My Trader ships always leaving my stations with 15% or less cargo

[Dersh]

So I am having an issue with Traders leaving my stations with 15% or less of their max capacity cargo. Its happening with any version of trader AI, Distribute Wares, Auto Trader, Trade for Station Commander. I ended up moving to the X4 Beta version hoping this issue was fixed. I have a few Streamer friends who regularly play X4 both with and without mods and they all say its Egosofts terrible trader AI and that no one has found a way yet to fix it with mods and its existed since X4 came out.

Just to give you an idea, I have my main station producing energy cells, there are currently over a million energy cells yet my Medium traders are leaving with like 2500-4500 cell when they can hold some 75,000 or more. I always assumed the game logic should be if available fill cargo as much as possible then do multiple trades. However the Autotrader AI seems to be, take a tiny amount, do one trade, come back to get more cargo.

So why is this even an issue anymore EGOSOFT since its been 5 years since X4 was released?

Honestly this issue effects all aspects of running your own faction from Making money from trades, to adequately supplying my stations or the AIs stations with goods. Its probably one of the reasons the Economy in the game is always so broken. But it really kills running your own faction and the game experience. I cant really be expected to manually order trade ships to fill their inventory before setting out when I have 100+ trade ships.

So anyway I hope someone has a suggestion on how to fix this issue with some mod as its been 5 years so its doubtful Egosoft will fix it. Otherwise im probably going to shelve playing X4 as this is really killing the enjoyment of the game for me.

[Raevyan]

Trade AI scripts are a mess and they never got to fix those scripts. They may be optimized for game performance but efficiency is very lackluster as you noticed.
Also station traders seem to have additional issues when it comes to energy cells. Man Egosoft has a really bad record when it comes to energy cell trading (hello rebirth first mission).

There are mods that make trader super efficient even to a point where it’s too good.

[Chips]

I was about to say it's only taking 1 trade's worth. Its likely not insurmountable, but it may be "it can't go wrong" with current solution. A few queries, which may be utterly wrong hence queries

1) You take 75k energy cells, you offload 4500 at first stop.

So where should it now sell? The next "best price", and how should that best price be calculated? It may already do something that's distance vs price trade off, I don't know - but if it's really dumb, then it may just be best profit? (price vs volume).
To get the best price for your initial 4500, it may have gone up to 5 jumps in one direction from the station. If the next best is 5 jumps from station in opposite direction, it's going 10 jumps right? How long, and is that best?

Additionally, should it solve all trades in one go - meaning trade reservations? (which the game certainly does with supply, can see it when you do repeat orders to fulfil your own station needs). At which point... currently, at 4.5k per stop, this trader needs to find 16 trades to do - and that's if it can do trades of 4.5k a time. What if most only need 2k? We're looking at 35 trades now? That 35th trade is going to be hanging on looking fulfilled for how long? an hour? maybe more? What impact does that have on the economy and the simulation of it? Should it offload as much as it can at each station along the route as their needs change (as they've used more) and therefore release future trades for stations. Could this also result in stations never getting supplies due to constant held/releases.

2) Should it continue to trade until it empties? At which point, the first may have wanted 4500 at good price. But maybe after 3 trades, offloading 12000 e-cells, you've got 62000 left in the hold, but remaining stations only want 1000. Or maybe only 100. Should it continue trading away all your ecells (and should those trades be reserved). If so, is it possible you may be having a single trader tied up with sub optimal trades for hours? In the event trades are reserved as above, should it recalculate and release after every visit of every station (again, potentially leading to stations getting repeat cancellations and therefore never fulfilled requests)? Or continue doing it's rounds for 2 in game days to offload 75k of trades via tiny amounts.

3) Given 2, in this instance, should it be trying to sell another cargo? At what point should that decision be made? Is this currently optimal to offload all the first, or would you demand it goes and picks up a second cargo. What happens is now we're lugging around 62k of e-cells and what happens if the second cargo is now... also not selling? Should it be cycling through which to sell? Should it be doing some form of "this sells for less but I can flog both items to 1 station so lower profit is better in this instance"?

And then what happens when there's no trades and you've a completely full hold? Should it try and offload for days as previously mentioned, even if they're tiny trades? Should it do a distance profit volume calc to attune all? Should that distance profit volume factor in optimised based on location of last trade, and be 100% calculated prior and reserved? Should it be re-calculated after each trade? At what point does it abandon trying to flog cargo that it has no decent trades available, or should it always just offload at any price to be rid?

You get the point. At what point does this "improved" can take entire cargo hold and try to sell either a) not crash the economy via held trade deals while attempting to visit 30 stations across 20 sectors, leading to shortages as apparently they don't need any traded resource as it's fulfilled just waiting, b) prevent your cargo from being overloaded and never completing anything, c) prevent it from trying to empty itself via minor trades that tie it up for days to empty the cargo hold.

Right now it may seem dumb, but maybe being dumb guarantees that it at least behaves predictably and completes without potentially serious impacts upon the overall simulated economy.
Maybe concentrate on smaller faster (Boa?) ships instead if their cargo hold is more suited to small trade volumes; I tend to have 3 per station. I like the bigger ones for supply trades, as it's usually when I *need* lots of resources I want to pick up 3k of them not 300

I should point out, I've *NO* idea how it all works at present. I only play it superficially, i've never checked nor read. I'm not trying to defend the current means, or say it couldn't' be improved either. But while there may be scope for more intelligent trading, perhaps there's unconsidered problems, or maybe some real problems, that arose? Who knows. Someone will explain I'm sure But there's definitely questions about how people would want/expect it to behave in a more complex demand trading method; how would people expect the above to be resolved? I'm just positive it may not be as simple as a cursory glance may make it appear.

[sh1pman]

Problems like that indicate either a user error or a misunderstanding of game mechanics. My first advice would be to check if buy and sell offers for e-cells are set up correctly at both buyer and seller stations. Then, make sure both stations have at least the recommended amount of money, as it also affects the trade offer amounts. I don't think that your problem has anything to do with trader ships.

[xrogaan]

Something I noticed in my game. I give a station manager access to a fleet of freighter of all class, say 20S, 10M, an 2 L. I'll then often see the L ships carry barely any cargo of the least bulky goods, and the smaller ships full of the bulkiest goods. Example, the L ships will sell 120 E-Cells to some random schmuck, while the S ships move the computronic substrate by groups of 81. It is so annoying, I really want the logic to reserve the largest ships for the largest shipments even if they'll do nothing for a while. Or the ability to define which class of goods a class of ship is allowed to move.

Currently I've fallen back on repeat orders to reliably move stuff from a factory to another, because the station manager is just inept.

[Raevyan]

Problems like that indicate either a user error or a misunderstanding of game mechanics. My first advice would be to check if buy and sell offers for e-cells are set up correctly at both buyer and seller stations. Then, make sure both stations have at least the recommended amount of money, as it also affects the trade offer amounts. I don't think that your problem has anything to do with trader ships.

Station budget is not needed for player faction trades. It’s trade ai scripts that causes this… I’ve seen lots of small unit trades from my traders while station runs out of other materials. Vanilla scripts are optimized for game performance and super inefficient resulting in that experience.

[sh1pman]

Station budget is not needed for player faction trades. It’s trade ai scripts that causes this… I’ve seen lots of small unit trades from my traders while station runs out of other materials. Vanilla scripts are optimized for game performance and super inefficient resulting in that experience.

Incorrect, trade offer amounts depend on station budget, even if trade rules only allow trading with player faction. Try withdrawing all money from the station and then look at buy offer amounts.

[Raevyan]

Station budget is not needed for player faction trades. It’s trade ai scripts that causes this… I’ve seen lots of small unit trades from my traders while station runs out of other materials. Vanilla scripts are optimized for game performance and super inefficient resulting in that experience.

Incorrect, trade offer amounts depend on station budget, even if trade rules only allow trading with player faction. Try withdrawing all money from the station and then look at buy offer amounts.

No you are wrong. Station budget being required even for player trades was fixed around 4.x. You can read it up in patch notes if you want. And if you don't believe the patch notes than look at this screenshot: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ ... rbox=false. Look at the screen, all wares got proper trade offer amount despite the station having 0 budget. I'm running hundreds of stations like this in my current save and its "fine", except that trade ai scripts are super inefficient when it comes to moving wares around efficiently.

[sh1pman]

I still saw tiny buy offers on my HQ until I gave it a couple million credits. This was in 6.0, a couple of days ago. I’ll check again when I get home.

[Panos]

So I am having an issue with Traders leaving my stations with 15% or less of their max capacity cargo. Its happening with any version of trader AI, Distribute Wares, Auto Trader, Trade for Station Commander. I ended up moving to the X4 Beta version hoping this issue was fixed. I have a few Streamer friends who regularly play X4 both with and without mods and they all say its Egosofts terrible trader AI and that no one has found a way yet to fix it with mods and its existed since X4 came out.

Just to give you an idea, I have my main station producing energy cells, there are currently over a million energy cells yet my Medium traders are leaving with like 2500-4500 cell when they can hold some 75,000 or more. I always assumed the game logic should be if available fill cargo as much as possible then do multiple trades. However the Autotrader AI seems to be, take a tiny amount, do one trade, come back to get more cargo.

So why is this even an issue anymore EGOSOFT since its been 5 years since X4 was released?

Honestly this issue effects all aspects of running your own faction from Making money from trades, to adequately supplying my stations or the AIs stations with goods. Its probably one of the reasons the Economy in the game is always so broken. But it really kills running your own faction and the game experience. I cant really be expected to manually order trade ships to fill their inventory before setting out when I have 100+ trade ships.

So anyway I hope someone has a suggestion on how to fix this issue with some mod as its been 5 years so its doubtful Egosoft will fix it. Otherwise im probably going to shelve playing X4 as this is really killing the enjoyment of the game for me.

There is a mod fixing those things. Personally using S traders for station trade.

[Imperator Claudius]

I can confirm the issue. That's why I am using only S and M traders for auto trade or assignment to station managers. Generally, I use L traders primarily for repeat orders to supply my factories or key stations like wharfs or ship yards of the factions. IMHO this is contrary to game performance (fps), as it unnecessarily multiplies ship traffic. Just my five cents.

[Dersh]

...Additionally, should it solve all trades in one go - meaning trade reservations? (which the game certainly does with supply, can see it when you do repeat orders to fulfil your own station needs). At which point... currently, at 4.5k per stop, this trader needs to find 16 trades to do - and that's if it can do trades of 4.5k a time. What if most only need 2k? We're looking at 35 trades now? That 35th trade is going to be hanging on looking fulfilled for how long? an hour? maybe more? What impact does that have on the economy and the simulation of it? Should it offload as much as it can at each station along the route as their needs change (as they've used more) and therefore release future trades for stations. Could this also result in stations never getting supplies due to constant held/releases.

2) Should it continue to trade until it empties? At which point, the first may have wanted 4500 at good price. But maybe after 3 trades, offloading 12000 e-cells, you've got 62000 left in the hold, but remaining stations only want 1000. Or maybe only 100. Should it continue trading away all your ecells (and should those trades be reserved). If so, is it possible you may be having a single trader tied up with sub optimal trades for hours? In the event trades are reserved as above, should it recalculate and release after every visit of every station (again, potentially leading to stations getting repeat cancellations and therefore never fulfilled requests)? Or continue doing it's rounds for 2 in game days to offload 75k of trades via tiny amounts.

3) Given 2, in this instance, should it be trying to sell another cargo? At what point should that decision be made? Is this currently optimal to offload all the first, or would you demand it goes and picks up a second cargo. What happens is now we're lugging around 62k of e-cells and what happens if the second cargo is now... also not selling? Should it be cycling through which to sell? Should it be doing some form of "this sells for less but I can flog both items to 1 station so lower profit is better in this instance"? ...

Thanks for the response Chips but I am going to 100% disagree with your logic of how these autotrader ai is supposed to work in your understand because 1) its an excuse for bad trading ai from the developer 2) if I manually order the freighter set to autotrade to completely fill its inventory with Any where it set to trade, it will trade that ware at multiple locations until its completely gone. So the fact that I can load 75,000k of any ware and it will sell until its gone but will not do this once it goes to get a ware on its own recognizance, that right there tells you Egosofts AI is garbage and needs to be fixed.

[Dersh]

Problems like that indicate either a user error or a misunderstanding of game mechanics. My first advice would be to check if buy and sell offers for e-cells are set up correctly at both buyer and seller stations. Then, make sure both stations have at least the recommended amount of money, as it also affects the trade offer amounts. I don't think that your problem has anything to do with trader ships.

I have 400 hours into this game. My station has a Million energy cells and it is set to sell all but 1 cell. So I doubt its my misunderstanding of the game mechanics as this occurs with ANY trader ai level be it 3 star auto trade, distribute wares, its also not fixable with mods yet that I have discovered. I have also talked to multiple friends who have thousands of hours in this game that tell me its been a longstanding problem and they too cant fix it with mods either, its one of the reasons I moved to the beta branch of X4 hoping they finally fixed this.

This also happens with other wares where the single freighter assigned to that ware has enough to fill its cargo and there are stations nearby requesting more than it can carry yet it leaves with 15% or less. Yet if I cancel all orders, manually tell that trader still under the same AI - Autotrader to FILL its cargo, it will trade until its all gone at multiple stations before returning then only filling up with 15% or less. Do you see the flaw in this system that has existed for 5 years?

[Dersh]

Station budget is not needed for player faction trades. It’s trade ai scripts that causes this… I’ve seen lots of small unit trades from my traders while station runs out of other materials. Vanilla scripts are optimized for game performance and super inefficient resulting in that experience.

Incorrect, trade offer amounts depend on station budget, even if trade rules only allow trading with player faction. Try withdrawing all money from the station and then look at buy offer amounts.

Honestly if we are saying the station budget is preventing traders from filling their cargo at my stations, the station they are picking up from with the example of energy cells or another ware like refined metals. That station in question has 100+ million in its account. I highly doubt its not filling up whatever that units max cargo is whether it holds 45k or 75k energy cells the station account has the funds to cover it. Can we not agree the AI could use an overhaul? X3 AI if I remember was pretty bad as well.

[Dersh]

I can confirm the issue. That's why I am using only S and M traders for auto trade or assignment to station managers. Generally, I use L traders primarily for repeat orders to supply my factories or key stations like wharfs or ship yards of the factions. IMHO this is contrary to game performance (fps), as it unnecessarily multiplies ship traffic. Just my five cents.

Unfortunately for me the ships in question leaving with 15% or less of cargo capacity are Medium sized freighters. So far the only solution is to overly babysit everything and periodically order my traders to pick up max capacity of whatever I want them to trade. Like if I order a L freighter to pick up 100% of its cargo capacity of something it will keep trading until its gone and come back. So why is that even a thing after 5 years, most of the issues with running your own faction is having to babysit the AI as these cargo issues end up causing supply issues.

I mean ideally youd want them to get 100% full or at least take as many wares if they can if there isnt enough for totally filling cargo, and then with a faction trade restriction on that ship only buy from my stations and sell to my other stations using Distribute Wares to take thing to where they are needed at my stations to be sold on stations that function solely as trading stations for AI ships to land at.

[Dersh]

There is a mod fixing those things. Personally using S traders for station trade.

Well if a mod can fix this issue of ships leaving with minimal cargo to do trades I am completely open to trying a new mod to fix this. So far DeadAirRT's version of TaterTrader on github hasnt helped with the low cargo amounts so if you could drop the name of the mod that fixes this that would totally save my X4 experience and enjoyment of the game.

[Dersh]

I still saw tiny buy offers on my HQ until I gave it a couple million credits. This was in 6.0, a couple of days ago. I’ll check again when I get home.

Unfortunately for me the Station in question where its happening has 100+ million in its account so adding more is probably not going to fix the issue for me.

[Panos]

There is a mod fixing those things. Personally using S traders for station trade.

Well if a mod can fix this issue of ships leaving with minimal cargo to do trades I am completely open to trying a new mod to fix this. So far DeadAirRT's version of TaterTrader on github hasnt helped with the low cargo amounts so if you could drop the name of the mod that fixes this that would totally save my X4 experience and enjoyment of the game.

Have a look at "More AI Economy Ships" on Steam. It creates different job schedules based on the items.

[xrogaan]

There is a mod fixing those things. Personally using S traders for station trade.

Well if a mod can fix this issue of ships leaving with minimal cargo to do trades I am completely open to trying a new mod to fix this. So far DeadAirRT's version of TaterTrader on github hasnt helped with the low cargo amounts so if you could drop the name of the mod that fixes this that would totally save my X4 experience and enjoyment of the game.

Have a look at "More AI Economy Ships" on Steam. It creates different job schedules based on the items.

But isn't that mod for AI ships, and not player owned ships?

[Nanook]

I've found that the NPC traders are much more efficient at handling my excess wares than my own ships. Most of my stations have a healthy surplus of energy cells built into them. So I let the NPC's come and take them away at a decent price. I rarely use my own seller trade ships, even between my own factories, since buyers seem to be a lot more effective than sellers.