Caravanserai is disabled by being behind highway

[eternal viper]

On my current versions (augustus-3.2.0.500-8dd715b2) it appears that highways block access to building for purpose of bonus. If I delete the highway to make a hole, the trade price changes to +20%export/+10%import as intended. If the highway is there, it consumes food but the price change is not there. Verified it isn't just UI, receiving in trade what it lists on the price window. Two saves attached with highway present and deleted. Wait for end of month for it to update based on blocked or not.

[dapper robin]

ok so after looking at this one for a bit it actually has nothing to do with highways. the caravanserai has a rather unintuitive behavior in that it only works if it has enough food stocked to supply every trader on the map at the instant a good is imported/exported (or at the instant you happen to be looking at the trade prices). this probably worked fine before some floral guy made it to where you can have a bajillion traders active on the map at any time, but doesn't work so great now as your particular city needs 600+ food stocked at any given time to get the caravanserai bonus.

to make matters worse, there was a bug with the caravanserai supplier where he would only keep things stocked up to the market max value of 800 instead of 1200. i've gone ahead and submitted a PR to fix that and bump up the max storage value per food item to 1600 to help deal with maps with many caravans. in the meantime, you can let the caravanserai get more food types to help ensure it keeps working.

this explains a lot about my playthrough of @arctic ginkgo masada map...

[dapper robin]

welp, that was quick. the PR has been merged into the latest unstable

[arctic ginkgo]

whats the max number of caravans you can have active and still get the bonus? or has the PR removed any limits?

i ask this because the map im working on has 14 land routes haha

[dapper robin]

It still just depends on the food

I think each caravan trader needs 10 food? Can’t remember

So if you had 14x10x3 you’d need…420 for one caravan from each route. Can’t remember how many caravans you can have from each route either but I think it might be based on how much each route sells?

Let’s just guestimate that you’d need 2,000 food banked up at the end of the month so when they consume 1,000 then you still have 1,000 left to maintain the bonus at the beginning of the next month

So you’d need to be feeding them multiple food types

And have your granaries right next door

[arctic ginkgo]

huh yeah, more reasons the caravanserai needs an overhaul.

[dapper robin]

I’m thinking the simplest thing to do here would be to change it so that we mark whether there was enough food in the previous month, and if there was then the bonus is applied in the current month

Then we won’t need twice as much food as necessary when the month changes for continuous operation

But I’m curious what other people think

(also a message on the UI to say how much food will be consumed at the end of the month and whether the bonus is being applied, but i think we talked about that before)

[arctic ginkgo]

i think part of the problem is counting camels, and whether they're on or off the map when the mounth turns over. I think just counting routes makes more sense, leads to more reasonable calculations. Like 10 food per month per route.

the lighthouse consumes 20 wood per month, kinda crazy that the caravanserai scales so far beyond that.

[dapper robin]

Hmm yeah I like that. Simpler is always better in my opinion

[rigid stag]

Agreed. This needs simplifying, it worked well when there weren't many routes but that's not the case anymore