Inactive traders, again

[Sound19]

As long as I've played this game, I've been constantly troubleshooting how to get traders to do their thing, in one form or another. Fix one thing, find another thing that doesn't work. By now I feel pretty advanced in my understanding, yet once again, some traders aren't trading. I could use help troubleshooting this round.

I have a system with bout 8 stations, in a mostly closed economy. I have some outposts in peripheral systems. Some of the peripheral stations act as trading hubs, to buy/sell ice/ore/silicon/gas as a supplier to my stations, and another market hub to act as a collecting point to buy wares that I have available to sell to NPC's. To keep all this working, I use manual buy/sell instructions for all inputs and outputs in every logical overview. I have manual assigned available space, manual buy price, manual sell price. Inside this closed economy, I buy everything at max price, and sell back to myself at minimum price, to ensure my traders/managers keep doing their absolutely basic role. And this has been working for a bit.

But now my largest station - my claytronics factory that needs 10,000 employees, keeps running out of medical supplies, losing all the population, absolutely messing up it's ratios. I check my medical supplies station, with a 3 star manager, which I've given 6 Medium and 2 Small traders, and ALL of them are idle while stocks pile up. I cannot fathom why they wouldn't be maxing out the medical supplies in every facility. Especially the one that drinks them up like mad. Seemingly, it was working for a while on these problem stations, but not anymore. I can still manually tell these things to buy/sell the right item at the right spot, that they should be doing automatically. But after their instructions finish, they idle again despite a massive in-system demand.

Do I have a misunderstanding of the mechanics of station traders? Should these traders be assigned to the input side instead of the medical supply output? Is there some other possible issue clogging things up? I'm aware I can set them to repeat independently(which I'm using as a kludge), but for the sake of organizing all my assets, I prefer to use them as subordinates.

Ideas?

PS, does logical overview have a hotkey, or a fast way to access it? I spend so much time there that it seems like it should be quick to flip on, like I for information. Opening it by right click and finding it buried in a menu seems off.

Ah shoot I should mention, I'm using the 4.10 beta, but I don't know that this is new at all...

[MatthewK]

One thing that I noticed is that station traders generally prioritize buy orders to supply its own needs before sell orders to generate profit. Sometimes to a crazy extent I.e. getting a few ecells to top up storage rather than offload full cargo of end products that will hit cap soon. So while more cumbersome and a workaround rather than fix, I prefer to keep each station having a few M traders so it can always pull the wares it needs.

[Sound19]

Yeah, this is the line of thinking I was wondering about. If it's better to pull than to push, so to speak.
Do you know if there's any info somewhere to back this up? It's the sort of important behavior that I assume in any game would be detailed somewhere.

even if it's so, though, the traders are mostly entirely inactive. Not it's not just failing to push out medical supplies, its also mostly failing to keep itself fed with water. Empty hold, and as I'm watching, it sends *just one* to go get a haul.... And then nothing afterward. Seems like there's something else going on.

[oddible]

Yeah, this is the line of thinking I was wondering about. If it's better to pull than to push, so to speak.
Do you know if there's any info somewhere to back this up? It's the sort of important behavior that I assume in any game would be detailed somewhere.

even if it's so, though, the traders are mostly entirely inactive. Not it's not just failing to push out medical supplies, its also mostly failing to keep itself fed with water. Empty hold, and as I'm watching, it sends *just one* to go get a haul.... And then nothing afterward. Seems like there's something else going on.

The logic the traders are using and their priorities are a bit too hidden by Egosoft for us to make good choices here unfortunately. Yes, I do find that pull orders are more consistent than push orders. Also, your storage and pricing are a significant factor. There are some quirks where if you have manual prices set it is less consistent than if you have automatic set. Also, if you have only a little bit of storage there won't be the urgency for the manager to fill it as if you have a TON of storage defined for your medical parts so they manager will feel more urgency to fill it since they'll only see a smaller percentage full.

[Sound19]

Useful factors, thank you.

In this case, I have lots of empty storage. And I switched to this custom buy/sell method because automatic pricing was resulting in... Inactive traders. To a much greater degree, too.

Have Egosoft said why this sort of details aren't described? I've basically quit the game twice previously related to trading-system-related frustrations.

[Baddieus]

I currently have 2 large product stations with a few thousand workers each, and 2 large food/med supply stations for both of them & the open economy. On the food/med stations I have 16 each Guillemot Sentinels for deliveries, and on each of the other large stations I have 5 each Heron XL freighters. I have watched and sometimes via higher pricing the Guillemot's will deliver to my own, but if the wares get too low I've also seen the Heron's go get them from wherever they are available. I have the buy price on my large stations in need of food/meds set to auto so it will raise high enough accordingly and it gets supplied by both my own stations and the local economy. I've not seen either empty out and start costing me workers, but that might be because I built the food/med suppliers 1st and let them run for a day before building any other. They are not overly profitable, but they do profit none the less, however the main objective was to flood the local economy with so much food & meds that the local supply always has abundance enough that my other large stations in need always have some available one way or the other. I would rather sit on an abundance of food/meds with little profit, than run the risk of not having any available when in need. (Large Food/Med station = 4 Nostrop Oil + 10 Med Supply modules each in a closed loop only mining Ice & full worker counts)

[RLSa]

Sorry to ask... but they aren't assigned to trade for build storage?
The behavior described is exactly this.

[Sound19]

text brick

uhhh.... I'm not clear what the takeaway is, relative to the topic.

You mention ensuring the prices are up - I ensure all my sells are at minimum price, and all my buys are maximum, so it should always appear as a lucrative trade to the ai. The majority of the game, I used automatic pricing, and there'd be constant inactives despite available local supply & demand.

If this is down to manufactured inefficiency related to manager skill(they're all at 3), I'm gonna be real disappointed.

[Sound19]

Sorry to ask... but they aren't assigned to trade for build storage?
The behavior described is exactly this.

That's a good point. I'll double check when I'm back in... I doubt it though, because I'd added in these traders one by one. Would mean I'd made the mistake over and over, on just that station. But who knows. Before I quit, I'd taken most the traders off the med complex, and distributed them among the various stations that needed to pull the input. Couldn't tell if it helped because their immediate tasks were pushing tiny hauls of outputs.

[RLSa]

If not the case, could you please put a picture how you setup the medical supplies on the overview?
Setting up manually could be tricky sometimes.

[Wultan]

Do I have a misunderstanding of the mechanics of station traders?

We all do this

You can check a trade route with a ship in recurring mode. Let this ship do the job. If this ship do not make the job, then something is misconfigured at one of the trade ends (amount, price, permission).
If the ship do the job, then check the distance (trade range depends on manager skill), your settings for sector travel and sector activities.
Check if the manager told your trading ship to tade the ware you want. Sometimes the manager is stupid when things were changed. Reassign your trade ships to a station can help.
Buy more trade ships

In the beta 4.1 the managers are a bit more smart. And some (not all) starvations problems are solved.

[Sound19]

After reloading the game, the groggy traders have largely woken back up.
Unfortunately, in between the problem and now, I'd tried a number of things, so it's difficult to identify any change(if any) helped clear the jam. My inclination is that none of my changes were relevant - that simply closing and reloading the game was the spark. However, I'd swapped around the assignments toward more station inputs instead of medical station output, gave some traders back, made manual trades, and some other stuff I forgot.

I also watched my various traders a bit more closely for a while to see which jobs they were choosing. I didn't notice any bias toward pulls, rather than pushes, unfortunately. But they'll definitely prioritize a partial load of whatever the station's focused on, rather than switch to a different item in order to push/pull a full load.

I tried out mining both ore and silicon to a buy/sell station, with manual storage limits, to see how it performs. So far, the manager has the miners(about 8 ) focusing one one item at a time. So I'll end up full in one, empty in the other, then eventually it swaps. It appears I'll simply have to build a second station to accommodate the different mining hauls. Bummer. While different from the medical stations issue, at least it's some insight into how traders get utilized by a station AI.

Beginning to think the "manager skill" mechanic needs to be removed entirely. It fundamentally undermines the time, thought, and choice players make to arrange their economy, undermines its *basic* functionality. By thinking through the system and setting it up, a player is paying enough dues, and have no need for further "challenge" such as an AI that purposefully messes up our logistics.

[Sound19]

Well, to continue pulling on this broader thread, now I'm interested in the different options we've got for setting up our logistics and production networks. And how well the game is able to sustain it's functionality right now.

I've described my method:
Closed command economy. Trading rules disallow NPC trades, except for a single point of entry/exit through a trade market station, where all my stations export their excess goods to. My economy is upheld by manual buy and sell orders that create a fake 30+% profit margin on every internal import, and by selling enough at the market for liquid to buy ships until I produce my own, etc. Most goods, however, are turned into further assets instead of liquid.

I feel like this works pretty good, barring weird bugs like above. I moved to this precisely because of difficulty with inactive traders.

The default method:
Automatic buy & sell, automatic stocks, open economy. Presumably, the player tendency would evolve toward building stations that contain as much of a production chain as possible, moving toward mega stations. But correct me if you think things shake out differently. I feel like the trading AI makes this a worse option, because it's gonna be sending ships all over the place on exceptionally stupid hauls, wasting an incredible amount of time.

Are there other big-picture strategies peoples use for their economy & logistics? I'm interested in what the other option there are. And, significantly, I'm interested in how it meshes with the game's logistics mechanics and AI, it's glitches and tendencies. How do you feel it compares?

[Sound19]

After playing another round, I began to see the original problem significantly recur. Traders began idling more and more. So I saved, closed, and re-launched x4. This appears to make a significant and immediate difference, most of my traders appear to wake up and get back to work.

Has anyone else noticed this behavior? Is there prior thought put into it? Are there other ways of tending to the issue?

[TheDeliveryMan]

After playing another round, I began to see the original problem significantly recur. Traders began idling more and more. So I saved, closed, and re-launched x4. This appears to make a significant and immediate difference, most of my traders appear to wake up and get back to work.

Has anyone else noticed this behavior? Is there prior thought put into it? Are there other ways of tending to the issue?

Your best chance to solving this issue is by reporting it in the Beta forum.

[oddible]

A lot of folks use an intermediate trade station. They have all their production stations supply a main trade station then that station doles out the goods back to the other stations. That way you have a bit more control over the trade ships signed to the statins doing what they're supposed to.

[Sound19]

Your best chance to solving this issue is by reporting it in the Beta forum.

Well, I figured there was a pretty good chance that this issue wasn't introduced with the beta. But I'm not sure. I haven't spent much time watching others' struggles with the game so that's why I'm starting here. Has this been an issue that's been around? Or does this behavior sound a bit more new? I'll pivot to the beta forum and bug reports and whatnot if it's not an old issue.

[Sound19]

A lot of folks use an intermediate trade station. They have all their production stations supply a main trade station then that station doles out the goods back to the other stations. That way you have a bit more control over the trade ships signed to the statins doing what they're supposed to.

I'm interested in hearing a bit more about this. I don't totally understand yet. How does this middle-man station accomplish the increased control?
Although, I may be doing a bit of this already by accident, since my Market station includes what I'd imagine would typically be excess intermediaries.
I'm also interested in how this is set up - How do you prevent a supplier from selling to an end-product station, but allow the intermediaries to go to just one station?

And... Do you figure this is a better way to go, relative to other options?

[WiiWiesel]

Does anyone know the following:

So if a trader decides to do a trade between two stations, there is some kind of reservation system in place: both stations know, that the trade will happen and reserve the ware, and presumably, the cash and the storage space. The question I would be interested in: How does this work in regards to cash and trades between player assets? It seems there are two possibilities on how the internal game logic may work here:

1. There is no reservation for cash: The trader (from the player) just checks, whether the stations have enough cash for a trade and forgets about the cash right away

2. There is a reservation in place: The player's trader behaves like an NPC trader: It signals both stations that the trade will happen and tells them to reserve everything (including cash) until the trade is complete at which point, the transfer of cash is just deactivated

If it is the second one, it could explain the issues the OP is having: The cash of the station may just be reserved by other player-trades.

Remark:
I don't know how this exactly works, so don't interpret too much in it. I am just talking from personal experience here and it seems, that putting more credits into stations seems to help with the issues the OP is having.

[oddible]

Does anyone know the following:

So if a trader decides to do a trade between two stations, there is some kind of reservation system in place: both stations know, that the trade will happen and reserve the ware, and presumably, the cash and the storage space. The question I would be interested in: How does this work in regards to cash and trades between player assets? It seems there are two possibilities on how the internal game logic may work here:

1. There is no reservation for cash: The trader (from the player) just checks, whether the stations have enough cash for a trade and forgets about the cash right away

2. There is a reservation in place: The player's trader behaves like an NPC trader: It signals both stations that the trade will happen and tells them to reserve everything (including cash) until the trade is complete at which point, the transfer of cash is just deactivated

If it is the second one, it could explain the issues the OP is having: The cash of the station may just be reserved by other player-trades.

Remark:
I don't know how this exactly works, so don't interpret too much in it. I am just talking from personal experience here and it seems, that putting more credits into stations seems to help with the issues the OP is having.

Yes they reserve the goods and the money - this may be impacted by discounts that will change the money owed on arrival. No, this doesn't cause the trader stall issue.