For the caravan system to be a major part of the gathering-processing-crafting pipeline, the crafting system would need to be really weird and annoying. The amount of resources that a (land) caravan is meant to move is ~10x the mule carry capacity (or ~100x the player carrying capacity). This means that players need to have incentive to move volumes of resources that is 10-100x what they can maximally gather on their own in 1 gathering session. This has terrible implications for crafting and would be best implemented with a different game mechanic in mind. But first, how would the caravan system be implemented with gathering in the first place and why is it bad?
Well, there are a few variables that make a difference where your resources are located. For instance, depending on the node (it's level and buildings) different crafting stations may be available. You may need to move resources to properly craft/process them. However, the other place where crafting/processing can be done is your freehold where caravans cannot travel to/from... This means you have to transport goods to/from your freehold without caravans. Not only that, but the local biome-specific resources you gather (one of the most likely candidates for caravan transport) may be spread across multiple nodes' local storage in that biome which need to be amalgamated in 1 node for optimal caravan use. This amalgamation will likely be done using your mule and not the relatively expensive caravan. But your mule cannot be too good at its job or it would invalidate the caravan so mule efficiency is capped by caravan efficiency.
You may instead find a way to fully craft items without having to move your resources (if you have a nearby freehold or the node has the right crafting stations). In such a scenario, you will not longer need caravans as finished crafting products are not dropped on death (by non-corrupted players). This may push Intrepid to make the transportation of fully crafted goods in player inventory restricted, adding global inconvenience for the sake of the caravan system.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we need to start asking questions about the volume of resources required to craft items and how quickly we expect item decay to require us to replace our items. There needs to be enough demand that many players are incentivized to gather for ~100 to ~10 sessions if they are dedicated gatherers (minimum), to make sensible use of the caravan system. To create this demand, I can think of 2 bad options. First, gathering carrying capacity needs to be small such that gathering sessions are either short or low yield. Second, combination of crafting recipes & repairs must require a very large volume of resources. Now these resources may not be necessarily for equipable items and may instead be used for creating ships and node projects/buildings. However, if this is the case, then the immediate local area would be the best place to gather for this purpose (and not risk the caravan loss), or there needs to be sufficient incentive that more distant resources be used.
In summary, to push the current vision of caravan use...
- players need to make effort to always deliver their gathered goods to the same node (forcing travel back to the same node's storage and/or gathering around the same node)
- mule effectiveness is capped by caravan effectiveness (capacity, speed, loss upon death)
- crafting/processing needs to be prohibitive in its spatial location
- transportation of fully crafted goods needs to be artificially made difficult (weight limits etc) or will always be the best strategy
- large resource sinks need to be available in game
- requires high crafting engagement (if some nodes don't have many crafters/gatherers, there is little reason to see caravans there).
I think in order to make caravans more widely used, they need to be partially de-coupled from gatherable resources and crafting. Specifically, I think doubling down on the use of the caravan system for hunting certificate sale is the way to go. If the primary use of caravans was to move local hunting certificates/resources to distant nodes for guaranteed profit, it would engage more players (non-crafters) and justify their use much more frequently. I think nodes should have ~weekly rotating resource/hunting certificate requests to support node projects and provide amenities for node happiness. These requests would have large bonuses applied to them based on (1) the trade status with the origin node of the caravan, (2) the distance between the origin and destination nodes, and (3) the amount of that resource already provided. Nodes requests are paid for by that node's taxes if they are delivered through caravans (proper due process) while bonuses should be generated by the game. Players will then have a baseline economic value of their resources, even if they are not high quality resources, and a resource sink that does not constrain the crafting process. This will dynamically change supply/demand of even common resources weekly and tie together multiple game systems with the caravan system producing high profit (warranted by the high risk). In summary, shifting the focus on caravans from gathered resources for crafting to hunting certificates and gathered resources for profit will free up design space in crafting and create large incentives to engage with the caravan system for everyone.
