Locking traders / merchants to single resource

[jonbaer]

Right now you have to partition your trade by % of each resource you wish to trade, are there any plans to make it so that you could actually lock a trader to a particular resource type?  I would imagine you could do this somehow by just extending the current trader / merchant ship to say "Metal Trader" or "Wood Trader", etc.  A few times I had a case where I wanted my longer routes to do metal but I didn't want to allocate it to 100%.  Does this make sense or has this been discussed under the Market before?

[elexis]

Setting resources for traders individually was implemented once but was removed. There is some code complexity to accomplish that and the arguments to keep it didn't seem compelling.

[jonbaer]

Interesting thanks, how would you go about looking at older releases to see how this worked?  Is there a spot for previous alphas?  Can't remember how to do this via SVN tags.

[elexis]

I think the implementation of that wasn't even complete, only simulation code for that existed but not graphical options for that.

It was removed by rP18393.

Old versions of 0ad can still be downloaded from the main website. Gotta click, somewhere over there

[sanderd17]

Originally, the only way to set the resource type on traders was to set it per trader. A newly created trader was always spawned with a default resource type (metal IIRC), and every trader had to be clicked once to change its resource type.

As a result, this was very unmanageable, as doing trading meant having to chase your traders all over the map to change their resources.

Mimo then implemented better trader management by automatically assigning a new resource based on a global distribution. But that meant it was incompatible with the old way (or at least quite hard to combine the two approaches).

Now the trade gives you a general expected distribution (the actual result still depends on a random selection), which is good enough for trading. If you want a more fine-grained control over the produced resources, you should use the resource-gathering units I guess.