This is the tried and true method and I think it is a good method. In my ideal world, most resources would be local and would require transport to get them to other places. So if you had a city with a mine producing metal and another city with unit producing buildings, you would have a caravan transporting from the metal city to the unit creation city. I think this would add an incredible amount of depth and complexity and would give caravans a real infrastructural role. That way, during a war, one could attack a factions infrastructure in a way that actually effected the enemies war effort.
I'd consider this a bearable minimum. The current system makes me want to kill small animals or something. It's a significantly more shallow end result though. You just can't abstract stockpiling with a raw only production system.
Kohan skipped the drawbacks by using a supply economy instead. Only gold is produced, units are trained instantly, and fill out to full strength at their normal resupply rate, using up resource supply in return. It skips the necessarily absurd training times because you're not stockpiling raw resources at all, thus see no benefit to last minute acquisition of the best units possible.
In many posts on this forum, I have expressed my dislike for the idea of end units in general. I think that having some super final unit that is just better than every other unit is both unnatural and unfun. I prefer units with combat roles that can be upgraded along some path to produce better and better units for their role. So you are not rushing for end units in the traditional sense but are instead moving towards creating combined arms of the highest caliber.
I prefer games with a smoother scaling. This 200-1 power curve nonsense is horrible in general. Unarmored, untrained mobs with pointy sticks would be a good starting point, but an armored knight with a steel tipped lance is only worth a hundred of them in the right situation. If I could retrain/reinforce my old, veteran units it wouldn't be too intolerable, but there still needs to be a massive shortening of the gap between weapon values. 50 attack weapons flat shouldn't exist with where the starting stats are at. As far as roles go, meh. The combat system sucks so hard that it's a lost cause right now. All we can end up with short of a significantly deeper system to utilize it is some lame RPS crap like the typical RTS game has. Hell, we wont even have morale going forward, I see zero hope of a happy end result for tactical combat. I was originally expecting something pretty lame, like the 15 year old simplicity from MoM, but those early dev journals threw me off my game and had me looking forwards to something less than craptastic.
What I want is the ability to protect that pointless tedium from spawning monsters or marauders that show up at the most ignorant times and I have no ability to counter.
The current situation is manually created caravans that randomly go boom because asshole monsters spawn in the middle of your static, and entirely pointless caravan route that can't be moved around the "magic bullshit generating forest of doom" it's passing through. This is your problem, not whether caravans are generated automatically or manually. You have dick for vision, you can't move the bleeding route around those god forsaken forests, and you can't assign reasonably appropriate defense without absurd levels of micromanagement.
Why even bother having a Caravan if all it does is provide 1 Food. Let me build a Carvan and park it in my City and forget about it. Click and forget. That is what you want right?
And you say I'm arguing for the sake of arguing. Why don't we just get rid of unit movement in general. The strategic and tactical portions of the combat system are so lame and under built that we don't really need it at all. Obviously, if I'm asking for a production transport system, it has fuck all to do with the retarded nonsense we have now.
If the Caravan system was robust enough to have a point to start with, then it would/could become an integral part of your Empire, to the point where if the other factions fool with it, war, death and destruction would ensue...
Indeed it would, but the point would not hinge on manually creating them. We have a depth problem, and we have a work problem. There's too much work for too little depth. We only need more of one, we need less of the other.
Sadly, I think we have similar interests in a more complex economy model, but you are so bitter, for some reason, that arguing, for the sake of it, is the best you can come up with.
Does this mean you actually expect the implementation of a complex production economy post release? I'm still marginally lucid to some degree, so I haven't been able to delude myself that far. All anyone here is doing is arguing for the sake of argument, a snowballs chance in hell would be damned optimistic thinking for even an expansion pack if they couldn't convince themselves to go for it initially.
And that concludes my activities in this thread. Thanks in advance.
For what? The asshole in me(most of me) says I should be saying thanks myself. I'm having a hard time believing you'd thank me for my reply since I'm basically calling your intelligence into question over this insistence that caravans be manually created.
