Manager not selling

[xleto2]

I'm getting frustrated with my one and only station. It's a distillery, so it produces spacefuel. At the beginning, I let the manager take care of the prices, so NPCs provided all the resources. Then I've decided to restrict trading and use my own frighters.

At first, I assigned a Titurel to do the trading. Wasn't effective at all though: the ship would keep on buying 300 plankton (around 1% of the ship's capacity), then by the time it was unloaded in my station, there was enough room for a bit more plankton. The station still has enough of everything, but plankton is always almost full, so it could have bought like 30000 energy cells instead. Or even better, sell some spacefuel.

I thought the issue was the Titurel and its universal cargo, so I bought one Gigurum of each type to replace the Titurel. It's better, at least to buy resources, but the one that should sell spacefuel (only container type ware on the station) didn't do anything. Note that the station has 140/160k of spacefuel, and there's many stations with buy orders at max price.

So the Gigurum which can only sell was just wandering around the zone, until it was destroyed by pirates. On a side note, I was IZ and reacted immediately. They spawned less than 15km away from me, so it didn't take long to destroy them, but still too late to save my useless freighter, I guess they appeared on top of it.

Before I go all the way to a shipyard and buy another one, I'd like to understand why it didn't sell anything, even though my station was full of spacefuel and actually out of money.

[stryderunknown]

Here is a few considerations:

The manager skill level *might* factor in on what tasks they manage, whether it's just buy, sell or buy and sell.

If you've not added a Radar to the station then your limited to Zone or Sector. If there isn't anyone to sell in that range then it's possible that your ship will be stuck with "Looking for Trade" (and getting shot by pirates)

It's been suggested that having a Patrol in the zone where your station is will increase the chances of NPC trading with you. Perhaps they were getting destroyed on route or maybe it wasn't deemed safe to venture to your station. (It appears to work like that, but I can't confirm it)

I'm sure someone else will expound the fact from fiction in these points.

[xleto2]

Here is a few considerations:

Well the manager is 4/5/5, 4 in leadership. I certainly hope that's enough to sell, it's not like I expect her to send ships to multiple stations in a single run. The pilot was some elite too, I even wasted a gift to find the best pilot around.

The station is fully upgraded and range is set to the whole system (OL). I have trade agents is every station, and there's many stations around asking for spacefuel at max price.

It's not the NPC traders I'm waiting for, it's my own pilot who was just fooling around until pirates spawn on his head.

I also have the appropriate licence, so that shouldn't be the issue.

[VincentTH]

It is a bug in the Manager script, reported since 2.x release. To-date we still await a fix. (unless it has been stealth-fixed into a recent release).

Basically, the manager script sorted all resources into an alphabetical list, then append to that list the products. The freighters just go through the list from top to bottom, and if the top resource is not full, it would keep on buying that single product, ignoring the rest.

The product entry is at the bottom of the list!!!!! if you allow NPC buyers to come to your factory, then it will work somewhat, but if you restrict the sale part to freighers assigned to the factory, then the product never got sold.



[EDIT] Disclaimer: This info was posted in the 3.X Public Beta forum, and I just rewrite it from memory. I have never attempted to read X's codes.

[xleto2]

Well thanks, that's good to know. But really!? What a simplistic way to select wares. Maybe it's the way you describe it, but the outcome seems so obvious!

Wait, it also takes the cargo type into consideration right? Otherwise that wouldn't even make sense to have those different types of freighters. And I've seen my different gigurums transport the one ware they're able to. Well except for the product of course, even though spacefuel is the only container type. I'm still a bit confused about that...

Anyway I've removed the restriction onselling spacefuel, since I've lost the idiot who was supposed to sell it, so I guess I'll see how it goes and won't bother buying a new ship. Worst case, I can manually do it with the one Titurel I didn't sell, but it's such a hassle.