Biggest Caravan payoff?

[jpciv]

What's your biggest payoff from a Caravan arrival?

I have no idea what my previous one was (maybe in the 60's?) but I just got one that paid off at 101 coins. I think I can state for a fact I've never seen a 3-digit payoff before. Have you?

[Whelkman]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=233585

[LordOfTheGeeks]

I have no idea... Nowhere near 101.

[jpciv]

I'm up to 137, but I can still get it a little higher I think. A long way from Valen's 359, though!
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9560842

BTW, LordOfTheGeeks, I love your sig quote "there are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who wonder where the other 8 are."

I pasted it on the wall at my school, so far nobody's mentioned it...

[GoldBerg]

Originally Posted by Whelkman

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=233585

Great ... i remember some payoffs like 120 or so and thought 'this is it'.
That was salt or silver caravan from a huge city into a larger capital city of another tribe / civilization...

[Valen]

Babylon has just hit population 16 and gone into disorder.
Lagash is occupying the polluted horses square.
Having a diplomat investigate while caravans sit on 2 other squares pushes Babylonian citizens out to sea filling every ocean square they can reach.
This is a temporary payoff since Babylon will create an Elvis in the next turn to regain order, but this is the highest I've seen so far.

[jpciv]

Wow Valen, you rock! If you don't mind, post a copy of the SVE/MAP files here so the rest of us can try it too!

I'm up to 150 while playtesting the new Oct GOTM

[Valen]

Minbar is ready for the 1440 city check.
Send in the caravan immediately after the check for a 368 payoff.
Hit the "F1" key and the payoff plummets to 275.
A little experimentation will reveal several other things that have the same effect.

[jpciv]

Hmmm. No matter what I do, I only get a payoff of 270 - what am I doing wrong? (even so, 270 is twice anything I've gotten on my own, LOL!)

Also, your game is a whole order of magnitude beyond what I'm used to doing. Coupla Q's if you don't mind..

How did you get to 602 Future Techs without triggering the Pollution Bug?

London and Babylon both have armor, and you don't have UN, how do you keep the peace? Don't they ever sneak attack you?

You did this all by hand, with the settler cheat, right? Not with TerraForm?

Wow, this is one great game. What is your criteria for winning?

Thanks for sharing!

[Valen]

270 is all you will get in 1460. I wanted you to experience a city check.
Immediately after city check, you will get 368. If you start checking advisors, (F1 and F5 come to mind) caravan payoff drops back to the 270 range. To keep the payoff high, I don't check the advisors.
(Some are OK, but I leave that as an exercise.)

When you go through city check, you will see the pollution bug in all its glory.

London and Babylon do not attack because the clock still says BC. I have put transports right in the path of a Babylonian ship and it just turns around. There appears to be no inclination to attack until 1 AD. I gave them automobile deliberately - to slow their progress toward railroad. When they get railroad, the caravan payoff drops by 50%.

I do not have a license for TerraForm. The game is all reload, fast settler and ship sentry. It takes four passes of reload (with fast settlers) to clean up all the pollution from one turn, for instance. That's why everything looks clean.

When I started this, my goal was to beat my previous best science score - somewhere in the low 800's. After seeing how well this game has developed I started shooting for future tech 900 by 20 BC. I am now toying with the notion of future tech 1103 in the early 1500's AD.

[jpciv]

Originally Posted by Valen

270 is all you will get in 1460. I wanted you to experience a city check.
Immediately after city check, you will get 368. If you start checking advisors, (F1 and F5 come to mind) caravan payoff drops back to the 270 range. To keep the payoff high, I don't check the advisors.
(Some are OK, but I leave that as an exercise.)

When you go through city check, you will see the pollution bug in all its glory.

London and Babylon do not attack because the clock still says BC. I have put transports right in the path of a Babylonian ship and it just turns around. There appears to be no inclination to attack until 1 AD. I gave them automobile deliberately - to slow their progress toward railroad. When they get railroad, the caravan payoff drops by 50%.

I do not have a license for TerraForm. The game is all reload, fast settler and ship sentry. It takes four passes of reload (with fast settlers) to clean up all the pollution from one turn, for instance. That's why everything looks clean.

When I started this, my goal was to beat my previous best science score - somewhere in the low 800's. After seeing how well this game has developed I started shooting for future tech 900 by 20 BC. I am now toying with the notion of future tech 1103 in the early 1500's AD.

Wow! I thought I was a dedicated player, but I tip my hat to you!

368 coins for a single caravan arrival is astounding. I've deff never been anywhere near that.

On the other hand, I have had to clean up 57 polluted squares! This is the main reason I stopped going for high scores - it just became too much for me. I think I got carpal tunnel from it, LOL.

I noticed one thing during your city check I can't recall seeing before - the fonts changed back and forth a few times. Look at the attached for Cordoba, where the font went smaller, all caps, and the coin symbol changed to a $ sign. When the city check got to Toronto, it changed back to normal. It did this a few times during the check, any idea what causes this?

[Valen]

It happens when a city builds an improvement on automatic and then pollutes. You get the weird font when a pollution announcement comes up right after the "(city) builds ..." newspaper headline.

[Valen]

Babylon has grown and so has the caravan payoff:

I'm convinced that 400 is possible, but those last 10 gp are the hardest.

[jpciv]

w00t!

Not sure if it'll help, but try parking the caravans completely outside Babylon's zone of influence. You might be squashing one square's worth of trade at the moment?

[jaxck]

I can dream about 300+, I´ve got only about 120.

[Valen]

By snagging the horses square, I have forced one Babylonian worker to the ocean, increasing the trade just enough to finally break the 400 barrier. This is with Babylon at population 19.
Caravans are going through a boom-bust cycle right now.
When Babylon puts all its people to work, you see the result in the attachment. Caravans get 401 gold, but the city is in disorder, so this will not last.
When Babylon creates an entertainer to regain order, it invariablly comes from an ocean square cutting their base trade by 4 points. That drops caravan value to 389.
To fix the cut in food and trade, they will put the entertainer back and the cycle repeats.
Babylon could break the cycle by building a colosseum, but the AI doesn't seem to be programmed for that.

[ApolloAndy]

Does the payoff drop when the opponents get railroad or flight? Anyway to predict which my enemies make the best trade partners?

[Valen]

The payoff drops by a third when the AI civ gets railroad and by another third when they get flight.

According to Rome on 640K a Day, the bonus formula is (Distance + 10) * (Your Trade + Their Trade) / 24
What you want to find is an enemy city with a lot of trade potential (maximize ocean, minimize hills, mountians, tundra, arctic) that is clear across the world (as close as possible to 40 squares horizontally) from a city site you can reach with the same characteristics. Distance in the vertical direction also helps. Gold and/or gems would be a nice bonus on either end of the trade route.

[ApolloAndy]

Does it also drop when I get railroad and flight?
I had some great routes going and then all of a sudden they dropped in value by about 50% and about 10 turns later dropped another 50%. Now they're barely worth the caravan itself.

[Valen]

Your own discoveries of railroad and flight do not impact caravan value.
Do you have an embassy with your trade partner(s)? You can keep tabs on what the AIs discover and depending on your ethics retry the city checks to delay railroad as long as possible.