A little suggestion to balance trading a bit.
At the moment, if you buy way too many goods compared to the amount of horses you have, you will move slow. This is kind of unrealistic, because having 10 crates on a single horse simply wont do.
I suggest you need 1 horse for every crate you carry. Or, if you have no goods, 2 troops for each crate. To limit the amount of horses, you will need 1 troop for each 2 horses or the horses won't count.
Little math here:
If you have 100 men, no horses, you can carry 100*0.5=50 crates.
If you have 100 men and 50 horses, you can carry 50*1 and 50*0.5 = 75 crates
If you have 100 men and 200 horses you can carry 200* 1 = 200 crates
If you have 100 men and 400 horses you can carry 200*1 = 200 crates (you need 1 troop to keep 2 trading horses in line)
What happens if i don't have enough horses/ troops to move like this?
You will not be able to move.What is the result of this? More traders will be needed then now. You cant endlessly buy goods and horses in your own safe territory, you will have to recruit men to guide the horses.
No longer will there be guys with 8000 goods (yes they already exist) running around using all S&D for their big faction, but they are limited to smaller trading caravans, just like the small faction guys that can't just buy horses and trade like madman (they will get attacked as soon as they have a lot of crates, though the big factions can do this, because they wo't get attacked in their territory anyway)
This will help smaller factions and faction-less to trade. Every trader will have around the same troops/goods on them, yes the bigger faction will get bigger trade army's, but they will have to pay relatively more upkeep then smaller traders, something they don't have to do now.
Have a good idea to make this suggestion even better? Or a reason why this doesn't help smaller factions? Post it here please