Is Caravan spamming degenerate?

It’s an undisputable fact in PvE that Caravans are immensely powerful. While the exact details aren’t known to many players on just how much stronger Caravans are in comparision to Villagers, their rough gold generation - Solo, mind you - is between 2.1-2.5 gold per second on average in most PvE maps - Higher on smaller maps, lower on larger maps. Factoring in the co-op bonus for sending caravans to an allied town center (Or on quests with a tradeable AI town center), and Caravans have between 3-4 gold generation before considering gear and advisors. At these levels of gold generation, Caravans are not only the most efficient way to acquire gold, but also the most efficient way to acquire stone, wood, and even food for most civs, even factoring in most advisors!


This has lead to a “meta” playstyle of quickly building multiple markets - Higher skilled players will build over 10 - in order to get out as many caravans as quickly as possible on maps where caravans are allowed. Nannus and other market/caravan related advisors are in immensely high demand, whereas most other eco advisors are considered weak or, at best, off-meta, despite numerous buffs and changes to them.


This has also lead to the ability to have extremely long games in PvP with equally skilled players - Unlike in other Age of Empire games in which, while markets help to extend you, you do suffer significantly reduced resource efficiency, Caravans in PvP provide enough resource generation, despite numerous changes to both reduce the reliance and power of caravans, such as changes to their movement speed, training time, and trade rate, they still preform as well as villagers, except being generally safer (Caravans tend to be placed as far away from the frontlines as possible) and infinite (You never run out of resources with caravans). And given the ease of replacing lost caravans, it’s more prudent to attack and destroy markets to stop gold generation then it is to attack and kill caravans - To the extent that Markets have a technology to significantly increase their durability, and making multiple markets is not just prudent but crucial.


I propose a change to Caravans themselves more extreme then what has been done in PvP - Making a maximum limit of Caravans to just 10, giving them a significant Garden-type increase in cost for each one being train and existing caravan in addition to train time increase, and finally increasing their trade factor AND carry capacity by a very large multiplier, in the range of 5-10x.


First, by giving Caravans an absolute limit of 10 units, you greatly increase the impact of killing even a single caravan - With 20-30 caravans, killing a single caravan only reduces gold generation by 3-5%. In PvE, if the AI manages to get past my frontline and starts attacking caravans, I do not even attempt to send troops to defend them. Instead I merely queue up an extra 10-20 caravans and simply wait for the AI to reach the town center while killing caravans, at which point they die, and I have suffered almost no noticeable loss in resource generation.


However, with a maximum limit of 10 caravans, losing a single caravan not only results in a loss of 10% resource generation, but also the delay of a significant amount of gold - You don’t notice a loss of 150 gold when you have 9k coming in the next minute, but you do notice a loss of 1500. This creates both a long-term impact on losing caravans as well as a near-immediate impact - You’ll want to micro a bit more and macro in static defenses to prevent future caravan losses, otherwise you lose significant portions of your eco.


The second change, giving Caravans both a large increasing cost per caravan, as well as increased train time per caravan, is mainly to further increase the impact of losing caravans - If you could replace those 10 caravans in merely 15 seconds for a low, low cost of 500 f/w makes replacing them minimal.

Thus, for each Caravan out/in training, I suggest adding an extra 15 seconds of train time (Maximum 150 seconds), as well as an additional 50 f/w (maximum 500 f/w). Losing the 10th Caravan means that you’ll be running with 9 for quite some time. However, if you lose all 10, providing you manage to somehow recover you can quickly get back up several caravans to restart your eco.


The final change is, of course, the boost to make up for a hard limit to caravans, depending on how much gold generation the devs feel that PvE/PvP caravans need. I personally suggest a 10x increase to trade factor and carry capacity as the current “meta” is to boom up to a huge number of caravans, generally at or over 100. However, it can also be used to nerf the overall resource generation available throughout the game by setting it to a lower number if the devs feel that caravans generate too much resources as is.


Finally, here is a list of other balancing issues that have occured to me due to this change.


1: Immense amounts of additional population. By giving 10 caravans the value of 100 caravans, essentially 90 pop worth of military is freed up. Given that Crassus has a similar value and has been nerfed, this may be a PvE design problem.


2: Impact to the value of several advisors. With the need to only create 10 caravans max, the value of Nannus significantly falls, becoming valuable only on water maps. With the increase to trade factor and training time, the value of Zeno rises.


3: Relative devalueing of Merchant Transports. Currently, Merchant Transports are stronger then Caravans on maps with a water trade route due to having a higher carry capacity. In PvP, Merchant Transports are further superior due to having greatly increased speed, safety, and somewhat increased trade factor (I do not know the trade factor for Caravans in PvP, but I assume that it’s somewhere around 1.5x). With Caravans now having significantly higher trade values then Merchant Transports, using them to generate gold would be highly inefficient on maps in which you can have both caravans and merchant transports. Personally I would suggest also giving the same build limit and similar increase to trade factor and carry capacity, but without the increase to training time and cost, making them remain a superior option to Caravans in terms of pop and cost efficiency like they currently are.


4: Giving AIs more resources. Unlike players, the AI will only have a few caravans trading. They also don’t often put the market in the best nor most efficient spot for resource generation - I have seen the AI place a market so close to the town center that it literally did nothing. However, with a gargantuan increase to trade factor, this would cause the AI to generate significant amounts of resource - Caravans that previously made only 6 or 18 gold per trip now make 60 or 180 gold per trip. Given that the AI’s unit production tends to drop sharply after they run out of gold deposits in their base, this means that players which previously relied on “outlasting” the AI no longer can do so. Of course, more experienced players would likely simply say “get gud” to such complaining.


That’s roughly it for issues that I can forsee. Thoughts, comments?

 

The issue here would essentially be design of currently existing quests. You would have significantly less resources overall (Reducing Caravans below that of Villagers is a 50% reduction in their gold design), meaning slower tech/age up, less military, more pop needs to be dedicated to resource production, so difficult 4/5 star quests could easily become impossible to do.

Of course, it would also change the value of Merchant Transports - if left untouched, you'd generate FAR more resources on any water based map then you would on maps without water, which would also have to be taken into account.

But yea, that would also serve to stop caravan spam.

 

Increasing the purchasing cost probably isn't the best way to go about it. Keep in mind that Stone is a very, very finite resource - There is generally only enough stone available for most players for 10 forts or 30 guard towers. Wood too is finite, just generally less finite then Stone. This is a significant issue with PvP, in which if a game lasts beyond 30 minutes, you are going to run out of both stone AND wood, which would cause the value of ranged and siege units to drop drastically, as well as reduce the effectiveness of static defenses like walls and turrets since it now requires even more resources to make - instead of having to spend 1.5k gold to build a fortress, you now have to spend 3k (at 250 max cap) or even close to 5k (at 400 max cap).

Players who rely on turtling to finish a game and get up their army would be significantly hurt by this - They don't play fast enough to get at the extra stone nodes before the AI mines it. This means that on most maps they'll only have access to 2-3 stone nodes before they run out.

It also doesn't really succeed in reducing the value of caravans but instead makes them even more valuable, since you'll need far more gold to buy additional wood/stone if and when you do run out.

Buffs or neutral changes are nice. Nerfs are not - Going from being able to complete a quest, to struggling or even failing to complete the quest is in no way, shape, or form acceptable in my opinion.

It's why I combine both buffs and nerfs in my suggestion so that it becomes more of an overall change rather then straight up buff or straight up nerf.

 

The issue is that there is a very, very limited number of gold mines on any map. And a while back, a player tracked how much gold he had used over several VoKs. On average, each VoK? roughly 900k gold each run - Essentally 300 Gold Mines. Now VoK is one of the hardest quests, and thats with a very nice large area that you can make caravans, it's generally an hour and a half for most players to complete, and you are going to be constantly making units to replace because your guys are going to get murdered as you make your way past the dozen forts, palins, elephant archers, ect ect.

That's why with maps that forbid caravans, you either have the ability to have water routes (Cold Cataclysm and Kourion are great examples for that right now), or a huge number of gold mines on a short map (Come Together, which barely lasts for any time at all). Otherwise your "gold generation" drops down to .3 gold/second per villager, because you have to farm food to get gold, and you only get 37 gold for 100 food.

So yes, the current game is heavily designed around the income Caravans provide. And yes, caravans in PvP still need some tweaking - Their earlier tweaking was an attempt to reduce their strength in the late game and make killing caravans a big move, but as I said it's better to raid a market in PvP then try to raid caravans, it makes a bigger impact, and if both players are on the same skill lvl caravans can extend a game nearly indefinitely, unlike in other age of empire games where even with trade carts or merchant ships you will run out of resources at some point.

So yea - If you reduce the gold generation value of Caravans, you have to increase the number of caravans you have out at any time. This reduces the number of military units you can have out. On the 4 and 5 star maps, you need as many military units as you can get. Without those military units to both soak the huge amounts of damage coming out as well as dish out damage, you can't progress past the opponents spam. You also tech up slower, age up slower, get out less production buildings in the same time frame, ect with reduced caravan trade.

 

Nannus is only strong because he lets you get out as many caravans as possible in the shortest time frame possible. If you nerf Nanus, Zeno becomes the new A2 advisor. Nerf Zeno, and we go back to Dumno. Nerf Dumno, and it's Village Elder instead.

Thus, again, the issue isn't with Nannus, but with Caravans. With my suggestions, Caravans aren't nerfed but rather changes - You'll still get out a similar amount of gold production within a similar time frame, but you won't need to place down 10x markets to do so. In exchange, losing a Caravan has a signifcantly higher impact rather then the current minimal impact you have going on.

 

Nah, not making PvE caravan identical to PvP caravans, but instead adding Royal Garden style cost increase to caravans, limiting their numbers, making subsequent caravans take longer to train, but keeping the overall gold production you currently have now. Less, but far more impactful caravans.

To explain again: Caravans would have a maximum limit of 10. In exchange, Caravans would also have much higher trade factor and carry capacity - I'm currently thinking 10x (so 1500 carry capacity and 8x trade factor).
To make Caravans more impactful in terms of loss, each Caravan would cost significantly more then the last, and take significantly longer to train - I'm thinking +50 food/wood and +15 seconds train time for each caravan. So first Caravan is identical to PvE, 2nd caravan is 30 second train time and 100 f/w, 3rd is 45 second train time and 150 f/w
Not sure on what to do with population. I'd like for it to just remain at 1 pop so that you aren't wanting to delete the caravans to make room for more military like what we have now. But it also does cause a balancing issue in that you suddenly have far more pop compared to gold production - Basically a Crassus on steriods for everyone baseline. 2 pop would likely be ok, but I feel that 4 pop would have you deleting all but 2-3 caravans akin to how in PvE you go from 100 caravans straight down to 20-30 instead.

It would have pretty significant impacts in both PvE and PvP at least.

 

This is not a suggestion to remove caravans. Nor is it a suggestion to nerf caravans to the ground. It's a suggestion to change the value of each individual caravan so to reduce the current "spam 120 caravans in 120 seconds" meta that we have going on.

 

First: The most complicated PvE quests can take over an hour - Unless you are exceptionally experienced, VoK takes time, as does a few other quests.

Second: Please actually read my post, rather then only looking at the title. My suggestion is to change Caravans giving players "super" caravans that carry and trade 10x as much, but limiting them to 10 - So you have only 10 caravans max, but all 10 together are worth as much as 100 caravans are now, with other limitations to make keeping caravans alive important.

Overall, my suggested changes are to de-emphasize the need to get out as many caravans as soon as possible, which has essentially been the dominant strat in AoEO PvE for years, and has been adjusted in both PvE and PvP, albeit not quite successfully.

This change should hopefully open up the A2 advisor slot significantly, instead of Nannus (or other Caravan-related advisors) dominating the scene. It'll also allow for more emphasis on Villager eco (Instead of villagers only being for the first few minutes in terms of eco, and then just for building afterwards), and make raiding caravans far more rewarding in PvP (Instead of the current meta in which it's better to take out markets then it is to take out caravans).

Nannus could still be useful in PvE - Any water based map, for instance, Nannus would be quite strong due to the need for multiple docks. But he wouldn't be the dominant choice in PvE anymore. And since this change directly affects Caravans instead of being a nerf to Nannus, you also wouldn't wind up with Dumno, Zeno, ect becoming the next #1 advisor, which is likely what would currently happen if Nannus got nerfed.

 

That would significantly impact the value of nannus, and depending on the number of markets allowed, slow down the whole caravan spamming. Of course, it also has an impact on harder quests in which the quicker you can get the eco running, the better off you are overall.

Decent idea I think, though idk the PvP implications, nor do I have any idea as to how many markets there should be per age.