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Not seen anything mentioned, will we have anything like universal traders or station managers for trade\mining ships and stations to generate there own income, or do we have to micro manage each ship.

From the devs' Q&A Sticky:

Q. Will Trading Software MK3 with the Sector/Universe Trader option be making a return (for a steady profit even if not the best profitss)? What about the Explorer Command Software?
A. The exact software commands from X3 won't be "making a return", but there may be some equivalences.

Q. How will the management of stations work?
A. You will have to hire a manager for your station and can then adjust the management level, i.e. decide how many decisions you want your manager to do on his own.

Q. If decision making happens on AI level between managers for trade and build, what handlers make the decision about defending and possibly forging wars? If factions are represented by interacting AI handlers, what handler is then the faction head? A faction head would be interesting to represent as "living" and "killable" with personal characteristics and interaction.
A. I don't really understand your questions. There is faction-level AI that is separate from the individual station-manager-level AI.

Q. What are plans to improve station managers and their ability to manage - choose prices and stock levels, do repairs, buy needed ships? Any way to reserve certain amounts of resources for our own use and sell all excess?
A. These details are still not finalised.

Q. How will NPCs decide where and what to build and how to expand their empires?
A. It's a hierarchical, dynamical system, in which different managers of a faction will communicate with each other and decide based on supply and demand, what wares are needed and where to build their next stations.

Thanks, Alan, I didn't see it, I was hoping that as the AI could build\trade\mine and expand in x4 , so would our own NPC's be able to do too.