I have to say I really don't miss the old trade caravan aspect of the old civ, can't remember which one now, but recently on a thread someone said wouldn't it be great to be able to transfer production from one city to the next...having thought about this I don't see why not.

Surely in real life in a civilisation with a city stacked high with marble, iron and stone and with a city a few days down the road by cart that needs yet another statue of the ilustrious ruler they are not going to scrable in the fields for pebbles........

Would it really alter game play that much, apart from adding realism and flexibility, if you could build a transport unit that could transfer hammers, or food, to another city. I'm not saying it should be cheap or easy, and obviously these transports might get trashed at times of war, but wouldn't it add a good aspect to the game allowing for even deeper strategies. Who knows a spy mission could even capture another players wagon of hammers.

just a thought....

That idea would work. You could spam those guys to carry production in a tight wonder or space race.

Well that would essentially just put back the building wonders from caravans strategy from Civ 2, which wa deliberately removed as overpowered. The problem was that you could basically do the builginf for all wonders in advance of getting the tech, and with the load spread among all your cities, which made it rather trivial.

I can the see the problem of using it to the extreem to build wonders, and of course it doesn't want to get too complicated, but something easy like only allowing 3 at a time like with missionaries, and having a reasonable limit on the load could work. It just seems like when a floodplain city is struggling to build a bank and 4 squares away there is excess production in a city it would be sensible to allow some transfer. Even one wagon per city at a time and limited amount of hammers like 20 would stop most of the abuse. as by the time you have lots of cities the wonders are much more expensive and an extra 200 hammers (10 cities) is nice but not pivotal. Also remember some cities will struggle to contribute as they are the ones needing the extra...

An extra 40 hammers towards the bank thats taking you 30 turns to build seems reasonable however

I like that idea, jackdog. I would say that the hammer count would scale with each era and of course the type of game (marathon, epic, etc.).

Civ III had those features allowing workers and settlers to 'join city' and disbanding military units adding to production.

It would be nice to be able to transfer food to a city starving due to unhealthiness, a la Civ II, but there should be some restrictions on when, how much, etc. Civ IV's approach is good and works well, but I've never understood why your empire can't help out a city in need. I might be wrong, but didn't Civ II have a feature where you could transfer population to another city as well?

How about SMACs resource units. I can't remember exactly how they worked, but you could park a unit on a tile and have it harvest production and stuff for it's home city.

But yea the ability to have trade caravans that take X amount of food or production and give it to another city would be cool. Put a cap on it that increases with certain techs.

I like the way it is now. If a city really needs hammers you can expand Mining Inc into it. There is also Civ Jewelers for a slight boost in production. You can even build workshops to add hammers. What about slavery? Moai Statues? Iron Works? If you can't do any of these options to help your weak hammer city... then you shouldn't have founded it in the middle of the desert :p.

How about this unit (caravan, lets say) gets updated every once in a while. Names arent really suggested.

1. Caravan I (req: Wheel?, cost 30:hammers:, gives target city 20:hammers:)
2. Caravan II (req: Metal Casting?, cost 60:hammers:, gives target city 40:hammers:)
3. Caravan III (req: Guilds?, cost 90:hammers:, gives target city 60:hammers:)
4. Caravan IV (req: Steam Power?, cost 120:hammers:, gives target city 80:hammers:)
5. Caravan V (req: Flight?, cost 150:hammers:, gives target city 100:hammers:)

Really, I don't know what technologies would be appropriate, but the system seems fine. Limit 3 at any time, and its overpowered for no era, especially because of the 67% efficiency rate.