Can I disable the gold/science giving function of caravans somehow?

[Greizer85]

(MGE, if it matters.)

Since I'm turning my map into a 'scenario', might as well make some quality of life improvements. I've always found it an astoundingly cheesy aspect of Civ II that you can amass tens of thousands of gold and science via setting up tedious caravan chains - a tactic the AI has zero hope of replicating. So I'm asking whether it's possible to remove the gain in gold/science, while keeping the more balanced uses of caravans (rushing wonders, transfering food, establishing trade *routes*). If it's not possible to do this alteration, then how do I delete the caravan unit? That might sound a little drastic but I'm not going to move around hundreds of caravans, my doctor warned me against it and I trust his sound advice for my health.

Cheers,
Greizer

 

[Blasph23]

You can't disable the function entirely. You may consider to restrict civilization to use only caravans rather than freights that provide even more gold/science.
Also, science is directly proportional to gold that you get from establishing a trade route.
That in turn depends on a multitude of other factors, most notably, source and destination cities' trade arrows and their mutual distance.
Also buildings and technologies have an impact on that. Invention and Navigation for example, are the first two technologies that cut profits by 50% upon discovery.
It is possible to rebuild the tech tree so that both techs are named differently, are discovered before trade and instantly serve to severely penalize trade income forever.

If you want to disable the unit entirely, just give it a prerequisite of 'no' in rules.txt, like below:

Caravan, Cor, 0, 1.,0, 0a,1d, 1h,1f, 5,0, 7, Tra, 000000000000010

changed to this:

Caravan, Cor, 0, 1.,0, 0a,1d, 1h,1f, 5,0, 7, no, 000000000000010

Also, instead of removing the unit, make it 3-4 times as expensive to force players that wish to build it to expend a lot of production/gold on producing or rush buying it.

Number 5 in the above excerpt from rules.txt denotes how many rows of shields (10 in each row) it requires to be built. Put 20 there and see what happens

Also remember that shield cost of caravan/freight directly translates to how much extra production it provides to building wonders. So a caravan that costs 200 shields will give the same amount towards the construction of a wonder.
Shield cost has no impact at all on trade bonuses, so you're safe to experiment with it.

 

[Greizer85]

You can't disable the function entirely. You may consider to restrict civilization to use only caravans rather than freights that provide even more gold/science.
Also, science is directly proportional to gold that you get from establishing a trade route.
That in turn depends on a multitude of other factors, most notably, source and destination cities' trade arrows and their mutual distance.
Also buildings and technologies have an impact on that. Invention and Navigation for example, are the first two technologies that cut profits by 50% upon discovery.
It is possible to rebuild the tech tree so that both techs are named differently, are discovered before trade and instantly serve to severely penalize trade income forever.

If you want to disable the unit entirely, just give it a prerequisite of 'no' in rules.txt, like below:

Caravan, Cor, 0, 1.,0, 0a,1d, 1h,1f, 5,0, 7, Tra, 000000000000010

changed to this:

Caravan, Cor, 0, 1.,0, 0a,1d, 1h,1f, 5,0, 7, no, 000000000000010

Also, instead of removing the unit, make it 3-4 times as expensive to force players that wish to build it to expend a lot of production/gold on producing or rush buying it.

Number 5 in the above excerpt from rules.txt denotes how many rows of shields (10 in each row) it requires to be built. Put 20 there and see what happens

Also remember that shield cost of caravan/freight directly translates to how much extra production it provides to building wonders. So a caravan that costs 200 shields will give the same amount towards the construction of a wonder.
Shield cost has no impact at all on trade bonuses, so you're safe to experiment with it.

All very good info, thank you! I think I'll opt for both the 2 x 50 % reduction and an increased cost for the unit, if I opt to keep it. I must do some experiments. I'm just getting into Civ II modding; wish I'd have done it when people still played the game in good numbers. Would've been more easy to ask around then.

A follow-up question about the effect of Invention and Navigation: so are there techs that come after those that *increase* the profit? Just so I can choose to not include them and in so doing torpedo my own fix attempt.

 

[Blasph23]

I don't think there are techs that directly increase caravan incomes, although perhaps automobile has that ability. There are more techs that decrease those bonuses though.
Certain other elements affect it however:
- city improvement superhighways adds trade arrow to every square that has a road/railroad. Although rather end-gamish, it can make a huge difference, to the point where I rush buy it whenever I can as soon as automobile tech is discovered
- city improvement airport, if built in both source and destination cities, will increase trade bonuses around 33% AFAIK
- corporation tech can allow you to build freight that are twice as fast as caravans and give double trade bonus compared to them
- railroad, industrialization and flight also lower trade bonuses as far as I know, but railroad tech for example has a hard-coded feature allowing you to construct railroads so I'd advise against allowing its discovery too early
- I'm not sure about this, but there might be 1 or 2 more techs that also lower trade bonuses, there is a trade guide somewhere around this forum that explains all aspects of trade in detail
- certain wonder/improvement/terrain combinations within one city will dramatically increase trade bonuses from caravans originating in that city, to the point where it's responsible for 90% of science and income of your civilization, at least early on, occasionally giving you trade bonuses in excess of 1k gold in pre-invention and pre-navigation era - look for Super Science City or Super Trade City around these forums

EDIT: Just found out that the discovery of railroad also increases trading payoffs by 33%.

 

[Greizer85]

Thank you again for the useful info. I wonder if there's a list of all the 'hidden' effects of Civ II techs somewhere? I have been looking but so far I haven't been able to locate a resource that would point out all of them.