Merchant

The Merchant is a Building available upon researching the Barter Knowledge. It provides a dedicated building for distributing Resources to the population.

While production buildings can use the Market stands Annex to distribute products, this reduces the workers ability to actually make the product. The Merchant provides a way to avoid this loss of productivity, by using a dedicated Trader in the Merchant to handle distribution.

In exchange for its service, the Trader takes a part of the product's profit for themselves.

The Merchant is the only way to distribute a Resource which was not produced locally, i.e. any resource kept in the resource inventory of a city.

To Know when to use a Merchant in favour of Market stands, a good rule of thumb is to look at the amount of resources that is being produced by a single building. If this amounts to less than half of what a Merchant would distribute, a Merchant would be more efficient, provided you have at least two production buildings.