1) Auto-traders need to look for the highest total profit per trade run, as opposed to the current situation when they only check the price difference between buyer and seller. 10 e-cell trades by an L freighter need to go.
2) Minimum cargo percentage/slider, to further discourage almost-empty trade runs.
3) Blacklist for factions (including player’s own) and sectors for both mining and trading. I’ve seen cases where my auto-miners were trying to mine in Xenon sectors. Ability to discriminate between factions is useful if you want to make your auto-captains stay away from your own factories, or trade exclusively with them.
4) Station-assigned auto-traders and miners always put all of their station’s resources and wares to their auto-trade UI, and it resets it you try to limit the list. This is an obvious oversight, we should be able to choose which wares they deal with.
5) Miners assigned to stations that deal with more than one raw resource can get their cargo filled with a resource that the station can’t hold any more of. It gets stuck, and they can’t drop it (unless you do it manually). The miner will then just fly around, unable to mine anything else. Solution: Station-assigned miners shouldn’t mine more than they can offload at their station.
6) Captains should really be able to auto-trade at 1 star, same as mining. Not only is finding a 3-star captain ...unreliable, as is their leveling, but it’s also inconsistent - miners can find the best place to sell their resources at 1 star, why can’t traders do almost the same thing, but without the mining part and with the buying part?
7) Auto-miner drones need fixing ASAP. Just watch L ships mine (gas or solid, doesn’t matter), their drones ALWAYS get left behind. Make L miners stay still until all of their drones are docked before moving to another spot.
Miners again. How do they know where to mine? Make them require resource probes or something like that (just one per sector is ok), it breaks my immersion that they always know the right spots without prospecting first!9) It’d be nice if hired captains had some sort of salary, or a cut from their deals. Don’t want to feel like they’re slaves.
10) Proper range settings for miners: home sector, distance (in jumps) to mine, distance to sell. Right now they have a single max range option that doesn’t even work. I saw miners ignoring their max range completely.
Feel free to post other suggestions! (I really hope they see this...)
What I suggest is to give us more tools to make them do exactly what we want them to do, that is all. And fix some obvious bugs/oversights, like with mining drones being constantly left behind.