The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

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Pares
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The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Pares » Wed, 5. May 21, 19:40

I have a couple of factories plus a warehouse. What I want to do, is to assign a ship to constantly move the wares from the factories to the warehouse. There are 5 wares involved. To do this is extremely simple task, I would need around 30 million credits in my warehouse.

Why? Because in X4 there is no such thing as internal logistics. There is a single trading logic, and it's forced on everything. A station will create buy offers only as big as it's budget allows. Makes sense, right? Only until no internal ware movement is involved.

My warehose has buy offers for 5 wares. All buy offers set to buy only from my faction. But without any money, the buy offer amount is zero obviously. The trader assigned to trade for the warehose, set to only trade with my faction, won't do any trading, since the buy offer is zero. The convoluted mess that are the repeat orders won't work either, since it still limited by the same rules, no money, no trade offer amount, can't/won't sell to station.

There is no simple automated transfer wares option in the game, so I'm forced to store millions of credits in my stations just because there is no distinction between standard inter-faction trades and internal logistics at all. Is this an intentional attempt to create some sort of fake upkeep cost to slow player progression? Because then it makes even less sense. These potentially hundreds of millions of credits don't move anywhere, they are not spent on anything, there are no active salaries, there are no active upkeep costs.

What it really is, is a poor workaround for making the standard trading logic work between your own stations in the absence of proper intenal logistics. This is why many, if not most of us tend to create megacomplexes, because setting up internal logistics between your own stations is a massive PIA.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by KopiG » Wed, 5. May 21, 21:17

Welcome to the club. I tried to advocate this but has fallen to deaf ears. They just simply dont care. Months has passed since this became a clear issue but all we got now are 3 hotfixes. I come back from time to time to see if anything is happening but seems nothing so far. I suggest you do the same thing: just forget X4 and come back and check on it each month once or twice. The horrible joke in this is that they wanted players to focus on multiple smaller stations instead of one huge megacomplex but without giving us any tools to transfer wares between our stations.

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grapedog
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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by grapedog » Wed, 5. May 21, 22:24

As absurd as it may sound, this is how it works in the US military.

I do agree that a change is needed. At a minimum i should be able to assign a ship to a station, and then assign it to another station, and give it a ware or two. All it does then is ship the ware from its first assigned station to the second, for zero cost.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by GCU Grey Area » Thu, 6. May 21, 00:28

Minor annoyance at most for me. If using the same programming for both traders & internal logistics means one of the devs can work on something else instead I'm fine with it for the moment. Leaving a bit of cash in each station's account is hardly the end of the world - after the first few days a few million isn't really all that much in practice. Anyway I have very few stations which don't trade with the NPCs (I simply don't tend to build pure warehouses which only stockpile goods), so the money side of this pretty much takes care of itself.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Alkeena » Thu, 6. May 21, 04:44

This is how real-world logistics work as well. It's a concept known as transfer pricing: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/transferprice.asp

If you can't make your stations profitable paying market rates for things then they're a waste of time and you should just be selling the intermediates.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Hector0x » Thu, 6. May 21, 08:05

The entire idea of a closed internal economy is a very simplified ideal which only works in this game because of minimum prices and the fact that there are no running costs.
It already wouldn't work in a deeper econ-sim game like capitalism lab. You would just go bankrupt early if you only setup your internal thing and ignore/don't trade with NPCs.

In the real world accounting is always required to determine profitability. And nobody starts out by building an ore refinery which doesn't buy resources from the open market. This is so inefficient that it blows my mind that almost all X4 players seem to setup such trade rules. Egosoft probably doesn't understand this either so they won't implement a dedicated internal logistics system.

Build stations and ships which are actually needed and trade freely! Block an entire faction if you don't like them but don't fall for these useless internal resource supply trade rules on mining stations and factories. It's like shooting yourself in the leg.

With a proper market analysis you don't need internal logistics. And you make faster progress/profits. once you are rich you can easily build the unprofitable rest required to get self sufficient im a couple hours. You will get your own shipyard economy twice as fast. Then you can use global trade rules and switch over to self sufficient. Most of you are trying to be self sufficient from the start. That's why you always experience these internal logistic problems.


But i agree that between player owned assets only magic money should be transferred. Transactions should appear in the logs, but no station money should be required to create the buy offer and close the deal.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by jakotheshadows » Thu, 6. May 21, 08:23

Vertical integration is a late game concept. If putting 30m in a station is out of your price range, then maybe you aren't ready to perform said vertical integration. The progression in this game from the early game to the end game is already plenty easy enough especially when there are other actual problems with the game that need to be addressed.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Pares » Thu, 6. May 21, 12:56

Alkeena wrote:
Thu, 6. May 21, 04:44
This is how real-world logistics work as well. It's a concept known as transfer pricing: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/transferprice.asp

If you can't make your stations profitable paying market rates for things then they're a waste of time and you should just be selling the intermediates.
Hector0x wrote:
Thu, 6. May 21, 08:05
The entire idea of a closed internal economy is a very simplified ideal which only works in this game because of minimum prices and the fact that there are no running costs.
...
jakotheshadows wrote:
Thu, 6. May 21, 08:23
Vertical integration is a late game concept. If putting 30m in a station is out of your price range, then maybe you aren't ready to perform said vertical integration. The progression in this game from the early game to the end game is already plenty easy enough especially when there are other actual problems with the game that need to be addressed.
This has nothing to do with transfer pricing, vertical intergration or even internal economy. This is basically about transferring wares between owned storages A and B. You can already manually order your ships to transfer wares from one place to another without any money being involved, the problem is that you cannot automate this, because all automation is tied to the existing trade logic. Which means that you have to create buy offers, and because the buy offer amount is determined by station budget, you have to give enough money for your station to create large enough buy offers for every ware to fill your ship's cargo hold.

I absolutely wouldn't mind if there was transfer pricing, salaries or even upkeep in the game. But there are no transactions involved in this case, the transport ship's crew doesn't get paid from this money, and other stations don't get any of this money either. It doesn't move. It's not used to pay for anything. It's only there because you need to fool the system with a workaround for being able to create a simple automated ware transfer order.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by jkflipflop98 » Mon, 10. May 21, 22:30

Basically, what you really want is the AI to utilize the "transfer wares" functions instead of the "trade" functions when moving between owned objects. Sounds like a winner to me.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Naalei » Mon, 10. May 21, 23:17

Prices are used to determine trade priorities.
If there is 2 station buying refined metal and you have a station selling it, then it will check the amount bought and the price and should select the most profitable trade.

Now if you remove the price and budget of a player station and set it to buy only from player, and set your selling station to trade to anyone, what will happen ?
Your selling station will search for the most profitable trade and end up selling only to npcs.
So what should the selling station do ? Make profits with npcs or store the products in a player station ?
Using prices allow both options. If the player warehouse is empty, it will buy at high price and other player stations will delivers goods to it.

We clearly need to be able to auto transfer wares between stations without having to assign budget but this is not so simple in my opinion.

Maybe we should be able to assign a new category of ships to a station which is « transfer ships » (like trader, miner, defense).
Those ships should search for the player stations which needs their commander goods and prioritize them by storage percentage.
And of course, they should not use any budget.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Pares » Tue, 11. May 21, 14:12

jkflipflop98 wrote:
Mon, 10. May 21, 22:30
Basically, what you really want is the AI to utilize the "transfer wares" functions instead of the "trade" functions when moving between owned objects.
That is correct.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Eyeklops » Tue, 11. May 21, 15:53

I'm curious to know if the 30 million request was an empty warehouse or a nearly full one. I've noticed the reserve goes down substancially once the stores get filled up. Typically I use repeat orders until the stores are at 75%.

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MarvinTheMartian
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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by MarvinTheMartian » Mon, 17. May 21, 08:41

While I understand the appeal and perhaps simplicity of using a single game trading mechanic for internal and external trade, we need some internal logistic scripts because it's not working well enough right now, there's far less control than in X2 or X3 games thanks to CLS & CAG. I don't enjoy micromanaging traders but the trade mechanism isn't fit for purpose when it comes to moving product between your own stations.

Issue 1: Station Budgets
If there is a way to set them to something other than the estimate then it's beyond me. I read something a long time / several versions ago but gave up.

My issue with the budgets is that it assumes there's no cashflow coming in so sets a budget big enough to buy everything - this is a problem when you're starting out and need the income to buy blueprints & trade ships etc. - perhaps I'm happy to run out of stock of resources/intermediates until the end-product is sold and don't want to have to raid station accounts all the time.
There's likely a way to manage this behaviour through storage capacity allocation or something but this is not intuitive enough given the already steep learning curve.

Issue 2: Internal logistics
The main issue (for me at least)
I don't know if this is because internal traders/miners are using the global sales logic or it's just plain broken anyway but whatever it is, the symptoms are game breaking:
  • Miners fill up with resources they cannot "sell"
  • Traders fill up with wares they cannot "sell"
  • Multiple traders go to supply a single resource ignoring other required resources e.g. both silicon & refined metals are needed in large & similar quantities yet 6 traders will pick up silicon while none are supplying refined metals
  • One trader will go out of its way to supply the last 200 items out of 10,000 (e.g. Antimatter Cells) while 14,990 of 15,000 other items (e.g. silicon) are desperately needed and there are no other traders with orders for it and production has ground to a halt - or worse, food rations will not support the workforce and it starts to shrink!
Naalei wrote: Prices are used to determine trade priorities.
That sounds about right and would explain some symptoms. But has no place in internal logistics, should be based on demand.

Devs, please give us the ability to assign a trader to a specific set of home-base products, that might help in the short-term

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Jeraal
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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Jeraal » Mon, 17. May 21, 14:20

If I have say, 10 miners for a station, I want to be able to specify their job.
"You 4 go get silicon. You 5 get ore. And you, go get ice. If silicon gets low, don't try to help out, just keep doing your assigned task." Maybe an additional command window. Mine for commander, ore, alpha. Mine for commander, silicon, beta. etc.

"Oh, and don't go too far." Being able to select gather/sell range with a slider rather than setting up 50 different blacklists depending on where the station is would be more than welcome.

I know there are work-arounds like setting up mining stations or using auto miners to supply factories, but this creates more property list clutter(another pet peeves, please give us filter options like X3).
Brute force and ignorance solves all problems, just not very efficiently.

If brute force isn't working, then you aren't using enough.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by TheDeliveryMan » Mon, 17. May 21, 19:24

MarvinTheMartian wrote:
Mon, 17. May 21, 08:41
Naalei wrote: Prices are used to determine trade priorities.
That sounds about right and would explain some symptoms. But has no place in internal logistics, should be based on demand.
Let's say you have two factories A and B. Both want to buy 1000 units of Refined Metals. Factory A will run out of Refined Metals in 20 minutes, factory B has sufficient Refined Metals to continue production for another 4 hours. How does an automated trader know which factory needs Refined Metals more urgently? Factory A pays almost max price, while factory B pays probably just a little bit more than min price. That's how a trader can tell which factory has a more urgent demand. Prices are vital for making meaningful decisions. In this example you really want your internal freighter to serve factory A first. You can actually create a "smart" repeat loop for this:
  1. Buy Refined Metals for price some price at Refineries R1, R2, R3...
  2. Sell Refined Metals for some high price to factories A or B
  3. Sell Refined Metals for some avergae price to factories A or B
  4. Sell Refined Metals for some low price to factories A or B
All automated internal or external freighters and miners require the stations they are going to serve to have buy/sell offers. So, if your logistics are not working as expected, the first thing to check are if the stations have created buy/sell offers with price and amount. For buy offers the stations need to have credits and free storage space. For sell offers the stations need to have the ware in stock.
Next thing to check is if these buy/sell offers actually make sense. For example, I have seen my Hull Parts factory buying 40 units of Graphene for max price, this would lead to inefficient use of transport capacity. I was able to prevent this by allocating more storage space for graphene.
If meaningful buy/sell offers are there and the logistics are still not working one should look at the freighters/miners in more detail and try to find out why they are doing something else.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Panos » Mon, 17. May 21, 22:05

Pares wrote:
Wed, 5. May 21, 19:40
I have a couple of factories plus a warehouse. What I want to do, is to assign a ship to constantly move the wares from the factories to the warehouse. There are 5 wares involved. To do this is extremely simple task, I would need around 30 million credits in my warehouse.

Why? Because in X4 there is no such thing as internal logistics. There is a single trading logic, and it's forced on everything. A station will create buy offers only as big as it's budget allows. Makes sense, right? Only until no internal ware movement is involved.

My warehose has buy offers for 5 wares. All buy offers set to buy only from my faction. But without any money, the buy offer amount is zero obviously. The trader assigned to trade for the warehose, set to only trade with my faction, won't do any trading, since the buy offer is zero. The convoluted mess that are the repeat orders won't work either, since it still limited by the same rules, no money, no trade offer amount, can't/won't sell to station.

There is no simple automated transfer wares option in the game, so I'm forced to store millions of credits in my stations just because there is no distinction between standard inter-faction trades and internal logistics at all. Is this an intentional attempt to create some sort of fake upkeep cost to slow player progression? Because then it makes even less sense. These potentially hundreds of millions of credits don't move anywhere, they are not spent on anything, there are no active salaries, there are no active upkeep costs.

What it really is, is a poor workaround for making the standard trading logic work between your own stations in the absence of proper intenal logistics. This is why many, if not most of us tend to create megacomplexes, because setting up internal logistics between your own stations is a massive PIA.
In many organizations different departments buy and sell to each other, especially when they are a group of companies.
eg one company pays for the software developers of the other company in the group to provide some support.
That way the Group has only 1 IT department and not 10. However everything goes out as profit and loss, the Company 1 doesn't work for free for Company 2.
Is unethical to the share holders for Company 1 and it's balance sheet to provide free value to another entity.

Also I do not see the problem. They go from one pocket to the other, you do not lose money.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Midnitewolf » Mon, 17. May 21, 23:02

I have been complaining about this from the beginning. Not only does it not make sense but it makes simple ware transfer overly complex and difficult and in my mind, actually breaks the game on many levels.

I also have an issue with the "cost" of transferring goods to yourself. It is absolutely ridiculous to have quarter of a billion credits being required for my Wharf to operate when it only gets goods from my factories which only gets raw resources from my miners.

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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by MarvinTheMartian » Tue, 18. May 21, 03:10

TheDeliveryMan wrote: Let's say you have two factories A and B. Both want to buy 1000 units of Refined Metals. Factory A will run out of Refined Metals in 20 minutes, factory B has sufficient Refined Metals to continue production for another 4 hours. How does an automated trader know which factory needs Refined Metals more urgently? Factory A pays almost max price, while factory B pays probably just a little bit more than min price. That's how a trader can tell which factory has a more urgent demand. Prices are vital for making meaningful decisions.
Are you suggesting that the priority traders use is based on price which is in turn based on rate of consumption? In all previous versions of X, price is based on stock levels as a % of storage available. Does auto allocating storage factor in consumption rate? With X4 this is the 1st time (don't know about X:R) I've been able to build dedicated storage and also control its allocation - it would be great if the control of this was more transparent and it had the affect of controlling price which in turn controlled trader behaviour but there are barriers to this.

Using your example, if factory A has storage for 2,000 (so 50% of desired stock) and factory B has 10,000 (so 90% of desired stock) then I would expect the trader to supply factory A first. Perhaps this happens, however, my issue is that factory A has 50% of its Refined Metals need but also has only 10% of required Silicon Wafers and if Refined Metals are more profitable... all my traders will rush to supply Refined Metals until no more can be, completely ignoring the Silicon Wafers until the profit differential shifts - that is not how it should be for internal logistics - the supply side is not looking at true demand if only considering price. Note: I don't know if that particular price example works but the principle holds.
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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by MarvinTheMartian » Tue, 18. May 21, 04:50

Jeraal wrote:
Mon, 17. May 21, 14:20
If I have say, 10 miners for a station, I want to be able to specify their job.
"You 4 go get silicon. You 5 get ore. And you, go get ice. If silicon gets low, don't try to help out, just keep doing your assigned task." Maybe an additional command window. Mine for commander, ore, alpha. Mine for commander, silicon, beta. etc.

"Oh, and don't go too far." Being able to select gather/sell range with a slider rather than setting up 50 different blacklists depending on where the station is would be more than welcome.

I know there are work-arounds like setting up mining stations or using auto miners to supply factories, but this creates more property list clutter(another pet peeves, please give us filter options like X3).
It's all right there in the behaviour UI but greyed out! That's worked since vanilla X2 I think, it's been a while, but certainly with the CAG/CLS add-ons.

I will acknowledge the efforts to make a more integrated and streamlined approach but it's just not working yet.

I'm using the blacklists too and I can kind of work with it on a small scale (e.g. half a dozen miners) but want white lists if there's no other option, especially as the universe expands - maybe use the lists for wares to transport/mine too, all sounds a lot like CAG/CLS :wink: .
Panos wrote: In many organizations different departments buy and sell to each other, especially when they are a group of companies.
...
Also I do not see the problem. They go from one pocket to the other, you do not lose money.
I don't think that's the issue, it's not that there is money or that it's market rate. It's that if profit is used to prioritise supply it does not correlate to demand. And as for credits sitting in station accounts, I've already stated that there's just too much sitting there (early game especially)
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Pares
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Re: The absurdity of internal logistics (or its absence)

Post by Pares » Wed, 19. May 21, 09:00

Panos wrote:
Mon, 17. May 21, 22:05
In many organizations different departments buy and sell to each other, especially when they are a group of companies.
eg one company pays for the software developers of the other company in the group to provide some support.
That way the Group has only 1 IT department and not 10. However everything goes out as profit and loss, the Company 1 doesn't work for free for Company 2.
Is unethical to the share holders for Company 1 and it's balance sheet to provide free value to another entity.

Also I do not see the problem. They go from one pocket to the other, you do not lose money.
There are no salaries in the game, and the money allocated to the station account is not used for buying/selling from your own stations. It is not transferred to your other stations. It doesn't go from one pocket to the other. As I wrote, it is just a workaround to hack the standard trade mechanism to create trade offers for your own internal use.

All these real world analogies people are trying to justify the lack of options for simply automating ware transfers from one of your storages to another are completely invalid. The game is extremely simple regarding business workflows. There are no salaries, no taxes, no upkeep, no maintenance, no multiple owned organizations. Also since you mentioned ethicality, you are practically running a slave empire once you are self-sufficient.

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