wich are your most thumb down about caravan?

[BlueWinds]

My main limitation in sending out caravans is food. Pemmican, pemmican, pemmican... so much pemmican, and it still doesn't last very long. I have no trouble feeding my colony, or even building up a large reserve of meals, but somehow sending out a caravan remains beyond my means. What I really want is a 'forage' button. When traveling in non-extreme biomes, 2/3 speed, 1/3 food consumption. Could perhaps be related to Animal, Shooting or Growing skill? Grazing shouldn't be just for animals!

The other important aspect is defense. My colonies tend to be at the limits of defensibility - every raid is difficult. But if I send out a caravan, taking with it three of my seven pawns plus several large animals... well... colony wealth didn't go down very much, but my ability to defend it certainly did! Ouch. Too many times I've lost pawns or even the entire base because desperately needed gunners were out trading.

[Shurp]

I tend to play with turrets in tundra.  Which means every summer is caravan season -- time to go out with my bale of joints and buy components and medkits and anything else I have trouble manufacturing myself.

it's easy to carry enough food for 2-3 days of travel.  But if your travel time is 20 - 30 days, yeah, it's really not worthwhile.

[TheMeInTeam]

Right now it's pretty asymmetric, but I don't know how to suggest fixing it.

1-2 man caravans carrying relatively high value stuff relative to weight (scyther blade, thrumbo horn, joints) can make runs for stuff like bionics, medicine, weapons, animals, or a chunk of components.  Often if you put yourself near-ish to a road you can make such a trip within time where simple meals can get you there and back, or at least there to buy food if really necessary.

Unfortunately, this scratches off bulk resources and now that towns restock very slowly (every 30 days once you visit according to Mehni IIRC) the utility of such trips is limited.  Calling in caravans is expensive but sustainable once you hit mid-game and have enough industry to cover the calling cost and still profit.

The missions are a bit nicer, but right now consumption of food missions is annoying and some missions you get are completely impossible (IE timing for delivering hard-drug crop yields + travel time is greater than time allotted, so you'd need to just happen to have 1000+ on hand).

My single greatest complaint is still that AI caravans have a hard-on for diving into deadfall traps and repeatedly wandering through them, making trading spot a nearly mandatory mod for permadeath to avoid BS faction loss.

I would also like to see tribal factions have a few more useful things to trade, abstracted by them having items off successful raids or something.  Right now unless you're on sea ice and completely dependent on cycling bulk goods for materials they're usually better hostile.

[Bozobub]

I think allowing foraging by both pawns and animals might help this problem a great deal.

Specifically, I'd recommend allowing the player to set a (freely changeable in transit) "forage" or "live off the land" rate for a given caravan, set to specific percentages.  For example, you could perhaps set 33%, 50%, and 75% of the daily nutrition requirement as the amount of foraging for both pawns and animals (as separate groups), slowing down travel progressively at higher percentages.  You could easily have the foraging % be the amount you are slowed by doing so, or some multiplied amount thereof, as an example, which also handily disallows foraging for 100% of your supplies.

[Toast]

The "forage" ideas sound good to me.

Not my biggest complaint, I guess, but one I haven't seen mentioned yet is that it's so damn hard to take prisoners on the road. I seemed to get jumped by jerks every time I set foot outside my fortress, so I'm usually in the situation of ending up with 1-2 raiders bleeding out on the ground for every trip I make. If you want to capture them, you need to either bring a bunch of heavy building material with you to build a prison, or hope there's enough trees and brick walls already on the map to build one. Then you need to build it with whatever pawns you have, probably not your best builders, and possibly recently injured too, so they're slow. Finally you can drag the scum inside and capture them. Like, the dude can't even walk, do I really need to construct a building I'm just going to abandon anyway so that he can't escape?

The really strange thing is that you don't even need to manually bandage your own pawns before leaving a caravan encounter when they were injured... the game assumes that you did it, and they spawn (usually crappy, but automatic) bandages over their wounds. It would sure make life easier if it would also just assume that we went to all the trouble of doing what needs to be done to capture raiders. So when you reform the caravan the screen could show you any still-alive enemies and ask if you wish to take them with you as prisoners or leave them behind.

[hypertension]

-We can't estimate how long it will take for the caravan to be ready (sometime it takes days but you'll never know in advance) 
 
This is the biggest problem for me.  It would be nice to be able to see a list of supplies to be gathered so we could watch it shrink and get a rough idea of when the caravan is ready. 

[Trylobyte]

I think allowing foraging by both pawns and animals might help this problem a great deal.

Specifically, I'd recommend allowing the player to set a (freely changeable in transit) "forage" or "live off the land" rate for a given caravan, set to specific percentages.  For example, you could perhaps set 33%, 50%, and 75% of the daily nutrition requirement as the amount of foraging for both pawns and animals (as separate groups), slowing down travel progressively at higher percentages.  You could easily have the foraging % be the amount you are slowed by doing so, or some multiplied amount thereof, as an example, which also handily disallows foraging for 100% of your supplies.

That would defeat the purpose entirely.  Assume you forage 50% of your food, reducing your food consumption by half, but you travel at 50% speed, which means the trip takes twice as long.  You now need half the food over twice the time...  which is the same amount of food as before.

[PhantomFav]

For me the caravan is kind of suicidal. Every time my paws exit from the map, there is 90% of possibility that they don't return

[Bozobub]

I think allowing foraging by both pawns and animals might help this problem a great deal.

Specifically, I'd recommend allowing the player to set a (freely changeable in transit) "forage" or "live off the land" rate for a given caravan, set to specific percentages.  For example, you could perhaps set 33%, 50%, and 75% of the daily nutrition requirement as the amount of foraging for both pawns and animals (as separate groups), slowing down travel progressively at higher percentages.  You could easily have the foraging % be the amount you are slowed by doing so, or some multiplied amount thereof, as an example, which also handily disallows foraging for 100% of your supplies.

That would defeat the purpose entirely.  Assume you forage 50% of your food, reducing your food consumption by half, but you travel at 50% speed, which means the trip takes twice as long.  You now need half the food over twice the time...  which is the same amount of food as before.

True enough.  SO you don't slow the caravan down by the same percentage.

[cultist]

There is no easy way to prevent Packaged Survival Meal from being consumed or reserved for caravans

What? You just forbid them. It's literally one key press and it's done. Food bingers might still eat them if you don't have fine meals, but how often does that happen?
And caravans can pick up forbidden items so there's no issue whatsoever with this method.

I personally like the caravans, though I use them mostly for looting stashes, not trading. Although it's often worth it to swing by a nearby settlement to sell loot you don't need at an increased price. It's also an excellent source of components and other materials as most temporary maps have an abundance of natural resources.