I can understand the potential. I just don't think huge trading caravans of however 100's of troops will be profitable regardless of how you do it. Especially because you can't sell crafted items (higher potential profit) to towns and only to players which would be a pain in the arse. Only goods can be sold to towns and other settlements. Which are very low cost/profit. I would very much like to play the trading game and be one of those criss crossing merchants and I can see that many others also would. But right now the idea of trying to maintain the upkeep of lots of troops in order to transfer lots of good's is simply daunting. I just think you should be able to do it without troops somehow if you really wanted.
I don't see the point of allowing low troop/lots of good caravans. Once people start doing that, others will just start attacking them for easy loots. So I guess by all means add it but I don't think it will be very productive for the wannabee merchants, and it won't really generate much in the way of epic battles either.
The #s need to be balanced so that well guarded long distance caravans are very very profitable (way more profitable just shifting goods from village to NPC cities, to compensate for the extra time factor, and risk factor of attack) even with 100-500 guards. We'll see if increasing to 450% distance bonus is enough, maybe more would be needed.
Let's crunch some #s
Let's say 15 profit per good * 4.5 distance bonus * 500 = 33750 gold
But then you need to subtract 60 gold /hr for 500 troop guards, I dunno how long it would take to travel that 450% bonus over lets say plains, maybe 48 hours so that's only clipping off about 3000 profit, plus maybe minus another 500gold opportunity cost if the guy running the caravan had just stayed in a village. So 30,000k extra gold made over 48 hours for organizing a caravan according to my basic and possibly incorrect calculations? Seems like a decent deal right now. I guess we'll see over the next few weeks tho as things develop.