Behind the BANG! - Caravans!

Allright, good to see those numbers. So Caravans will provide more gold/second then Villagers on all maps solo, but generally aren't more efficient then Villagers for food/wood/stone while solo, outside of Road techs. Co-op, ofc, Caravans are far more efficient at gathering gold and generally more efficient a getting food/wood/stone due to the 1.5x ally TC bonus. And ofc, there are several maps where you have a tradeable ally TC - Join Forces, Lair of the Crocodile King, ect, thus on those maps Caravans are also the superior resource gatherers.

So yea, good to see that, solo, caravans are much closer to Villagers then I previously thought, especially for my first round of testing (Initially tested on a Small Skirmish map solo which resulted in nearly 3.5 gold/second due to the small map size, this was before even the Champion Mode caravan changes. Initial calculations at the time even displayed Persia caravans capable of reaching 10 gold/second, combing Dumno, Tamineh, Zeno, and a co-op partner on said small skirmish maps)

Given that Villagers have anywhere from 1.4 gold/second (A3 gold upgrade w/Divine) to 1.9 gold/second (A4 gold upgrade w/ Kleon+Divine), caravans are significantly closer to Villagers in Solo play on larger maps. And Egypt with Amunet translates to more traditional AoE play in which you only start making Caravans once you begin to run out of safe gold deposits.

Hell, Egypt with both Amunet and Kleon are superior to Caravans even in co-op on most maps!

So yea, this lets me have a good bit more hope for Indian Gatherer Elephant's place in PvE.

Thanks for the work Aryzel!
 
Merchant Transports in Champion Mode are confirmed to have a Work Rate of 1.3. On a 300x300 map (I believe Normal PvP maps to be this size) Merchant Transports have a gold generation value of 2.41 gold/second without the A4 upgrade, and 3.44 gold/second with the A4 upgrade - Thus Water dominance is quite critical on any map with water routes, otherwise you get heavily out-eco'd
 
Hell, Egypt with both Amunet and Kleon are superior to Caravans even in co-op on most maps!

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So, if we look at Aryzel's spreadsheet, on an average size map (500x), Egpytian Caravans pull in 2.04 gold/second solo. Co-op, that's at 3.06 gold/second because of the 50% bonus.

Egypt with Kleon pulls in 1.94 gold/second baseline. Amunet with pure resource scepter adds in an extra 40%, so thats 1.94*1.4 = 2.7 gold/second.

So, solo play, Egyptian Vils with Kleon do pull in much more gold then Caravans. However, with co-op, they pull in less gold/second.

Note that in very large maps, anything above 650x650 (I think there are only 3-4 such maps in the game), then yes - Amunet+Kleon will give more gold/second then Caravans with 0 advisor support in co-op. For every other civ, Caravans are the superior choice when available irregardless of advisor use.