Trading

[Frank Johnson]

I've spent some time on the subject of trade now and have determined that it is severely lacking in granular control.

First:
You can not command a captain to make trades independent of your personal squad at all.

Second:
Station Managers can only issue a single command to not trade with other factions. Ships assigned to stations can not be limited to trade only with player stations.

***if you build a supply chain in an empty zone and restrict all station trades to that zone you can force your station ships to trade with only your stations and your supply chain may work.***

There are no thresh holds for when a ship makes a supply run and I have not been able to figure how how to get the station ships to run supplies short of being completely out for putting the ships in my squad and doing the runs manually.

Trying to automate the supply chains just does not seem to work at all right now. I currently have two of the 290K freighters assigned to my Med dispensary and both are trying to run Ecells a couple thousand at a time while the water supply is near zero.

Trade deff needs a metric crapton(very technical term) of work.
Stations resources need a thresh hold slider
Station funds need a min/max thresh hold
Ship captains need command to do supply loop runs (independent of player squad)
Ship captains need command to buy from player/faction
Ships should have a setting for buy/sell
Station production lines should have an on/off switch.


I have not yet figured out how ships decide to buy supplies since at this time I have two ships buying Ecells and the station needs water. Both ships can carry all types of supplies.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

One of the admins already said that they will have a look at manager restrictions in the close future...

Except for that, Iam quite annoyed by manager budgets.
Why is money moved even when wares are moved between two player-owned stations?
I do understand that in real life it might have a economical meaning or something like that.
But seriously, in a game? Watching and maintaining the manager budgets gets annoying after the second time you do it.
And this was very annoying in previous games too.

They should either make transaction between player assets always cost 0 credits, OR add an option to make managers take money directly from player's account with a notification.

[GCU Grey Area]

Why is money moved even when wares are moved between two player-owned stations?

Think it's to avoid potential problems if the supplying station is buying resources from NPCs. If that station isn't paid by other player-owned stations which use it's wares it may run out of money, therefore can't buy the resources which it needs & the whole supply chain collapses.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

Wrong, completly self-sustaining loops fail miserably if you don't watch them.

The end product (Reinforced Metal for building in my case) is not sold directly by the station, but I sell it manually or use it in my station construction.
Thus the Construction shop which produces the end product of the supply loop is always running out of money.
While the Energy Array, which is the very bottom of food chain, doesn't require any resources, and thus it's hoarding all the money!

In short, money always flows from the top of self-sustaining supplying station loops to the very bottom, where it stacks. Annoying.

[GCU Grey Area]

In short, money always flows from the top of self-sustaining supplying station loops to the very bottom, where it stacks. Annoying.

You may find it annoying, however if you run open supply chains that flow of money between stations is essential. In my current game I never got round to building food or energy production stations (more than enough spare capacity at NPC stations to supply my needs for the moment), so if it wasn't for money flowing between my stations I'd be constantly topping up the cash reserves of every single station which buys food or energy (which is pretty much all of them), rather than just the stations at the top end of each production chain - they tend not to make enough profit to cover their operating costs because I hoard most of their production (RMP etc) for my own use.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

Yes, but I have a completly self-sustaining loop in Bleak Pebble, even though it's not fully functional, I already know that it's going to cause problems.
My older self-sustaining loop (H20 Addictives + energy array) is having the money issue too: money is stacking at the Energy Array.

[Frank Johnson]

Credits going in and out is why I suggested having a thresh hold option. If we could set a minimum and maximum threshold we should not have to keep topping off any stations. With a threshold set when the station drops below the minimum limit funds would move directly from the player account and possibly give an alert and log entry.

Combine this with being able to set a ship to sell wares from the station and having a minimum threshold the station would be able to make money more dependably and should not often need extra credits.

Don't ask me to give an example of the code for the script...I made a C in my programming class. Logical operators bend my mind in a most unpleasant manner.

[Frank Johnson]

OK I have a Med Dispensary, the manager is set to restrict resource purchases to my ships only with a limit of Devries.

I have assigned a Titurel and a Lyranea to the station manager. Now both ships can carry every type or ware.

The station has to import Ecells, spacefuel, water.

Both ships have been running Ecells for the station while the water supply is empty and the spacefuel is slowly depleting.

The H2O plant is in a neighboring zone and the ecells array is two zones away.

Why are both ships running ecells from two zones away (and from a NPC stations at that) while the water plant is next door and station supply is empty.

I ahve not seen either ship run med supplies to any other stations at all yet. Nor have I seen any other stations ships come get med supplies.

I am looking for a constructive solution here.

It seems to me that trade loops are not working at all at this time.

most of my stations are in a single zone Devries/Bleak Pebble/Crimson Rock


{Merged with your other ongoing trade discussion thread. No need for two of them. - Nanook}

[rguy1]

The problem with having "universal freighters" working for station manager is you have no control over what the manger sets them to buy or sell.
You might find it better to use ware spcific freighters ie energy,water,container,bulk.
One thing I did find is that if you add some scoop colecters to a Titurel they make good gas miners. And the Scaldis (with the Saldis cargo fix mod) makes a good ore miner

[Frank Johnson]

The menu needs an option to view a manager list where you can view available funds for all stations.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

Never use universal Cargo space ships as station suppliers, it's very wierd.
Rahanas liquid for water and cells.
Rahanas energy for e-cells.
Rahanas container for container things
Rahanas bulk for bulk things
Midir for mining of liquids
Fedhelm for mining of bulk stuff.

[Boggart]

Hi there, I'm a long time lurker on the forums but rarely post anything.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'll do it anyway:

With 2.50 now ready, is empire building and economy in X-Rebirth a viable option now?

The Patchnotes about fixing cargo drones and stuck trade offers etc. seem rather promising.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

Sure they are. Trading and building is the main thing I do since 2.20 release.

[wysiwyg]

If you're building in DeVries, the Styrvoks make excellent station freighters. Faster than the Rahanas, and slightly cheaper. I also found the dual cargo ones work quite well and don't confuse the manager too much (unlike the 290K hold Titurel that is still wandering around Fervid Corona with 7 ecells on board lol!)

@Boggart - I have a 10 day old version of the game started with 2.50b7 that is bringing in about 5M-6M credits per hour with 13 stations in Glaring Truth. I've yet to let the managers loose trading with the general public, most of the profit is coming from sales made by the managers to the shipyard in DHA. Still a bit of nannying needed here and there but all in all a fair reward for the investment and effort that's gone in to building this setup. Bottom line is that so far I think the S/M shipyards are now generating consistent demand for the high end tech goods - Podkletnov Generators sell like hot cakes (er, I mean pancakes) in my game but you will need quite a supply chain to keep a ship tech fab running if you want to supply every ware.

[Boggart]

@Earth and wysiwyg

That's good news. Off I go then! Thank you.

[Baconnaise]

Never use universal Cargo space ships as station suppliers, it's very wierd.
Rahanas liquid for water and cells.
Rahanas energy for e-cells.
Rahanas container for container things
Rahanas bulk for bulk things
Midir for mining of liquids
Fedhelm for mining of bulk stuff.

Universal cargo ships are the best miners. Sequanas is best actual specific miner out of all them but isn't universal. Fedhelm is the worst ship in the game. Any universal cargo ship plus mining drones of both types is most efficient and best. This will not be different in 2.5 patch and 3.0 AFAIK. It's been like this since game launch. Construction vessel is still the best ship in game.

You're half right being that they make bad traders when you typically move medium trader sized amounts. Leptons an extra variant would be fine or the medium ships now in 2.5 perhaps.

The Empire thing is a bit of a stretch as you can't really take over a zone or area. Doesn't feel like building an empire anyways just building stations and trading anyways. It also sort of kills immersion when everything you own is Ren Otani a name which cannot be changed. We can't even get around this by founding our own corporation of our own choosing and being the CEO. It would be the way we would fund out stations and trade networks but isn't a feature in the game.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Most of my trading fleet are universal cargo type ships and I have not noted any issues yet. However, I do also have some that are not fully universal cargo vessels (Lepton, Rahanas Container, Gigurnum Energy).

The thing about using universal cargo vessels is that (in theory) the vessel could be tasked to trade/mine whatever is most necessary at a given time. The AI should be able to capitalise on this relatively easily.

I have one Scaldis which I bought early in my game, and a number of other vessels (inc. Titurels). The key is probably to ensure you have some dedicated cargo type vessels and some universal cargo vessels. I have found that ships equipped for mining tend to just mine in the main even if they are universal cargo vessels.

[Snafu_X3]

EU: why the preference of the Fedhelm over the Sequana? On paper the Seq looks better & has 2 mining turrets (if they ever get that implemented )

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

EU: why the preference of the Fedhelm over the Sequana? On paper the Seq looks better & has 2 mining turrets (if they ever get that implemented )

Fedhelm looks like the best example of an ore/silicon miner.
And that's just what it is.
Once you assign it to a station, it will mine ore/silicon/nvidium/crystals.
Unlike universal ships, it won't go buying resources, and it's cargospace is not divided into different types of wares (Iam looking at YOU, scaldis), the whole cargospace is used only for resources.

Then there's Sequanna, it just feels unbelievably stylish to me, just look at that ship, and imagine it roaming around fields of ice shards, with a swarm of drones that collect rocks.

I don't know if you haven't heard of it, but specialised ships have efficiency bonuses.
Sequanna has bonus when mining ice, and fedhelm ore/silicon.
Boann is for hydrogen.
I don't know if those bonuses are true, but Iam really happy with the current efficiency of my mining ships, once I dumped Scaldis everything runs perfect.

[Snafu_X3]

OK, tks for the clarification. I can't afford the cash or rep loss to replace my Sequanas atm, but I'll keep things in mind for later

BTW, I don't think the efficiency bonus has been implemented yet, FWIW.. but I'm set up for ice mining (most important in Devries) at least