If you find yourself with too many Caravan units, though, think proactively by not disbanding them without a second thought. They will 'wait in lurch' for future business opportunities. Yes, the artificial intelligence (AI) in the game is sophisticated enough that a Caravan unit can recognize when a city has been built after it and then plotting a most direct course to it rather than idling by the market or remaining otherwise expendable.
While it remains to be seen how the fanbase will respond to this, it is clear that fans of automated settlers in Civilization II and Alpha Centauri and beyond will feel even more at home with this and other built-in processes. Don't worry, though: if micromanaging is your thing, you will not be deprived of its joy if you don't want to be. In the game's preferences you can change how the autopeasants and other like parts work by instructing them to help build buildings, gathering supplies, one or the other or disabling the function completely. The default setting is to have units 'find their own way' to the greatest extent possible.
HORSES AS AN EARLY STATUS SYMBOL
Within a Market, you can sell food, metal, timber etc. for gold and can conversely buy it yourself to round out your resources. As with today's stock markets, the price of commodities fluctuate up and down on an ongoing basis based on the time tested process of supply and demand. Reynolds encourages players in Rise of Nations to “spot the trend”; you can deflate value of a product quickly by flooding local bazaars with a particular resource by selling it off in great quantities in a short period of time. This will have a near immediate and devastating effect on the bottom line. Your dastardly efforts have only a finite lifespan: markets can and do recover from such practices.
Still on Markets, you can build a Merchant unit – complete with mule for companionship and practicality – to, for example, exploit a Horses resource whereby setting up shop that will lower cost of your civilization's horse-driven units as well as providing some food and metal gratis from controlling that resource. With mounted troop costs now lowered by one quarter, players can start planning strategy around what they have at their disposal including but not limited to border expansion and the 'face' of combat units. In this example, you will need to build a Stable and as such must research appropriate additional military technology by which to obtain this goal.
Other resource types available in the game include but are not limited to peacocks, bison, diamonds and whales on the open seas.
WATCH FOR CITY IMPROVEMENTS UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Before building an improvement to a city, one must first have a city itself already built. To found new budding metropolises, you go to your library and research Civic technology – units increase their political strength as a result and in turn enlarge their civilization's borders in the process. When you have successfully researched Civic, you can instruct a citizen to found a city from then onwards. Civic technologies are colour coded in blue for quick reference by glancing at a library, while military advances are red and commerce progressions are represented in green. With each additional branch added to the technology tree comes unique special abilities. One's momentum in acquiring such knowledge is tracked by a thermometer in similar fashion to the flasks of Civilization II.
As for the improvements themselves, Reynolds provided the case of the University to demonstrate. This building can first be constructed when your civilization reaches the Classical age, acquiring knowledge in the process by which to train your scholars. Assuming you are able to thwart off all that would seek to destroy your people from existence, you will eventually be able to study the Literacy advance, a University-specific technology, which upon completion thereof will upgrade the number of scholars that a University can support at one time. You can forget about cross-town rivalries of scholarships, sporting events and practical jokes though: you can only construct one of each type of city improvement per city, i.e. a University.
Rise Up: Reynolds On RoN 
