Improving inventory trading

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

Been doing inventory trading for a while with the Albion Pride, and I feel like posting a few suggestions for Egosoft:


1. increase price ranges: the current price range is too small.
Buying items at lowest price and selling them for highest will only make you very small profit, because the percentual difference between lowest and highest price is almost non-existant.

=Double, or even triple the ranges.



2. the chatter: I never cared about NPCs and Ren talking when interacting.
Except for inventory trading - checking prices of tens of NPCs, you will listen to them a a lot.

=Add a "station item trading screen", which will show list of all wares that are bought/sold by the selected station (with ability to buy/sell directly from this menu!)




3. remote transport fees:
=it would be nice if the fee was shown.
I mean, an actual amount of credits you pay.
Currently, it just says "transport fee included in price" or something like that.




4. less "browsing", same profit:
=decrease the amount of vendors in a zone, but increase the amount of items that each vendor has (so you can buy all wares at once - instead of browsing stores of trillions of different vendors)


5. you cannot use remote item transport to sell wares while docked, to a vendor who is positioned in the same dock as you.
This is quite annoying. When you dock at a station, you have to meet the vendor personally or undock the station, because you cannot remotely sell wares to him if he's in the same docking area.

=Allow remote trading with vendors who are in the same station dock as player character.




6. metal alloy "exploit": at the end, what's the point of trading or smuggling, when buying scrap, crafting and selling metal alloy will make you much more profit? There's no motivation to trade with anything else.

=do something with it. Maybe Scrap Metal should be removed from vendors and loot crates, and you should only be able to get it as random loot from enemies.




(thanks to Lupo for mentioning)
7. Cargo space for playership: currently, the inventory space is a bottom-less pit of wares. It would be fine if Egosoft added a limit to number of wares carried, but added new upgrades that can increase the playership cargo space.

[Santi]

Very good suggestions to inventory trading, I will add the option to buy all those items needed for hacking at highly inflated prices. Cargo space should be taken into account, currently it is a bottomless pit where you store everything that is dropped or found. Will be too much work to have fixed traders in stations? With that and some reworking of the wares you could establish some trade routes for the Skunk.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

Cargo space should be taken into account, currently it is a bottomless pit where you store everything that is dropped or found.

I forgot about this!
Edited the OP.

[UniTrader]

Agreed fo Inventory Size, and i fact i would even combine all Cargo the Skunk has into one (Missiles, Marines, Drones, Inventory), but thats not related to the topic hhere.

Also Agreeing for the Metal Alloy - its almmost a Money cheat..

and one more point to the List:
=> also add some kind of System behind the Prices of Inventory Trading instead of pure Randomness. (like here: https://github.com/UniTrader/UTItemtradeOverhaul )
this would supplement some of the points in the OP, or even replace them: if you know where you can buy/sell for good prices instead of just checking every Vendor the Price variance can imo remain the same

[donzi]

Something I would like to see would be the trader ship list (what 5 and 6 keys cycle through on the trade screen) to sort on the ship name.

I am sick of having 'parked' stuff come up first, then not knowing what rhyme or reason the list order will be sorted by, is a chore.

EG: ship named "RF 01 Something" always before "RF 02 Something" and always after "RF 00 Something"

..of course provided they are part of the group of ships that will be presented.

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The other nagging thing is I would like to see drones not be auto expanded all the time.. Yes, all the trade ships will have them -- I don't need help pointing out that I have some which could be sold or need any more.

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The last of the main nags on this screen I have is that it sure would be nice if there was an A-Z hotskey active to zip up/down to the first item beginning with that letter. If no "Q" items then go to the first "R" or something like that.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

=> also add some kind of System behind the Prices of Inventory Trading instead of pure Randomness.

Yes, but it shouldn't be too significant.
Randomness has one big advantage - you'll always find demand and supply.

Maybe there should be randomised events, that would only affect certain items (not all of them) and player would be notified that they are affecting the item trading system.
Like "Glaring Truth system has increased demand in all Food items due to starving", or "Eternal Dawn zone is offering ship equipment items for lowered prices", which would be shown on your sector/system map.

[UniTrader]

=> also add some kind of System behind the Prices of Inventory Trading instead of pure Randomness.

Yes, but it shouldn't be too significant.
Randomness has one big advantage - you'll always find demand and supply

well, with my solution you will find them, too and you dont have to pray to the RNG anymore, just fly to the Stations where its logical to find a certain ware, like Albion Tobaccon in Albion Farms and the Sinks are the Albion Tech Fabs for example. my approach to signal the Player he has found a source/Sink the Prices are at the very top/bottom of the scale and additionally there is more/less than usual in stock (Sink: 50% of usual min amount, Source: 110% of usual max amount)
and once you find them they will stay there for a while, except maybe illegal goods


basically this System is very similiar to the Trade system in Freelancer, with the differences that in FL the supply was not limited and the Prices were completely static(just follow the same principle)