gnasirator wrote:squshy7 wrote: It APPEARS that they will sit on standby if they can't fill up most of their cargo bay, though I haven't monitored the sectors closely enough to say for sure; I suggest this because I experimented with using a couple low cargo bay ships as ST's and they almost never stopped trading (this doesnt help the problem though as the amount of wares/money appears to affect leveling; these low cargo bay traders take forever to gain levels).
That's true. Pilots do level up based upon their total earnings accumulated over their lifetime. So a bigger ship levels pilots faster as they earn way more money.
And therefore pilots won't trade in routes where they won't make any profits at all which is of course more likely in a smaller ship.
This is just like in reality where I wouldn't start a banana transportation business with a porsche
µChips are a different story though. And there small, fast ships have their play. But skilled pilots are better here and jump drives pay off.
My suggestion for you: Get your traders a bigger ship. TS big.
And for the installation: if you don't use the exe, that should be fine but to make sure, delete all *.autotrade scripts first. This is actually what the .exe does for you. It's just a self expanding winrar archive with an included delete script.
you can open and check it with winrar.
I figured out as much, thanks for the reply.
Here's a question: is mk3 traders interacting with your own stations broken? Because I'm pulling my hair out after two attempts at bullwinkles suggestion of building my own stations to get them to trade more. The first time I built a complete energy loop that wasnt connected with complex hubs, figuring that the mk3 traders would be more than happy to ferry the goods between them. Nope.
But I figured that didnt work because the traders arent actually making any money, since it's all my own goods. That's fine and makes sense, we're not levelling CAGs here. So I built the same energy loop, but this time complexed it all, making an excess of 350 ecells every minute and built it in a paranid sector with 5 factories that were all starving for energy cells. No dice. The STs (which are novas with full cargo upgrade btw, so they can more than fill up their bays) just sit there on stand by. I tried all different ways of fanagling it; making ecells an intermediate and letting the station sell intermediates, making them products, allowing other races to trade and not, adjusting the prices low or high or even exactly matching what others in the sector are willing to pay for them, homebasing the STs to the complex and not....
There was only ONE instance in which a trader actually started to go to the hub to grab a good to sell, but it was soja husks...which isnt desirable at all, since my complex is only on a 1:1 soja husk ratio. I cancelled that action...though to my dismay I decided to run a test and immediately tell him to trade again and this time he apparently forgot he was willing to do soja husks before.
So...if it isn't broken (which it sure seems it is), is it just a function of gross money gained? That's the only explanation that makes sense: that you coded this so that the higher level a trader is, he will not do trades that don't result in some net amount of money; and this net amount of money that must be made per trade at a given level must have been predefined by you, or else the trader would adapt to his storage bay.
(PS, And if that is true, then I implore you to rethink that. The trader should adapt to his storage bay. Why shouldn't I be able to run a fleet of goner rangers? they're XL, they have 1/3 the capacity of a fully upgraded mistral but are 3 times as fast. which means they could run volume in the same amounts over the same period of time, but also have a higher chance of beating another trader due to speed.)