How do you go around the place?

[code99xx]

... and by place i mean planet.

Is it just me or are caravans just not viable? It takes too long for them to get anywhere  and you need to bring loads of food for the trip and even then sometimes you dont have enough of it.

Transport pods on the other hand look awesome on paper, instant(?) travel and they carry a lot of stuff and you can launch several of them at a time but are only one time deal, what do you do when you get to your destination?


Say you need some resources that you cant find on your map anymore but you can probably get it somewhere else on the map.
How do you do it?

I was thinking about this and would it be viable to build a few pods, launch your ppl to your destination, mine/do what you need, build a few pods there and get back the same way you came in? You could bring the materials and fuel needed for the new pods with you so you dont have to mine/manufacture anything there ...

Would that be viable?

[Jibbles]

You could do set-up camp mod or enable multi-colonies in options to gather resources from other tiles on the map. I would think this is a bit cheaty since vanilla isn't balanced around that.  Just do trading and deep drilling when you're out of resources on your map.

Launching drop pods to other locations just to collect resources isn't viable in my opinion.  You can just walk to tiles nearby, collect there and be back within a day.  I guess it'll be worth to build drop pods at other locations in winter if you want to go raid a base or do a quest since it takes a long time to travel. They're very useful in emergencies.

[Canute]

If you choose caravan or launch pods, you allways need a long time to prepare a long distance traval.
Normaly i build up a base, but one time i was forced from a mod (tiberium made is very hard to stay at the map) to leave the map and i decide to take the offer to travel to the Friendly AI and leave the planet.
I did this travel over serveral steps with launch pods.
I build enough pods and fuel for all pawns, food and important stuff and advance to the next location. Build there a small temp. camp, mine steel, harvest trees and start again to build launcher and fuel for the next step.

When you do this as caravan you need alot of travelfood instead of fuel, but i think it would take the same amout of time. But as caravan you need to deal with threats during the travel, while this don't happen with launchpods.
But solong you try to stay on roads, and it isn't winter you can travel pretty far in a short time.
Thats why it is a good idea to settle next or on a road with some other friendly outpost on the same road.

[Panzer]

Lightweight items with a high value (clothes, drugs, AI cores, scyther blades etc..) are usually preferred trade goods when I set up a caravan, and I never send out more than 2-3 people so I dont have to rely on pack animals or take tons of food with me.

Droppods make things way easier, you can do stuff like 1 man overweight caravans and launch them onto friendly outposts, sell and buy til you can move again or launch another colonist to help with carrying if calculated poorly.
As long as your caravan is within range of your droppods it is also pretty safe, if you get ambushed you can load up colonists and launch them to the ambush site in a matter of seconds, you even get to pick where exactly on the battlefield they should land. Same goes for supplies, if you run out of food you can always launch some food from home onto the caravan tile, it will be added to your caravan package.

So yeah, in my opinion caravans are viable under certain conditions, a low amount of people and within range of droppods. Caravan ambushes are also always manageable in my opinion, they match the size of your caravan.

What I would really like to see is cheaper food at the outposts, even a goddamn nutrient paste meal is expensive. It would also be nice if I could make a living by trading, buy stuff cheap at one outpost and sell for a profit at another, that would add a lot to caravaning.
I guess in time the economy will be fleshed out a bit more, stuff like supply and demand will probably also lead to more interesting playthroughs.

[b0rsuk]

Transport Pods are currently by far the most efficient method of travel, especially in winter. You just need to send some resources with you. Think hard what's necessary. If you want to leapfrog across the planet, you just need food, medicine, steel, fuel, components (for next transport pods).

It's not even carrying capacity that's bad, it's stockpiling (cooked) food. Cooked food is more efficient but either way you need a huge pile of it to travel anywhere, especially with animals.