Early game caravan balance and mega belt dragging

[notnotmelon]

One of the most annoying features of early pY is the repetitive belt dragging to more and more ore patches.
The caravan is promised to fix this issue however its unlocked slightly too late after this phase is already completed.

This thread proposes to move lead ore, zinc ore, titanium ore past the point of the caravan unlock and possibly into py1.

[BeaulieuT]

I think this Is a great idea, gives caravan a stronger use case / makes them much more useful.

Getting fluids to ore patches might still be tricky, but if caravans moving barrels is viable/reasonable then caravans would be a fantastic solution there too that should cover all the "mega-belt issues"

[przemo1232]

i don't think moving ores up is a good idea due to circuits, moving caravans down or adding some way to capture them in the wild would lead to fewer issues

[notnotmelon]

The problem with wild caravans is; how would you supply the brains.

[BeaulieuT]

What if you added native flora as a potential food source for caravans?

You could make it flora-expensive to scale them, so you can't really support more than a few caravans with your starting flora patch and brains are still a much better alternative once you get them, but that way you can bootstrap with a few caravans to get through the early game.

Just an idea

[BeaulieuT]

I like the idea of adding an early "fishing building" better after seeing your reply further down lol

[przemo1232]

true, maybe add fish to the list of foods? then you can automate it after getting circuits

[notnotmelon]

That makes sense.

I just had an idea:
We have now the new agricultural tower prototype.
We could use this prototype to make a "automated fishing rod" at automation science.
This would perhaps replace the fish farm building.

[fvandrog]

Could we have a more 'limited' caravan for early game? I like the current caravan, but it could be an upgrade, at the point where it becomes available currently.

I also like the idea of feeding the 'early caravans' native flora -- it could have limited reach with feeding (or watering) stations along the way? (Feeding station supplied by caravans).

[notnotmelon]

This one feels wrong to me. The base caravan is already extremely early - it's automation science!
There is also some problem with needing to add more graphics and logic to support this feature.

My thought is that we should instead make the food limited in some way, perhaps with the fish mechanic.

[przemo1232]

decreasing the starting area in the py preset will help alleviate the issue without adding anything new, its radius was halved recently so it should already be much better