A little Flash game developed by some Russian dude, Caravaneer places you in a post-apocalyptic world, fraught with highwaymen and financial ruin. Braving the dusty wilds are the caravaneers, leaders of large envoys carrying goods from one town to another in the sake of profit.
Quite an interesting title, Caravaneer can easily be summed up thusly: Fallout Merchant.
The game starts you off just outside the town of Poca Cosa, where you have traveled in order to claim the inheritance given to you by some dead relative or another. They died, of course, to those pesky bandits who roam the wilds.
Your inheritance includes a rifle, some bullets, a donkey, and $1000. Not much, but you can turn it into quite a hefty amount in short order.
It's rather interesting trying to manage the necessary supplies for your wilderness town-hopping, making sure you've got enough water and fodder for you and your pack animals. It's also interesting trying to determine what combinations of equipment you opt to purchase later on. Do you go for pure cargo limit, purchasing numerous donkeys and cheap wagons, or do you go for the raw speed provided by a smaller (and much more expensive) number of horses? Or would you rather take the economists route, boycotting wagons entirely in favor of a herd of very low-maintenance camels?
http://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/03/caravaneer.phpWhat's interesting about this is that, unlike several other trading simulators, you can indeed seriously bugger up the economy. Don't go blindly following your standard trade route, keep an eye on the prices of your goods. If you take a massive shipment of a particular good from one town to another, you will turn over a hefty profit but also tweak the levels of that good in both cities. Thus, the good may end up being more expensive in the town you just bought it from, since (because of you), there's more of a surplus in the town you just provided than there is where the damn thing's actually made.
This, combined with random events, can cause wildly varying prices on the various goods.
I'll leave the rest of the game for you to figure out on your own. However, I will provide a few items of advice:
Take a character with high agility and accuracy. Physical build will be practically worthless to you, as melee weapons are pointless (hurr hurr). Your first and only true friend will be the rifle you get when you start out, and you'll have to learn how to use it in very short order. Agility is important because you will often be outnumbered, so being able to have your one guy do stuff as fast as three guys in one turn is imperative.
Check your remaining bullets whenever you come into town. The last thing you want is to run out when you really need them.
When fighting the robber bands in the beginning, feel free to take all the junk they leave behind. You'll need as much water as you can get (always more than you think you need! Remember that), and the glass bottles they leave behind will give you easy storage early on. Later, you'll want to switch over to more efficient methods. Also, you can sell the knives and scimitars for some pocket change in the start, but merchants will quickly lose interest in such wares.
Buy vast amounts of water and fodder. When you're just starting out, you'll only be feeding one or two people (if you hire a goon), plus your donkey. Everybody needs to drink, but you will only eat food and the donkey will only eat fodder ("forage"), and boy does he ever eat a lot. Pack animals will devour vast amounts of fodder, particularly the more expensive ones (horses, in particular, eat like horses). You'll only need a very small amount of human food though. Just keep an eye on how quickly stocks drop when you're out on the trail to figure out how much you'll need for various trips.
Shotguns. At the first available opportunity, buy a double-barrel shotgun and a load of shells. A shotty, wielded by a high-agility character, is absolutely
devastating to enemy units. Just get up close and personal with your victims and let 'er rip. If you need to pump more than one or two shells into a full-health dude before he goes down, something is very, very wrong.
Pack some meds. Seriously.
The robbers, at least in the little starter area, will quickly switch over from being a threat to being a simple annoyance. Regardless of how many times you utterly annihilate their filthy little bands or how vastly more powerful your group is to theirs, they will still insist on trying to take your goods. Two guys with fists and shirts versus two experienced killers, one with a shotgun and one with a rifle. You figure out who wins.
I've been trying to switch over from donkeys to horse-drawn carts recently for the speed boost. I just want to get from point A to point B while outrunning as many bandit groups as I can, simply because it's too much of an annoyance to fight every group along the way.
This, of course, means that every town I pass by will be fresh out of horses and will have absolutely no interest in taking all these donkey carts off my hands.
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