Why are Caravans 50% weaker than Cargo Ships?

Coastal cities blow, lose half their workable tiles to junk water tiles. Sea routes make up for it somewhat.

Because water starts are handicapped; early work boats are so not close in efficiency compared to early workers. One worker upgrades up to ~25 tiles to turn 200, and boat upgrades 1 tile to turn 200. It can also be pillages by any random ship.

Because on land maps, players used to ignore sailing branch till medieval... some till renaissance... some even to industrial

Because caravan's are generally opened earlier. Thus, "upgrading" your routes to being marine-based can be not a trivial task. Isn't for me, at least.

Security difficulties have already been highlighted.

So, all together it's a good gameplay decision, which adds some macro depth to land-based maps and changes literally nothing in water-based ones.

Greizer85 said:

I think right now coastal trade routes might be a bit too good. Specifically food routes. If your capital is coastal and you found a quick second city on the same coast, then set up Granaries in both and make food routes to each other, you can have two size 20 cities in no time at all (under 100 turns in my current England game on Standard speed, and I didn't even play optimally). Then you can found a third and fourth and get more routes... It just escalates from there. All my trade routes are oceanic food trade routes right now, and I'll only found cities inland if there's very good resources or chokepoints to defend.

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That is kinda of an advanced strategy/opening right here.

Always good? Appropriate for any map? No.
Situationally powerful? Yes.
Always possible? No.
Breaks other civs early? No.
Counterable? Yes.

If you made it up yourself - well done.

soprof said:

Because water starts are handicapped; early work boats are so not close in efficiency compared to early workers. One worker upgrades up to ~25 tiles to turn 200, and boat upgrades 1 tile to turn 200. It can also be pillages by any random ship.

Because on land maps, players used to ignore sailing branch till medieval... some till renaissance... some even to industrial

Because caravan's are generally opened earlier. Thus, "upgrading" your routes to being marine-based can be not a trivial task. Isn't for me, at least.

Security difficulties have already been highlighted.

So, all together it's a good gameplay decision, which adds some macro depth to land-based maps and changes literally nothing in water-based ones.

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All good points, in particular the one about Work Boats. Come on Firaxis, do something about it already! Why not just let embarked Workers upgrade sea resources...

Btw I just remembered that you need quite an advanced tech in order to trade over ocean... Maybe it's because I play mainly TSL World Maps that I have no problems with barbs - many cramped coastal capitals in Europe to keep their numbers down. I'll need to play more games to judge the barb issue more accurately.

soprof said:

That is kinda of an advanced strategy/opening right here.

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Always good? Appropriate for any map? No. I re-roll non-coastal starts, so I'll concede the point. However coastal starts are very common in BNW I find, and many civs have a coastal start bias.

Situationally powerful? Yes. As nearly anything in the game (apart from directly science-related things). A sign of good balancing. However the situations where it is powerful are plentiful indeed; perhaps too much so.

Always possible? No. If you're not on the coast, I'd get to the coast asap as long as they've not nerfed those mad routes. The benefit is lessened rapidly as more turns go by (due to early advantages snowballing), and the capital not being coastal hurts plenty (NC science benefit), but it's still worth it.

Breaks other civs early? No. Not sure what you mean; if you mean early conquest, then no it doesn't help there. But it tends to be a bad idea in BNW anyways.

Counterable? Yes. You mean in multi-player? Yes, very vulnerable indeed. AIs have no clue about your endeavors, as usual. A surprise DOW can still wreck you of course, and it's harder to replace ships than caravans. If you spot a potential enemy navy, make a few more Triremes to defend and hope for the best. (If they're Dromons just give up and make caravans instead. )

soprof said:

If you made it up yourself - well done.

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It's a bit lofty imo to call something so obvious a 'strategy'. But the optimal timing of the routes along with other builds (chiefly the NC) is a thing that warrants close study, certainly. I'm sure tommynt has already done something to this effect, as he's all about optimal play. And optimal play atm includes sea food trade routes, period.

I think this is a nice addition. Sea trade cogs carry a lot more than camels. This was one of the reasons why ancient Greece was a rich nation, Greece is very mountainous and traders had to pass by sea. I was actually - worried when I knew that "trade units" will be in this game and the devs would treat land/sea trades equally.

And I didn't like the fact that coastal cities have crappy water tiles as mentioned above. We build a lot of cities to land ships on the seaport! (e.g. Vladivostok) I always thought coastal cities should have some kind of trade benefits and now with Exploration policy tree and cargo ships there's a reason to have cities all around the globe on seas.
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Edit 1:
Though I can't deny the "overpoweredness" of starting on coast. Later in the game I have zero caravans running unless I have a city to feed. Cargo ships much better, and that's still very realistic. Stuff land on ports, "city connexion" trucks drive those into cities.

Magma_Dragoon said:

Coastal cities blow, lose half their workable tiles to junk water tiles. Sea routes make up for it somewhat.

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Imo they more than make up for it. 'Losing half' of 36 tiles is a non-issue as typically by the time you reach a size where you can't work useful tiles or assign specialists, the game should be well in the end-phase. If there are a lot of sea tiles in the city (15+), then you may have to work some of them but the trade-off of very fast growth makes up for it handsomely. And don't forget that those idle fishermen still contribute science (don't ask me how...). One-tile island 'fishing towns' are not viable in Civ V ofc, and thank God for that. In all other iterations they littered up the optimal player's coastlines... At least now only AIs can make them and not ruin their game.

Now granted it is a tad awkward that the ideal coastal city has precisely three sea tiles (ideally with resources), but it's still the best trade mechanic ever present in Civ imo. Just maybe tone it down a little bit...

My biggest problem with the caravan vs. cargo ship argument isn't that cargo ships are twice as effective, it's that caravans aren't twice as cheap to build.

Deggial said:

Cargo ships...

- represent over-sea trade, which historically was an enormous wealth generating factor. Far away cultures possess trading-goods that are not available in the nearby regions and which are very valuable in consequence. The doubled route yield represents this.

- encourage players to build coastal cities, which might not be too atractive otherwise due to low maritime tile yields.

- encourage players to build up their marine to protect them - something they might not want to do otherwise, due to the limited usefulness of ships in Civ5 (if not playing water maps, of course).

So, game wise and in relation to the real world model, the current game mechanism is totally reasonable.

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Very good points, all of them. Such a simple thing of doubling yields of cargo ships vs caravans and it changes the game completely. People start setting on coasts, trading with faraway places and building a navy to protect the sea lanes. And no not from barbs, you need navy to wage successful late game wars even if most action is still land based. If other civs have navies, in late game a chance to lose your seaborne routes ( and by then those should be all your routes) is not something to be a taken lightly. I find myself paying attention to my navies now and enjoying that aspect of game play a lot. Good job Firaxis ( it's amazing how right they get certain things once in a while)

I certainly don't mind water routes having an edge over land routes. However, it's currently rather excessive.

Simply giving them a far longer range is pretty effective in and of itself (not to mention being the onlly viable means of trading with other continents). Don't see the need for a whopping x2 bonus to boot.

Not sure I'd even argue that caravans are easier to protect prior to caravels. Barbarians don't seek out caravans, they just plunder them when they cross their path. If you have to stick to the coast, they're very likely to cross paths. The only reason I can see anyone thinking cargo ships are hard to protect in the early game is because they can't be bothered to put a trireme at a choke point.

A reasonable compromise would be to bump the river bonus from 25% to 50%.

Whatever. Not all that pressing. Dev's got bigger fish to fry.

Sea routes giving more cash are ok. Since demand seaport, and more protection over no man sea.
However, i like the ideas of:
Increasing production time of cargo ships, so it will be high risk, high profit option.
Doing something with wagon trains policy, since it gives very little profit, and even less considering that only part of our routes will be land. I mostly wish for "caravan spawns, and add 1 to number of routes". Some hard choices against rationalism would be nice.

steveg700 said:

I certainly don't mind water routes having an edge over land routes. However, it's currently rather excessive.

Simply giving them a far longer range is pretty effective in and of itself (not to mention being the onlly viable means of trading with other continents). Don't see the need for a whopping x2 bonus to boot.

Not sure I'd even argue that caravans are easier to protect prior to caravels. Barbarians don't seek out caravans, they just plunder them when they cross their path. If you have to stick to the coast, they're very likely to cross paths. The only reason I can see anyone thinking cargo ships are hard to protect in the early game is because they can't be bothered to put a trireme at a choke point.

A reasonable compromise would be to bump the river bonus from 25% to 50%.

Whatever. Not all that pressing. Dev's got bigger fish to fry.

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I like the idea of bumping up the river bonus
(and also cheaper caravans + more expensive cargoships)
[say 60 and 120 instead of 75 and 100]

addition to my post above:

200 gold for pillaging a water trade route is huge in multiplayer (it's 200 even at quick speed).

It's 100 for land ones, as far as I remember.

I just played a game where an early caravel earned 800 gold and did severe damage to eco of my most prospective enemy. He must have read your posts about how imba it was, ty

Caravans

Pros

• Cheaper.
• Easier to protect from barbarians. I don't think I ever got my caravan pillaged by a barb. Most of the time it happens when your friend betrays you & you loose the trade units.
• Don't have any specific location requirements.

Cons

• Less range, thus they have less opportunities for trade.
• Generate less resources.

Cargo ships

Pros

• Generate more resources
• Greater range so you have more opportunities to trade.

Cons

• More expensive. So difficult to create more of them early on
• Much harder to protect from barbarians.
• Require a coastal city which generally have poorer sea tiles (unless it has resources). Coastal cities are also more susceptible in multiplayer.

I have one suggestion to make the mechanism more fun though. Base the international trade yield on distance. So for example cargo ships 1.5x more gold than caravans instead of 2x but due to their larger range they can benefit more. So larger routes would be more rewarding but also more riskier to secure.