A poll: do you accept caravan rehoming?

[Straybow]

Think of it this way. Merchants from the big city travel to the new city. They use the capital available from their rich trading company to exploit the resources available in the new city. Hence, the trade value of the product reflects the trading power of the big city.

If your hoola hoop factory in Dinkiesburg had to lease a cargo ship, send their own workers to the port to load it and unload it in the other country, hire multilingual salesmen to hawk them in the destination that would be like "no rehoming." You sell them to a distributor, and you ship them by some dedicated shipping company. That is like rehoming the hoola hoop freight unit.

But the game mechanics intentionally limit each city to three commodities (with rare exceptions designed into the mix). Rehoming is obviously a feature which they intended to disallow for trade units but never patched to prevent the cheat.

[ramses II.]

I think it's a trick, not a cheat, like bomber shielding or the airbase trick.
For the AI is cheating the hell I think I can accept it. In MP-games all (human) players can take advantage of this trick, in SP-games you can decide it by yourself whether to use it or not.

[La Fayette]

I gave a bump to this thread only because SlowThinker asked for it. My opinion about rehoming is the same as Straybow's: the feature is quite realistic.
But there are 2 commands in the game: one (the city screen) allows it, the other (the 'h' key) forbids it. It is therefore very important to make a choice (and not a hidden one).
I think XinYu and any other honest player is perfectly entitled to use rehoming (just like solo in his famous 776 game) as long as he states he has done it.
Personally, I stopped rehoming after the discussion in this thread, but I would never say that rehoming is a cheat (except if someone used it and then said he didn't ).

[SlowThinker]

No

I vote NO.

Originally posted by rah
Because when you try to rehome a caravan you get a message saying you can't do it. So obviously it was the designers intent to not allow you to do it. The programmers just forgot that there was another way to do it, hence the discussion here.

This is NOT an argument for me. I want a good game, not to obey designers. (especially because we know they were far from genial).

I have two reasons:

1. the game should be as most interesting as possible from the strategic point of view.

With caravan rehoming the need of player's strategic decisions is reduced. The bulk of civ games would be based on one SSC city supported by shield producing cities. I want various forms of civs.
A sidenote: It is similar to the effect of corruption and waste based on the proximity from the capital. It is a bad rule. I always expand in concentric circles. Front lines and borders are always simple, no isolated cities. This is boring.

2. the caravan rehoming is not natural

Originally posted by La Fayette May I ask ONE question?
Doesn't any of you rehome settlers or military units (for example build them in a city with barracks and station them where needed)?

Rehoming of settlers and military units is natural, there goes about real (shield, food) support. But caravan rehoming doesn't change the source of support.
We can imagine 50 shields represents an amount of work that is put in the caravan. The city that has high trade is able to load a larger caravan (using an equal amount of work as a low-trade city). You can't expect the caravan will get larger if you "rehome" it.

[rah]

While I also mostly agree with your other reasons, the designer's intent plays a role for me. The desire for a balanced game is one of the main goals in a designer's eyes and make the rules accordingly.
But the other glitch with repeating "hide" routes defeated their purpose also.

RAH

[Straybow]

What is it with Muppet avatars?

Do we know for sure that the continual Hides is a glitch/bug? It is possible to get new commodities, right?

[DrSpike]

Check out the active MP threads.......they are pretty funny. The avatars are a temporary homage to a post by War4ever. Though I'm getting quite attached to mine.

Oh, and IMO caravan rehoming is a blatant no-no. It's clearly not intended to work that way, and it is unbalancing even if you think it is supposed to work that way. Having said that for SP records you may as well exploit whatever you can; just acknowledge it has been used.