I always like to read the primary source. I don't trust something that doesn't have human thought.

Having a few ready-made profiles would save a lot of time instead of rebinding everything manually.

Ok, I came up with a simple, interesting and realistic mechanic (I've tested it with Python, with chatGPT help since I didn't want to waste too much time on this). The general idea is giving each Market a value according to its placement, and get from that Local Trade (small trickle) and Route Trade (with Traders). I normalise all areas and distances according to the area and radius territory settlements (initially) generate, and use a couple of constant to have final values resembling present gameplay. To assign each Market a value, I'm using Voronoi cells (regions closer to a point than to other points, play with https://cfbrasz.github.io/Voronoi.html) to tile one's contiguous territory. I calculate Market value as sqrt(N)SE, where N is the total Number of Markets, S its Economic Zone (Market's cell area), and E its Efficiency, given by, after fixing the Market's cell, the ratio of its subcell area respect to the subcell area of the centroid of the cell, multiplied by two (a Market placed at the centroid of the cell has E=1, while at the periphery of a circular cell has E=0.4). Local Trade is then sqrt(N)SE/5, which gives a reasonably low trickle of metal per second. Between any two Markets there's a potential trading route. They start enabled, unless they form less than 20 degrees with an already enabled route, to avoid skipping intermediate Markets. One can disable and enable them to change the network, and a Trader travelling between two Markets produces a Route Trade of 5sqrt(N)SiEi (which is the sum of their Local Trades multiplied by 25). Traders would randomly travel these routes (greatly reducing micro of uninteresting stuff), thus an appropriate network has to be enabled depending on the circumstances (like Market value, number of Traders or enemy territory). Traders would need to have a limitation to make total Route Length proportional to their number (I think them taking a time to trade would work best). I also define a quality factor Q=Route Trade/Route Length, which would be proportional to average profit per Trader (per unit time depending on Trader speed). There are some things that I'm not testing, like coastlines, Docks, allied Markets (neutral ones could be included), and actual Trader dynamics (just averaging for now), but at least to have an initial idea, as shown in the following examples with the script.   1) Placing a Settlement and a Market, where its Eco Zone is then all territory. See how its efficiency at the border is 0.4, and near the centre close to 1 (for now ignore right panel and trading routes). Placing a bunch of Markets together is not effective since it's better for each to be at the centre of their Eco Zone, and in extreme cases of making them less effective the total Local Trade can reduce a bit (client indecision). I get the same Local Trade from five Markets put together as from two placed strategically: 1.mp4   2) Expanding territory is more profitable, but inefficiency keeps gains low. More strategically placed Markets need to be built to make the most of Local Trade, also up to a point because their Eco Zone gets reduced. This is how both variables balance each other to generate realistic dynamics: 2.mp4   3) Disjointed territories have independent Eco Zones, but for now there are situations where the Eco Zone of a Market can be disjointed, like in concave territories. One can think that clients somehow go to the closest Market anyway, but I'm leaving it like this for now because just not allowing Eco Zone borders to cross territorial boundaries would be a mistake, as shown at the end: 3.mp4   4) I've already explained trading routes, so I'm just choosing different networks among possible ones. The orange flashing is the angular restriction to make things look realistic. Quality is important since long routes require more Traders to be as profitable as they can. Again, Traders taking time to trade would work best, and would reduce Quality for short routes, which right now is high because of the lack of it. At the end it's a balance between involving the most valuable Markets and the amount of Traders one is willing to have (I think they should take less than 1 pop, it'd be nice to see the network working without losing so many slots for troops):  4.mp4   Here is the code for those who want to play with it: MarketsVoronoi.py

Yes we started working on Empires Besieged with @wowgetoffyourcellphone but we don't have much time these days so it's going slowly

Hello, I was wondering if the idea of creating a version of 0 A.D. set after AD 1 is still being considered by the developers or the community. I noticed that the discussions related to this project are no longer very active. Personally, I find the idea quite interesting, even though I understand that the amount of work involved would be enormous. I am currently working on my own mod, so I have a pretty good idea of how much work a project like this can represent. Is this project still something that could be considered in the future, or has it been abandoned for now? Thanks !