How Frequently will Caravans be Attacked?
We know Caravans are PvP zones and we know they carry valuable goods. There seems to be some consensus in threads that Caravans are going to be attacked frequently, perhaps to the great frustration of players who don't like the resulting PvP and losses. But let's do a bit of rough analysis of whether or not Caravan battles are frequent. I am presenting this post as a starting point in the hope that other players will refine and improve it.
Including castles, we know that there will be 118 nodes. It is probably reasonable to assume that within a few weeks of launch, they will all reach village level and be able to start Caravans, at least most of them will. If Caravan destinations are only nodes, that is over 13,000 Caravan possible routings. However, most caravans will probably go to nodes that aren't that distant so we might cut that by two-thirds. We are still looking at over 4,000 Caravan routings. There are lots of places Caravans might go which makes them harder to find.
The map is roughly 100km x 100km, or 10,000 square kilometers, some of it is underground Tulnar regions. However, I think there will be some impassible areas in the mountains so I'll guess 9,500 sq km that players can travel. How far can an individual see? Less than 100meters in dense jungle, maybe 1 or 2 km over the ocean or desert...clearly I am guessing about that. If the average visible distance is 1/2 km in each direction, then am I right that roughly each player can see 1/9500th of the map? That's not much of it. Maybe you can see twice that far, you still are not seeing much of the map. In forests, jungles, mountains, under-realm you can probably see much less in each direction. Caravans will be hard to spot.
How many Caravans will be out there at any given time? That depends on how many Caravans are generated each week and how long each Caravan takes to get to its destination. Will each node generate enough stuff to send one Caravan a week? Maybe two? It will take harvesting, production, assembling parts through quests for axels and wheels, and a fair amount of organization to get the node citizens motivated, coordinated and assembled to guard the Caravan. Let's start with one per week per node. Maybe you can get the Caravan to the next node in an hour, or two hours for a couple nodes over. Land is probably slower than by ship, but ships may take more distant and profitable destinations. Let's work with three hours per Caravan for travel time. Which gives us:
118 nodes at one Caravan per week x 3 hours travel = 354 Caravan travel hours in a week on the server. There are 168 hours in a week. So, at any given moment, there is an average of roughly 2.2 active Caravans in the world. The world of 9,500 sq km. In other words, if about 4,500 players were spread out over the world, only one would spot a Caravan. And one player isn't going to take down a guarded Caravan. It might take a dozen good PvPers to be reasonably certain of taking the average Caravan. A group formed for a 'Caravan Hunt' is usually going to come up empty.
Caravan ship captains are going to learn to hug the edge of the map, not take a straight line to the destination port. Land Caravan drivers are going to slink through the woods and over obscure passes, not run through choke points and well travelled highways. Smart mayors will run valuable Caravans on Monday mornings during work/school hours, not on Saturday afternoons.
So I'm thinking thinking that most Caravans will get through without a fight. The ones that get attacked will tend to be driven by dumber players, Darwinism at work again. But it will sound like lots of them get attacked because dumber players are also the ones who complain the most, right?
