[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Caravans

[John Paul Rodman <jp@xxxxxxxx>]

On 5 Jan 2000, Daniel Zinsli wrote:

> Jason Todd <idjason@xxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> >  Why not be able to move food with caravans. This way
> > you could quickly grow a small town. Just a suggestion.
> 
> Yeah, I second that. AFAIK civ2 has that option, nice to build huge
> science-cities :)

Not all of the food produced by caravans in Civ2 is "moved".  
When you first establish a food trade route, the receiving city has it's
food stock maxed out, while the sending city loses no food.  This means
that the receiving city will grow the following turn.  It also allows for
some pretty interesting (ab)uses of food caravans.  I once had a set of
several cities, each of a fairly large size (somewhere between 16 and 27),
and each with a *huge* food deficit (at least 20).  Each of them would
produce a food caravan every few turns and send it to one of the others
to curbe loss of size due to starvation.  I would usually have to buy the
caravan, since production was usually negligable but this was more than
made up for by the income I was getting from the tax collectors.  Of
course, this was a very high-maintenance task, and as such, probably
wouldn't work well in a real-time game like FreeCiv.  Nevertheless I think
that if we add food caravans, they should work a little differently to
prevent this kind of abuse.  

> We should probably do unlike civ2 however, in allowing people to cancel
> food routes :)

I think you could cancel food routes by building one in the receiving
city, and sending it back to the original city.  I do like the idea of the
ability to cancel food (and trade) routes.  


JP Rodman

PS
My favorite wonder (SETI) is not in the list in the current poll on the
website.