogfest—especially the one lacking any real aspect of diplomacy that we have now.
 
I'm all for having caravans be destroyed and attacked, however having to retrieve the NPC and start the caravan all over again is annoying as heck.

If a caravan is destroyed and the NPC gets caught as a prisoner, just allow them to go back to the original point of where the caravan was created and charge 50% of the original cost and let them be on their merry way.

Since 1.1 was pushed out today, I spent probably an hour just getting back my companions and starting the caravans again. I just ended up leaving as a mercenary and quit playing for the day.
 
I said it before here and I still think that this game shouldn't obsess about the balance of a player's income. The primary goal is to have fun fighting big battles and not worrying about the next party wage bill.

It seems like the nerf was overtuned and things really shouldn't be changed so drastically.

It's still very annoying to recollect defeated companions because they just hang out in a tavern on the other side of the world.
 
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So look at those guys who voted yes and the most brilliant and greatest taleworld employees have done.
I guess we are all happy since caravans are completely wiped out, the economy system done and the game is unplayable.
 
So look at those guys who voted yes and the most brilliant and greatest taleworld employees have done.
I guess we are all happy since caravans are completely wiped out, the economy system done and the game is unplayable.
I voted yes, because even on Realistic I had only lost 1 single caravan in something like 700 in game days and was sitting on over a million denars with myself and companions fully decked out in tier 6 equipment. I'm splashing cash around like crazy and can't get rid of it fast enough.

Give TW a day or two and they'll have this sorted.
 
I agree with the general idea that caravans shoyld not be safe and that they should be juicy targets for bandits and lords and war.

However I disagree with the way the nerf was handled. You perfectly summarized the problem points in op, the main point being: They are way too fast.

Caravans are currently so cautious and fast they are nearly always ignored by enemies. Also bandits are generally weaker compared to them.

Caravans carry goods with them, on carriages, so why on earth are they faster than looters. Instead of nerfing their party size, you should start by nerfing their speed so that bandits catch up. Then make initial caravan weak with the possibility for the player to hire caravan guards (tier and number whatever can pay for). So in the end the player has to balance the costs of having many / high quality guards vs. the profits of the caravan and risk of it dying.

In addition the player should be able to limit the route a caravan takes instead of them roaming freely wherever profit is to be made. More control means more risk vs. benefit decisions.

I appreciate that the devs try to fix some things quickly. But it is not a sin to take longer for more fleshed out fixes instead of band-aiding everything, especially as it is EA.
 
The fact that to just equip myself with full imperial lemellar and some top weapons will easily run you 700k, I dont think having extra cash was something that needed fixing. On the bright side all 5 of my caravans instantly had some 400 troops desert and were all raided and destroyed within 5 minutes of loading up my save.

Good thing governer skills work and my city and 3 castles make me plenty of money to pay for the garrisons I put in them...... Oh shut the front door it looks like my city is out of food and all my villages raided AGAIN.

Well luckily we are a peaceful kingdom who... oh my god we are at war with all other kingdoms AGAIN. Just once, can we stop and hold a feast for the love of god!

Yeah the caravans are the problem here.
 
I wonder what you think about one issue related to caravan's current situation.

Currently caravans are nearly 100% safe money source. You build your caravan and it buy some cheap stuff then sell them in next destinations. It buys cheap and try to sell expensive again and again. After some time (like 10-15 days) their capital passes initial limit (10K) and you start to get profit from them. Caravans are currently so cautious and fast they are nearly always ignored by enemies. Also bandits are generally weaker compared to them. This results in player gaining 0.8K daily from one caravan as average until party is disbanded by player. Caravan's party wage is about 0.2K. This means one caravan make 0.6K profit daily in average.

As summary to create a caravan you pay 15K and in one year you get 50K, in two years 100K and this goes on... If there is no extraordinary situation.

I think this situation is not a good design because caravans are currently obviously OP and player has no fear of losing them. This results in caravans to be a stable game element. There are nearly none caravan involved battle in map and this create lack of variety. I want to make caravans more desired targets so that bandits and minor mercenary faction lords (which player is in war with) will attack caravans even they are a bit weaker compared to it or even they are a bit far. So this will result in losing your caravan time to time (more than current situation). Of course this should not be very common. In average once in a year player can lose his/her caravan.

What do you think about this development idea? I know caravan owners will be a bit disturbed however we are trying to make game more exciting.

FIX YOUR MESS PLEASE.
 
Should caravans be a completely safe income? No. Should caravans be so unsafe that their chance of actually turning a profit for you is negligible? Also no.
Now to find a balance between these two extremes...
 
Prefer them to be relatively safe, rather than risk making them irrelevant by having them get destroyed too often.

Can see this being a difficult thing to balance, and very prone to breaking if things like bandits or the battle-auto-resolver need to change.

Look at me, quoting myself...

The current build is enough indication that this is too early to actually work on this.

Everything is dependent on everything else, and apparently with high sensitivity. Whatever balancing act is done now will have to be done over multiple times before launch.

Just make them safe. Reconsider whan all the core systems are done, and proper regression testing procedures are in place.
 
Algorithm should be roughly like this

1-) Looters can't attack caravans

2-) Raiders attack caravan when they are more than 2 times of caravan in size

3-) Heroes attack caravan if they hate the owner of caravan and their factions are at war (-40 or worse relation)

4-) Manhunters kill bandits to prevent too many bandit accumulation

5-) Caravans get significantly slower when they are larger to decrease the frequency of income, this size should be controllable by hero, or player if the player owns it so they have to make a trade off between frequency income with high risk and less frequent income with low risk.
 
In my view the caravan has never been entirely free income, because the "resource" you payed for them was the companion.

What I would prefer is to keep them safe, but limit their income and provide some tools to the player to interact with them. For instance, in case of a war, you should be able to stop them, or reroute them to avoid enemy territory. Or, have the option to buy safe passage for the caravans, so they wont be hit by enemy lords.
 
Factories should be small and safe,Caravans should earn more, but risk being destroyed,But now the caravan is destroyed almost every time,It's not interesting that it doesn't do anything but lose 15000 dinars
 
If before the patch the risk was at 0 and now the risk is 10, please put it to 5.

I voted yes because i wanted there to be a "risk that caravan gets destroyed".
I don't want a "chance that caravan make profit".
 
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