Best use of Trade Caravans

[CanaDutch]

I'm still playing my first game on Emperor with the Shoshone. Caravans have been pretty powerful and at the start I've been sending a few to Assyria (who are now my puppets) and Venice for BPT and plenty of gold.

Since I decided to try to go for a cultural victory I've build a guild in each city with the most food. But with my cities having 2 university and 2 guild slots filled, they were growing slowly.

So then I decided to build more caravans to send food to my cities and now all my caravans are sending food and two of them hammers. Does anyone else favor food over land trade routes to other civs?

 

[Resipsa]

I'm still playing my first game on Emperor with the Shoshone. Caravans have been pretty powerful and at the start I've been sending a few to Assyria (who are now my puppets) and Venice for BPT and plenty of gold.

Since I decided to try to go for a cultural victory I've build a guild in each city with the most food. But with my cities having 2 university and 2 guild slots filled, they were growing slowly.

So then I decided to build more caravans to send food to my cities and now all my caravans are sending food and two of them hammers. Does anyone else favor food over land trade routes to other civs?

I think that's a tactical choice rather than a strategic choice. For example I settled a single tile in the middle of the ocean late game because it had 3 oil tiles near it. I switched a trade route to it to build up my population and used the pop to build infastructure via workshop/factory specialist.
Mostly use it for the gold from different civs

 

[Spiceweasel]

I don't think there's any one best answer. Trade routes are a powerful tool with many uses.

One of the Freedom tenants improves your relationship every turn with any city-state you have a trade route to. That combined with the trade route quests make it easy to gain political power. (At the end of my first game - Shoshone, King, Small - I was allied with all of the city-states.)